Showing all newswire headlines

In this second installment I'll profile Minicomputer, a subtractive synthesizer with some familiar aspects, unique characteristics, and terrific sounds. Let's take a look under its hood and see what makes the Minicomputer run.

Debian, the popular Linux distribution, has just been shown to have made an all-time stupid security goof-up. They managed to change OpenSSL in their distribution so that it had no security to speak of. Good job guys! OpenSSL makes it possible to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in Linux, Unix, Windows and many other operating systems. It also incorporates a general purpose cryptography library. OpenSSL is used not only in operating systems, but in numerous vital applications such as security for Apache Web servers and security appliances from companies like Check Point and Cisco. Yeah, in other words, if you do anything requiring network security on Linux, chances are good, OpenSSL is being called in to help.

Sugar Labs Foundation is being established to further extend Sugar, the highly acclaimed open source “learn learning” software platform that was originally developed for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO laptop. Sugar is the core of the XO laptop's human-computer interface; it provides a fun, easy-to-use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. Sugar Labs will focus on providing a software ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO laptop as well as other laptops distributed by other companies, such as the ASUS Eee PC. Consistent with the OLPC mission to provide opportunities for learning, an independent Sugar Labs Foundation can deliver learning software to other hardware vendors and, consequently, reach more children.

There’s been a flurry of discussion around the idea of syncronicity in free software projects. I’d like to write up a more comprehensive view, but I’m in Prague prepping for FOSSCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit (can’t wait to see everyone again!) so I’ll just contribute a few thoughts and responses to some of the commentary I’ve seen so far.

Adobe Systems is reaching out for Linux desktop users with its announcement today that the first beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, a.k.a. Astro, is now available for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X. In a statement, David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, said that "Adobe had been working closely with the community; we are delivering groundbreaking creative features that will be transformative for interactive designers and developers, and revolutionary for end users."

Updated: Billionaire investor Carl Icahn announced an alternate board of directors for Yahoo in a move that could revive a Microsoft bid. Will Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer bite?

Plugins and extensions—they're what made Photoshop such a bonanza from the late 1980s onward, and they gave it the market push to triumph over competitors who preferred to keep their tools and development completely in-house. It was a great idea—make your own product more valuable by letting other people enhance it for their own benefit—and it worked famously. In the graphics world, everyone's got 'em now. But, in the browsing world...well, it takes an open-source project to apply that kind of functionality across categories.

One of Carla Schroder's favorite Linux features is its endless adaptability as a cross-platform rescue tool, and her favorite rescue Linux of all is the excellent Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD. In this series, you'll learn how to set things right when things on your PC go awry.

Last year, I wrote about our school district's implementation of LTSP. In the article, I pointed out the significant limitations a thin client environment gives you. While I don't think my article was the reason the issues were addressed, less than a year later just about every limitation I highlighted has been eradicated. Welcome LTSP 5.

It's been a year and a half since I started using Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) for much of my day-to-day computing, but the past week or so marks the first time I've had to support another user -- in this case my wife, Ilene, whose Macintosh iBook G4 is awaiting the end of the semester at California State University Northridge, where she teaches. ... It has been a lot harder than I thought. We don't think like our users. But we need to learn.

Josh Stewart loves MythTV -- so much so that he is building his own front-end app for it as a drop-in replacement for MythTV's default. The replacement is called Gloss, and although it isn't ready for prime time yet (no pun intended), its OpenGL effects and GStreamer bindings show plenty of promise. One of MythTV's distinctions among digital video recorder (DVR) applications is that the front end (through which you watch television and recordings) and the back end (which runs the scheduling database and records video to disk) are separate apps -- and multiple front ends can connect to the same back end independently.

Back in January of 2007 we had looked at Linux Virtualization Performance as we had compared a running native OS (at that time, Fedora Core 6) against the same operating system running as a virtualized guest OS using Xen, QEMU with the (once closed-source) kqemu kernel module, and then KVM. In this testing we had found that KVM had performed well and won a number of the tests, but it wasn't the clear winner nor it had won by a substantial margin. However, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had premiered with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and it has matured quite a bit over the past year and a half since its christening. With that said, we are in the process of conducting new Linux virtualization benchmarks to see how these various implementations compare today.

Red Hat announced that a European branch of the the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has implemented its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Network. NYSE Euronext is using RHEL for key components of its "mission-critical," high-speed financial trading environments, Red Hat said.

Shuttleworth wants the major distros to release at the same time with the same open source base. Is he nuts or is he onto something?

Linspire has announced that its "one-click" software installation service for Linux desktops now supports Transgaming's Cedega 6.0 emulator. Released about a year ago, the emulator lets Linux users play Windows games full-screen or in a window, while simultaneously web browsing or doing other computing activities.

A recently disclosed vulnerability in widely used Linux distributions can be exploited by attackers to guess cryptographic keys, possibly leading to the forgery of digital signatures and theft of confidential information, a noted security researcher said today. HD Moore, best known as the exploit researcher who created the Metasploit penetration testing framework, called the vulnerability in Debian and Ubuntu systems "ugly" and said it will be a big job for administrators to find every flawed key, then reissue them.

The first public release of Moonlight — the Silverlight on Linux project from open-source leader Miguel de Icaza and his band of coders — is out. De Icaza, Novell Vice President for Developer Technologies, noted the release in a blog post dated May 13. De Icaza noted the release is available to testers in two forms: A no-media-codec-based version and one which will allow users to compile FFMpeg codecs themselves.

Dreamlinux is a Debian-based distribution that offers you a choice of GNOME or Xfce window managers as well as an extremely simple installation and scripts to install popular programs not found in the Debian repositories. With included programs for communication, graphics, and music, plus OpenOffice.org, it covers most general desktop needs, and installation and configuration are a breeze. Besides a few minor bugs that didn't cause any problems, my experience with Dreamlinux was entirely positive.

Latest enterprise release brings open source content management lines into wider competition. "We are building the product to customer requirements, particularly in what they need for developing knowledge worker applications, compliance applications or corporate intranets and internet Web sites," Newton told InternetNews.com. "However, this brings us into competitive and winning situations with Filenet, OpenText and EMC on the document management side, Vignette and Interwoven on the WCM (Web Content Management)side, and increasingly Microsoft SharePoint on both."

Ubuntu 8.04 has some nice short-term benefits, but the real upside involves Canonical's long-term support. Here's why, according to Works With U, a new site that tracks Ubuntu.