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This one’s a two-fer! Dan Walsh covers the evolution of SELinux from Fedora 2 all the way to the upcoming Fedora 9 launch. Find out how it started and how user access controls will grow in the newest release. As a bonus, this is also a preview of Walsh’s scheduled talk at the upcoming Red Hat Summit. Want more? Check out the schedule of talks and register–and we’ll see you in Boston.

If Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian was the the president of the Dairy Association would he say that he predicts people are going to drink less milk?

Building on the success of last year's Vancouver PHP Conference, the Vancouver PHP Users Association on April 14-15 drew more than 400 to the Vancouver Trade and Convention Center to learn about the trends in free and open source software on the Web. With speakers from major corporations such as Creative Commons, Facebook, Google, the Mozilla Foundation, and Sun Microsystems, and a healthy dose of the self-organization popularized by Bar Camp, the conference was in many ways a template for how a local conference can manage to offer informative and current information despite a relatively small size.

Microsoft Corp. has yet to convince Yahoo Inc. to agree to a friendly takeover, but the software company is already hiring lobbyists to help it convince regulators to let the deal _ hostile if it has to be _ go through. Software company Microsoft Corp., bracing for a regulatory squabble in its takeover bid, recently hired Bryan Cave Strategies LLC to lobby the federal government on the proposed multibillion-dollar deal.

"It's been long promised, but there it is now," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, "special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries."

In my next three articles I'll profile three native Linux software synthesizers (a.k.a. softsynths). I'll introduce their basic synthesis architectures and program operations, then I'll guide my readers briefly through the process of creating a new sound for each synth profiled. Our voyage begins with Nick Dowell's Analogue Modeling SYNTHesizer, better known as amSynth.

A few weeks ago, one person informed me that my game blew up on his older distro with an error "version `GLIBC_2.4' not found". Most of the dependency issues I’ve encountered involved changing flags used in my libraries, such as libSDL. Unfortunately, this issue was different. It was strange because I was not sure why my game was depending on GLIBC_2.4 since I was not explicitly linking to it. This article explains what the problem is and how I went about trying to solve it.

Version 0.46 of the open source vector graphics editor Inkscape is out, showcasing new tools, new effects, new filters, and a host of interface and speed improvements. Binary downloads are available for all three major operating system platforms on the Inkscape project site. The Linux build is provided in autopackage and ZeroInstall formats. The site links to unofficial Fedora packages, and Ubuntu users can install the update with APT using the Inkscape team's DEB repository; instructions are on the Inkscape home page. More distribution-specific packages are expected to follow soon for other distros.

Less than two months into Sun Microsystems' MySQL acquisition, Sun has succeeded in upsetting the grassroots types with plans to close off features to the community. It's emerged Sun may release extra data back-up features in the Enterprise Edition of the next version of MySQL, due in Q4, to paying enterprise subscribers only.

You can stream your music collection to the whole Internet from your favorite Linux distribution. Take some playlist files, add in the functionality of the Icecast server, and you have your own Web-based radio stream. Use it to listen to music remotely on your home machine, or tell your friends and become the next Internet radio phenomenon. Icecast is a collection of programs and libraries that creates a Web server for your stream. Icecast grabs your audio from a source program and allows it to be accessed by going to a URL. It seamlessly communicates with Shoutcast, announcing the presence of your stream all over the world if you wish. Others can listen to your stream through programs like VLC, MPlayer, and Xine.

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today. Coleman noted that the GSA does indeed use a wide variety of open source programs. The agency started using open source for information systems, though is increasingly using the software for transactional mission-critical systems.

I completely realize I'm a geek. I've been using Linux far longer than it's been the "cool thing" to do. I've also been around the Windows world longer than Windows itself. And to nicely round off the playing field, for the better part of a decade, I've been supporting a network of Apple computers. All this experience means two things:..

The future of the standalone operating system is not particularly bright. At least, that's according to Nat Friedman, chief technology and strategy officer for open source at Novell. "The big story here is Linux versus Windows," he said. "I do not believe that Microsoft has shown the interest, time and the will to allow an ISV to embed their operating system and intermediate between Microsoft and the customer."

In part 1 of this series we learned how to measure how much power our systems are using, both hardware and software, and some tricks for reducing power usage without degrading performance. Today we're going to dive into the world of power management on laptops: ACPI, APM, hard disk spindowns, and spinups.

This document describes step by step how to set up a Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (GNOME). The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

Linux and open source software giant Red Hat has abandoned plans to develop a consumer desktop product because it cannot compete with the might of Microsoft. The firm said in a statement yesterday: “As a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.

The European Commission Says that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft at el Can't Keep Personal Search Data Longer Than Six Months

The next red-letter day for Ubuntu fans will be April 24, when Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) arrives. Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, guarantees that the next version of the popular Linux distribution will make it on time, with something for enterprise, desktop, and Internet users. In an interview, Shuttleworth made the point that, while many executives have yet to realize it, "Open source software projects and Linux distros are actually better than proprietary companies at hitting deadlines." In particular, Shuttleworth says, "Companies are now comparing Linux with Vista, and it's clear that's Linux does a better job of meeting people's expectations.

Installing software in Linux is nothing like it used to be, but there are still some pitfalls to watch out for. If you follow this little guide, your Linux life will be made simpler and safer. Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

Novell Wednesday released the beta of its new "Just Enough" SUSE operating system targeted as a platform for Linux-based appliances. The company is releasing the beta in conjunction with the creation of the SUSE Appliance Program targeted at independent software vendors (ISV) who want to package their applications with SUSE Linux on an appliance.