Showing all newswire headlines

Red Hat yesterday announced that it had appointed TSI-Systems as a JBoss Certified Systems Integrator for South Africa. This follows Red Hat's August announcement of Obsidian Training as JBoss' first official training partner in South Africa.

If you’ve ever gone looking for legitimately free fonts, you’ve probably found that there are a lot of really bad ones. But there’s also a lot of discussion out there about “open source fonts.” Some who post about open source fonts are really just talking about free-as-in-beer typefaces. Some, however, have embraced the open source philosophy as applied to typography.

PacketProtector is an embedded Linux distribution based on OpenWRT, the first popular distribution designed to run on a number of wireless routers commonly found in SOHO settings. Like X-Wrt, which we reviewed earlier this year, PacketProtector extends OpenWrt by offering additional functionality to enhance network security right out of the box. PacketProtector's forte is the ability to use properly prepared USB drives for swap and storage. At present, the only routers supported are the Linksys WRTSL54GS and the Asus WL-500g, in either the Deluxe or Premium models. PacketProtector.org provided me with a loaner Linksys WRTSL54GS on which to do the review. I used both an external USB IDE drive and a USB key flash drive with the router.

Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project's code, while avoiding stifling developers' creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.

Pound is a reverse-proxy load balancing server. It accepts requests from HTTP / HTTPS clients and distributes them to one or more Web servers. The HTTPS requests are decrypted and passed to the back-ends as plain HTTP. It will act as:

Google SketchUp 6 on Linux and FreeBSD with Wine

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on a Debian Etch server.

When working with XML you really need a way to describe a namespace using multiple resources, including DTDs, XML Schemas, XSL stylesheets and software documents. The Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) allows you to do exactly this! Parse RDDL descriptors with an API in the XML_RDDL package from PEAR, and extract resource information for use in any PHP application.

Yesterday, the Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber) of the Dutch parliament adopted a plan to switch the country's public sector over to open standards. At the same time, authorities will be called upon to use open source software wherever possible. The 26-page paper from the Dutch Economics Ministry obligates governmental services to provide reasons why they need to continue to use proprietary solutions, such as operating systems or office suites from Microsoft, starting next April; next December, this duty will be imposed upon all public authorities. At the same time, authorities are required to come up with a strategy that includes a timeline for migration to open standards and free software.

phpBB™, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License.

One of the special abilities of ATI's R600 GPU family is the integrated 5.1 surround sound audio support through HDMI. Many Radeon HD 2000 and HD 3800 series graphics cards also ship with a DVI to HDMI dongle, so that one can experience the full video playback capabilities of these discrete graphics cards. But what level of HDMI support can Linux users expect when using these latest ATI graphics cards? We have done some testing internally and have the initial ATI Linux HDMI video and audio results to report in this article.

Canonical has been pushing its Ubuntu Server Edition, but I believe that they should instead be pushing their desktop version and dropping their server version altogether, because Ubuntu has a unique advantage on the desktop that they should not abandon.

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to get Windows XP up and running on the XO laptop. Get your SD card ready, your portable USB CD-ROM and let's go!

[All I can think of is..why? - Scott]

In a Ministry of Justice report, which can be found on the New Zealand Open Source Society Web site, the ministry addresses traditional concerns about open source, and concludes that although "open source software [OSS] was once an extraordinary way of thinking, limited to academia and small guerrilla projects in a community of hackers...[it] can lead to a more stable, supportable and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons".

A long time ago in net time (so around 1999) I wrote an article about setting up DNS. The article I wrote was terse to say the least. Recently I had the opportunity to work on a new DNS installation that grew to become somewhat complex. I decided to do a series on DNS covering the scope of what I have dealt with in hopes that it might help others. Although the scope I have dealt with is really mild; we have to start somewhere. In this first part of the series - an extremely simple DNS server with very few hosts is covered to get the feet wet.

I've been using and advocating free software for around six years. When studying and then working as a freelance writer, migrating an office seemed so simple -- draw up a list of comparable programs and, over a reasonable period, move your staff across. But over the past few weeks I've been trying to use Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop PC in a Windows-based office, and whilst most things work just fine, it's far from the seamless integration I was hoping for.

The federal government doesn't seem to have too much time for what some call "social media" - Facebook, MySpace, blogs and so on. Access to many such sites is restricted in many government offices, presumably because they are seen as time-wasting devices for the office slacker.

[Interesting article that talks about copyright law and the RIAA in Canada - Scott]

While the use of Linux continues to sail along at a nice clip, the number of people kicking the tires is shrinking, for all the right reasons. While Linux and complex RTOS products offer such attractive capabilities, they're also correspondingly difficult to learn and use due to these robust arrays of services. Linux includes hundreds of system services, virtual memory, and tens of millions of lines of open-source code. High-end commercial RTOSs also include many features and lots of code, making them (and Linux) a challenge to master.

A number of corporations are moving into the free software arena, and this has resulted in legions of programmers, paid by companies, moving into free software communities, Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun said Friday at FOSS.IN, a conference on free and open-source software in Bangalore, India. This development has thrown up questions about how open-source developers on corporate payrolls can protect their freedom and rights from the demands of their employers, and resist corporate influences that may run counter to the free software community's interests.