Showing all newswire headlines

For some time I've been considering writing a book about what has become a standards war of truly epic proportions. I refer, of course, to the ongoing, ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike. And, needless to say, at countless blogs and news sites all the Web over as well. Well, I've taken the plunge, and if you are so inclined, you can help.

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.

Here is a good and comprehensive Debian 4 server guide containing lighttpd, postfix, spam control and other things essential to run a server. The guide is easy to follow.

Certainly most of the Linux users would like to have their systems fully optimized for their rigs but do not have the stamina or enough knowledge to play with the Gentoo installation paradigm. But here comes the rescue — an apt-build goody available under every distro armed with the big gun - APT package manager.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I will show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses.

How-to about sudoers file to give permission to some users to act as if they were others, or to execute command they, usually do not have permission to.

The Asus Eee PC, a inexpensive Linux-powered laptop, is sold out, as well as receiving great reviews, on major retail sites such as Amazon.com and Best Buy. Also, the Eee has placed near the top in Amazon's best seller list and CNET's most wanted list. This is not the first time a Linux computer has been sold out shortly after being released. The gPC, another low-cost Linux computer, was sold out a Wal-Mart shortly after it was first released.

Can Software as a Service get some Open Source lovin' now that the Free Software Foundation gets its licensing act together?

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release is a bit special, as it includes support for Ubuntu 7.10. Moreover, starting with this version, the ATI Catalyst software suite does not support the Linux kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.3 software and workstation hardware.

Space is filling up fast for the not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative(HCHIC) sponsored, intensive, vendor-neutral Educational Conference:"Introduction to WorldVistA EHR System Administration". December 7th-9th, 2007 in Houston, Texas. 10% of the proceeds benefit the not-for-profit WorldVistA organization with the rest of the proceeds benefiting the not-for-profit HCHIC. More information and enrollment informationhere.

Detailed report on installing Debian lenny/sid on Fujitsu Lifebook P7230. Includes use of LUKS device mapper encryption with LVM for swap and /home.

The survey still has a week to run, but the results have been leaked out nonetheless.

I was thinking of ignoring the Black Friday sales this year as it's annoying to have to get up really early, stand in line freezing for hours, fight my way into the store along with a few hundred other people, get 1/10th of what I wanted, then spend another hour in the check-out line. But then I spent Wednesday night stuck at my office because a large snowstorm had blocked all the roads and they weren't be plowed out until the following afternoon. So to pass the time I started checking out the leaked BF advertisements to see what was available and I decided to try my luck at the Staples store in Alpena.

A good how-to on getting dx9c working under wine. For linux gamers we know that this is a major headache for us. Now we can snag some of those games that we have relegated to the *sigh* windows only stack and fire them up with little to no problems. ~Az

It seems like Novell’s role in GNOME is not healthy to GNOME’s existence (let alone the success of ODF), to say the very least. Only yesterday, we delved deeper into the connections between Microsoft and Novell, which desperately needs Microsoft’s money. It is worth stressing that Novell should be approached very cautiously by the Free software world.

Last week NVIDIA introduced the 169.04 Beta Linux driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. What we had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format (OOXML) as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess.

Sometimes getting a grasp on what Open Source is and how it can be leveraged is difficult. There are many facets of Open Source, however, the two most interesting points of Open Source are: Direct cost savings from Open Source software. Slight difference in support models. In part one of the series, a generalized look at the costs and savings of Open Source. Story.

People are a funny lot. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And one person’s primary means of instructing a computer is met with disdain by another. There’s a perennial battle between mousers and keyboard jockeys, and “what’s in” appears to go in cycles.