Showing all newswire headlines

Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable "spins" of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect.

Uploading pictures to Flickr via its Web-based interface can be a hassle, particularly if you have dozens of shots to upload. Linux users have a better choice, though, in the form of Kflickr, a simple application for uploading shots to Flickr that will have your family photos online in no time.

rPath facilitates certification requirements for software providers with VMware Tools integration, enables auto-publish to Community section of VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

The FSF (Free Software Foundation) recently released their latest draft of the proposed new GPL license, "v3." In its current form, GPLv3 may unintentionally end up limiting one of the most important things we love about "free" open source software...freedom of choice.

A news site has been created to follow Source Mage GNU Linux. MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. Many people have complained in the past about a lack of news on the latest happenings with Source Mage. MagePower is here to remedy that.

Longer notebook battery life and less hard drive failures are on the way as SanDisk launches 64GB hard drives with no moving parts at Computex 2007 in Taiwan.

[Not FOSS related, just some cool new technology. - Scott]

Portable multimedia players are not necessarily a luxury these days; however, compared to yesteryears, they have certainly improved with additional features and a better user interface. The Archos 704 WiFi A/V player, for instance, is a step in the right direction with a multitude of impressive options, in addition to the standard support for various audio and video formats.

StumbleUpon was last week bought over by eBay, for a cool $75 million. Taking this as an opportunity to stumble around on company time, James Archibald collects some of the more interesting finds.

The deal Xandros Corporation signed with Microsoft on June 4 is an indicator of several things...Slice these deals any way you like, they are a sellout.

So, this is what we have been leveled to: patent wars. Earlier this week, I learned that the Linux Foundation has a portfolio of patents they own themselves and are quite willing to take Microsoft on in a patent war. And while I support the Linux Foundation fighting the good fight, I believe there are some issues that had better be considered.

Many years after first announcing plans for a native version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac OS X platform, the development team yesterday released the first alpha version.

OpenMoko Neo1973, an open source mobile phone similar in concept to Apple's iPhone, is expected to be launched in September this year.

The last few weeks have seen a dramatic increase in spam (once again). Estimates say that spam makes now up for 80 - 90% of all emails, and many mail servers have difficulties in managing the additional load caused by the latest spam, and spam filters such as SpamAssassin do not recognize large parts of that spam as they did before. Fortunately, we can block a big amount of that spam at the MTA level, for example by using blacklists, running tests on the sender and recipient domains, etc. An additional benefit of doing this is that it lowers the load on the mail servers because the (resource-hungry) spamfilters have to look at less emails.

TreeLine is a hybrid application that combines the features of a traditional outliner with a free-form database. As such, it offers a unique way to organize heterogeneous data, be it contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or something else. Moreover, using TreeLine's outlining capabilities you can easily group and manage the mixed data inside the database.

Linspire is a company that is never dull in regards to controversy. From their Lindows days to the recent Freespire release day, they have always been in the thick of things. Lately, however, it feels like they have been overly quiet, maybe too quiet. Perhaps it has something to do with people and their expectation of seeing the latest developments of CNR to other distributions.

Microsoft is prepping a security software suite that will take it deep into Symantec and McAfee heartland. They won't be quaking in their boots just yet: the suite, called Stirling, hits the streets in 2009, at the earliest.

[So after letting other companies make money closing the holes in its code MS wants a slice of the pie for themselves. Why not just fix the code in the first place? Oh, that's right. There's no money in doing that. - Scott]

There will be more criminal prosecutions for intellectual property (IP) violations as a result of Australia's Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, according to leading IP academics.

Camino, the Mozilla-based native Mac OS X browser, has reached version 1.5. Camino 1.5 is built on the core Gecko 1.8.1 platform, which also powers Mozilla Firefox 2 and SeaMonkey 1.1.

Welcome to issue 15 of the Red Hat Asia Pacific Newsletter.

Mozilla is certainly having a nightmarish security week. Late yesterday, it released a security-fix version 1.5.0.12 of its Thunderbird email client, after updating its Firefox browser, a Firefox Google toolbar extension, and its SeaMonkey web application suite -- all within the last six days.