Showing all newswire headlines

"One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors."

Standards New Zealand, our representative organisation in dealings with the ISO, objects on the grounds that Open Document has already been approved

A branch of the Free Software Foundation known as DefectiveByDesign launched an online petition last week that calls on Apple CEO Steve Jobs to "set the ethical example" by eliminating DRM from iTunes. The petition, a response to an open letter on digital rights management Jobs wrote in February, reached its initial goal of one thousand signatures about five hours after going live.

With the switch to an Ubuntu base, development of Freespire 2.0 has restarted. The first alpha release of Freespire 2.0 is now available for download and we had decided to check it out for ourselves. Freespire 2.0 Alpha 1 utilizes the Linux 2.6.20 kernel, X.Org 7.2, KDE 3.5.6, and all of the other latest packages. However. for the Freespire team there remains a great deal of work ahead before we shall see Freespire 2.0 final.

In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure MyDNS and MyDNSConfig. MyDNS is a DNS server that uses a MySQL database as backend instead of configuration files like, for example, Bind or djbdns. The advantage is that MyDNS simply reads the records from the database, and it does not have to be restarted/reloaded when DNS records change or zones are created/edited/deleted. A secondary nameserver can be easily set up by installing a second instance of MyDNS that accesses the same database or, to be more redundant, uses the MySQL master / slave replication features to replicate the data to the secondary nameserver.

To help protect against incorrect edits, another feature of a wiki is robust change control mechanics and auditing. This would not only include naming who changed, added or deleted what from a particular page, but often a means by which to get a change history of an article, or retrieve earlier versions of it for reviewing purposes.

About four months ago, Bernard Golden predicted that virtualization would play a big part in the open source world . The fact that the Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement centered on it is one more indication that virtualization is “it” for tomorrow’s data centers, he said.

Memory management has been a relatively quiet topic over much of the life of the 2.6.x kernels. Many of the worst problems have been solved and the MM hackers have gone on to other things. That does not mean that there is no more work to do, however; indeed, things might be about to heat up. A few recent discussions illustrate the sort of pressures which may lead to a renewed interest in memory management work in the near future.

I heard on the news this morning something about Google's founders getting close to being richer than Bill Gates. Is money the root or the root of all evil? I don't know.

The Switzerland-based Remote-Exploit.org project team earlier this week announced the release of BackTrack 2.0, a SLAX-based live CD with a comprehensive collection of security and forensics tools. The distribution features a 2.6.20 Linux kernel (with several patches) and the KDE desktop environment.

Bourne Again Shell offers a lot of power, flexiblity and fun. Many new Unix users do not realize the flexibility of the shell environment; indeed; many new Unix users regard the shell as primitive and too restricted: nothing could be further from the truth. With very little time investment a new Unix user can learn how not to just make their work environment in the shell more productive but even a little fun.

Organizers of OpenOffice.org's annual conference, "OOoCon," have voted to stage this year's event in Barcelona, Spain, in September. Exact dates are expected to be announced soon. Barcelona won out with 297 votes over Dehradun, India (224), and Beijing, China (82).

You've finally made the move to a Windows-free computer, you're enjoying your brand new Linux OS, no trojans/viruses, no slowdown, everything's perfect. Suddenly, you need to update the BIOS on your motherboard to support some new piece of hardware, but typically the motherboard vendor is offering only DOS based BIOS flash utilities. You panic! Fortunately, this problem is easy to solve...

HTMLfixIT is a help and news site for anything Internet or web design related. We welcome and encourage you to check out the site and make use of the tools, tutorials, forum and chatroom.

An unofficial guide to installing the RISC OS Firefox 2 port has been published online. Paul Vigay uploaded his user-friendly tutorial to installing and running the mammoth web browser after punters complained they were unable to use the software

Now that opensolaris has been progressing for almost 2 years, some people are starting to ask the question "is it a success?" Which begs the question of how do you measure its success?

I've been using OpenOffice.org Calc for a while now, but I recently decided to give KSpread a try after getting frustrated with Calc's slow load times. It rarely bothered me on my desktop system because I have 4GB of RAM and usually leave the program open, but my work laptop runs Windows XP, forcing me to run Kubuntu in a virtual machine. Unfortunately disk access is significantly slower and memory capacity is much smaller so the Calc startup time is painfully slow. KSpread is very fast, but are its other features good enough for me to stick with it?

We just passed a quiet milestone at the beginning of the month. And while the milestone does not seem to affect Linux, it could be mark the beginning of the worst assault on desktop Linux to date.

After the recent switch to the Ubuntu code base, Freespire announced that it has restarted its development process with the first alpha release of Freespire 2.0, Alpha1U (1.2.42). The new revision sports a 2.6.20 kernel and the KDE 3.5.6 desktop environment, according to the project team.

Is a flaw in the Firefox browser fixed or not? A security research claims that it's not. Mozilla says it is. Last November security researcher Robert Chapin discovered a zero day flaw in Mozilla Firefox's password manager. The flaw could potentially allow a maliciously crafted page to auto-fill a form with credentials intended for another site. Mozilla claimed that it fixed the flaw in its most recent Firefox 2.0.0.2 update. Chapin doesn't quite agree.