Showing all newswire headlines

Linux distributions are known for evolving quickly, but it looks like MEPIS is trying to set a new speed record. Yesterday, MEPIS announced the release of the feature-complete RC1 (release candidate) of SimplyMEPIS 6.5.

It seems to be a trend among some proprietary software vendors: attacking open source with lies. The latest appears in this week's Network World's Face-off, which features a slop-bucket full of self-serving hogwash by Ipswitch's Roger Greene entitled "Don't trust your network to open source."

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.

A survey of 140,000 small to medium-sized business (SMB) users has revealed that the Mozilla Firefox browser is now almost on equal footing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the SMB market sector. What's more, the gap is narrowing dramatically every month.

The Google Summer of Code is running again this year.

A critical flaw in the popular encryption software GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) allows attackers to launch a phishing-style attack that inserts text appearing to part of a trusted email, Core Security Technologies announced today.

The Free Software Foundation has begun an online petition urging Apple chief executive Steve Jobs to remove protections from the iTunes Music Store. "As the largest purveyor of digital rights management [DRM] protected music, Apple carries a large part of the responsibility for the situation in which consumers now find themselves," the petition reads.

WebSphere Application Server (WAS) introduces a new ready-to-go solution. Try WAS Express Version 6.1 on Linux and Windows. It includes a J2EE application server, sample applications, powerful development tools, and wizards along with the performance and reliability you expect from an IBM product.

Normally, when a program runs under Linux, it inherits the permissions of the user who is running it, thus if I run a program under my account, the program runs with the same permissions that I would have if that program were me. Thus, if I cannot open a certain file, the program I am running also cannot open the file in question. If I set the SUID or SGID bit for a file, this causes any persons or processes that run the file to have access to system resources as though they are the owner of the file.

NVIDIA has graced us with new drivers that support their latest and greatest GPUs. Here are the release notes and relates links.

[I really don't see anything gracious about non-free drivers. However, since we seem to be so dependent on the driver gods, here's the latest non-free driver from Nvidious. - dcparris]

Mandriva has announced the launch of the beta program of Corporate Desktop 4.0, the brand new version of its enterprise-dedicated work station, which it punts as ergonomic, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and easy to administer.

Bug stamp-out list for March 9, 2007

Sun launches products for web infrastructure on Solaris 10. Sun Microsystems has announced a new set of products and services targeting developers, startups, and internet companies seeking to build and deploy their web infrastructure on Solaris 10.

ATI released their latest Linux drivers toward the end of February..

When you start learning the source code of an unfamiliar project, you don't have the knowledge of its structure or the meaning of specific functions, classes, and units in the project. You can use tags to browse for definitions, but it's hard to get an overall picture by just looking through every definition one by one. Cscope and SilentBob are two tools that can help you analyze unfamiliar source code. They help you find symbol definitions, determine where specific functions are used, determine which functions are called by other given functions, and search for strings and patterns throughout the code base. With them, you can save time by doing fast, targeted searches instead of grepping through source files by hand.

Red Hat Inc. plans to create a Web store to boost sales of its own open-source software and of compatible open-source products from other companies, a person familiar with the plan said on Thursday. The company plans to announce the strategy next week when it releases the first major upgrade in two years to its core Linux-based operating system, according to the source.

If, for whatever reason, you have done some digging on me you will have discovered a dark secret. Well, not quite a secret as I do not hide it, nor is it that dark, more of a information non publiée. I am involved in local politics, and my political party is the Tories. There, I have said it. I have come out of the closet. I have admitted it. I can now wander around the Free Software Magazine pages without hiding my true nature. I am free!

Now, this is one cool project (and video) from Alan Carvalho de Assis (and friends), as announced on the LinuxBIOS mailing list: LinuxBIOS with X Server Inside.

STMicroelectronics (ST) is sampling a pair of configurable SoCs (system-on-chip processors) powered by ARM9 cores and 600K-gate configurable logic blocks. The SPEAr (structured processor enhanced architecture) Head600 and dual-core SPEAr Plus600 run Linux, support DDR/DDR2 external memory, and target printer, fax, and POS (point-of-sales) devices.

A new report from the U.K. Office of Government Commerce about Open Source Software Trials in Government, has found that servers running Linux could combat the rising problem of e-waste because they last up to twice as long as machines running Windows.