Showing all newswire headlines

Various sites including slashdot and kernel trap are reporting that there's a root exploit in more than one of the nvidia binary drivers. Bad news if you (like me) use them to achieve 3d acceleration.

Asa Dotzler has conducted an interview with Mozilla developer Boris Zbarsky. Boris contributed to the Mozilla project for a number of years as a volunteer and now works part-time for the Mozilla Corporation. Questions were suggested by readers of Asa's weblog.

Ruby on Rails seems to be a lightning rod for controversy. At the heart of most of the controversy lies amazing productivity claims. This article explores the compromises and design decisions that went into making Rails so productive within its niche and how Ruby on Rails, like a nail gun, saves so much time.

Open source software is playing a growing role in telephony, and getting the attention of major equipment suppliers, but there is still an element of “buyer beware” in the use of open-source telephony technologies. Those were the key messages from a panel on the subject at the inaugural Voice 2.0 conference here Monday.

The built in webserver in Visual Studio 2005, formerly known as Casini, uses a dynamic or static port on the localhost machine (e.g. http://localhost:2049/default.aspx). It is dynamic by default, but you can make it static if you choose.

We like openSUSE 10.1. Really, we do. And, it's not just us -- openSUSE has been holding onto second place, after Ubuntu, for months now on DistroWatch, and it's even been crawling close to first place in recent days. There's just been this one little, well not so little really, problem: the revised YaST package manger, which is used for adding new programs and updating old ones, has stunk. There have been fixes, but they've all left something to be desired. Perhaps the biggest single problem was simply this: when you have a broken package manager, how do you use it to fix itself? It was doable. It was also painful. Now, the openSUSE project has finally come up with the most practical fix of all: SUSE Linux 10.1 "remastered."

"When we think of this we think of mobs going around beating and killing people they believe have broken the law. In these cases the police usually treat the vigilantes as offenders and those the vigilantes persecuted as victims. This seems fair and just doesn't it? People shouldn't take the law into their own hands." It is different with DRM though.

In a letter to the deputy director general of the European Commission's Enterprise and industry section, which made its way into the hands of the INQUIRER, Hugo Lueders, of the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) seeks to rubbish a report into the economic impact of open source software (dubbed FLOSS in the EU, so as not to upset the French – Free/Libre Open Source Software).

Colorado-based OpenLogic said today that it is now offering its customers indemnification coverage for intellectual property infringement on 160 open source projects offered by the firm. OpenLogic said the coverage was targeted at giving enterprises peace of mind when using open source products.

An East German company will soon begin selling an IP-PBX setup based on a Mac Mini running Linux. 4S Newcom's iBlue package comes with an iPod Shuffle that acts as a boot device for the Mac Mini, plus five Linux-based VoIP phones.

Open source software can help manage large software projects of globally distributed, individual contributors with virtually no management overhead. As open source blends more and more with the commercial software industry, this property of the open source phenomenon, which I will refer to as "open source globalization," may have an even higher impact on engineering jobs than IT offshoring. But this time, the news is not so bad for those who embrace the change.

Under urging from Intel Corp., TransMedia's Glide online applications suite--an emerging competitor to Microsoft Office--will gain a Linux desktop client in January of next year plus a Linux version of its back-end infrastructure during the March 2007 timeframe. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

This article argues that the fundamental moral layer is the "state of freedom" and hence the most fundamental moral question, the first one to ask, is how free is the society and its individuals.

With the release of the 2.6.19-rc1-mm1 kernel, the ext4 filesystem was merged into Andrew Morton's -mm tree for further testing. In the announcement Andrew notes that the new filesystem is compatible with ext3 until you add a file that has extents. He also notes, "when comparing performance with other filesystems, remember that ext3/4 by default offers higher data integrity guarantees than most. So when comparing with a metadata-only journalling filesystem, use `mount -o data=writeback'.(Although this doesn't seem to make much difference with ext3)" The goal is to stabilize the new filesystem within the next six to nine months, and ultimately to replace the ext3 filesystem.

In part 2 of this essay, I had discussed the relationship between users and developers of the Free and Open Source Software from the point of view of the community. I tried to show in what kind of framework this relationship could work, and how it could ensure the community's coherence and plausibility. In this last part, I will briefly discuss the GPLv3 in the light of the user-developer relationship.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application. Download packages for Kubuntu, SuSE or you can try before you install with the KOffice 1.6 live CD.

Welcome to our issue number 62 of Fedora Weekly News.

ApacheCon 2006 ended its week-long run in Austin, Texas, on Friday. The event proved that Linux is not the only brightly shining star in the world of free and open source software.

Full Open Source Compliance and Database Independence are now one step closer for Open Source ERP project Adempiere (www.adempiere.org) with its first version released today, as scheduled. The Adempiere Bazaar as the project community call themselves also boasts of being independent of any commercial entity and thus does not lock in any business partner that uses this application. It provides a full stack of tutorials and documentations in its Wiki.

Last week the Sabayon Linux project released ISO images of its miniEdition 3.1 live CD Linux distro. Sabayon has earned a reputation for running right on the cutting edge; it is the first distro to deploy a live CD using the Beryl compositing engine and Nvidia's newest beta video drivers. The only reason I tested the miniEdition instead of the full DVD ISO is that the DVD torrent estimated three days to complete the download. Seeing how much there is the miniEdition, perhaps I should be glad.