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Lennart Poettering, developer of Avahi, discusses Ubuntu's "No Open Ports!" policy in his blog syndicated on Planet GNOME. That policy is supposed to create a more secure workstation after a default installation, but at the same time makes its usability and comfort for users go down considerably. Lennart questions the validity of the reasons behind that decision as far is Zeroconf/Avahi is concerned. Another blog, this time on www.kdedevelopers.org takes up that policy in relation to the crippling of CUPS's convenience features on a default Ubuntu installation and puts it into the nutshell "you can't use your system for printing, but at least it is super-secure".

SugarCRM is touting the first fruits of a technology relationship with Microsoft in the next version of its open source customer relationship management suite.The bitterest pill for some, though, is likely to be Sugar's plan for a distribution issued under Microsoft's Community License, part of Microsoft's pseudo open source Shared Source Initiative. SugarCRM is currently licensed under a modified version of the Mozilla license, called SugarCRM Public License (SPL).

For several years, Nero has manufactured one of the most popular CD/DVD burning suites for Windows. Now at version 2.1.0.1, NeroLINUX is the GNU/Linux equivalent of Nero Burning ROM, one of the main programs in the Nero suite. Like its Windows counterpart, NeroLINUX combines an easy-to-use interface with a variety of options. However, unlike the Windows version, it offers little, if anything, that is not available in comparable free software.

Sun Microsystems, and Greenplum recently unveiled a data warehouse appliance built from open source software and general purpose systems. Powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and PostgreSQL, both the mature product of open source development, this breakthrough solution aims to deliver two orders of magnitude better price-performance over the competition.

Motorola's new flagship platform, SCPL will support slider, flip, candy bar, swivel, touchscreen and QWERTY keyboards. The first SCPL phone is called the MOTOFONE. In addition, Motorola will be abandoning the familiar operating system used on its feature phones, such as the RAZR, for a Linux- and Java-based solution.

These days, when one talks about free software, the first word that comes to mind is Linux—be it the kernel or a distribution based on it (which would then be a GNU/Linux operating system, and its flavour marked by a brand name: Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware...) At one time, there was another project worthy of note: BeOS. It wasn’t POSIX-compatible, but it was neat. But now, only free *NIX prevail... really?

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall's State of the Onion report.

A recent patch posted to the lkml contained the following description, "this patch adds an efi e820 memory mapping", in response to which Andrew Morton asked, "why?". Linus Torvalds offered his views on EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface beginning by describing it as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)".

Last week in Part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

Any user that was browsing with Internet Explorer and had not installed the latest Microsoft patches was vulnerable to this attack. In January, Microsoft released a patch that prevents WMF (Windows Metafile) files, so users that had installed the patch were safe. Browsers using Firefox version 1.5 or later are also protected from WMF files.

Using Linux and the HDAPS kernel drivers, you can access the embedded accelerometers on Lenovo ThinkPads, then process the accelerometer data to read specific sequences of "knocking" events -- literally rapping on the laptop case with your knuckles -- and run commands based on those knocks. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. You can also download and use article Perl scripts to customize your own knocking input environment.

In this episode: voice mail update (or lack thereof) and Ogg Vorbis RSS feed link; listener feedback; this week’s Listener Tip about the alias command; the legal and philosophical issues concerning proprietary video and audio codecs; a review of Linux video players, such as MPlayer, xine and gxine, VLC, Totem, and Kaffeine, Linux video editors, including Kino, Cinelerra, Avidemux, LiVES, and Diva, Linux DVD ripping/encoding applications, such as dvd::rip, acidrip, xdvdshrink, and k9copy, and DVD authoring applications, including QDVDAuthor and DVDStyler.

The new Version 4.0 of Debian, known to date by its code name "Etch", will appear in December of this year, those responsible for the Linux distribution project state in a new status report.

Even the Emacs-enlightened are still but humble human beings who may err. We make spelling mistakes in our writing, and syntactical mistakes in our structured documents. So let's take a tour through Emacs' built-in tools for preventing, catching, and correcting mistakes.

A new report from Futurelab suggests that the open source model of peer-reviewed collaboration could radically transform educational practice for teachers and learners.

Supports kernel 2.6 versions of RedHat, SuSe and Fedora. Driver source code is available.

Strategic Test Corp has announced the release of new Linux drivers for kernel 2.6 versions of RedHat, SuSe and Fedora distributions. The kernel 2.4 drivers have also been updated. Linux kernel 2.6 gives increased stability and near to real-time operating system performance, useful for measurement and signal generation applications.

IBM has extended its portfolio of middleware and systems platforms to support Novell's new Suse Linux Enterprise 10 offerings. Particularly exciting from IBM's perspective is the Xen virtualisation feature.

Solid Information Technology, a provider of fast, always-on and affordable databases used in more than 3,000,000 mission-critical deployments worldwide, today announced the availability of the beta version of its open source product, solidDB ™ for MySQL. solidDB for MySQL is covered under GNU Public License (GPL) and is downloadable from forgemysql.com and http://dev.soliddb.com/download.

[That forgemysql.com wasn't working when I tried it. -- grouch]

Directed by Hoffman and John Levine, the organization intends to work together on best practices and technical solutions, in particular the promotion of the Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) approach being championed by Yahoo and Cisco.

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 150:
Chris & Bryan fromThe Linux Action Show tell us why they switched to Linux from Mac
Dan installs trixbox after our Asterisk server flakes out
Pat uses Opera for a week and likes it
Linc gets into Arch Linux
And much, much more

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