Showing all newswire headlines

The GNOME desktop has come a long way since a study sponsored by Sun Microsystems in 2001 raised usability issues. Since then, GNOME has learned to take usability seriously, developing its Human Interface Guidelines and making strong efforts to apply them more thoroughly with each release. The GNOME 2.14 release continues this tradition. Although few major innovations are visible to the user, the release includes another round of improvements in usability and the continued development of the desktop administration tools, as well as numerous small improvements in productivity software.

This week, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released security advisories. Among the affected packages were Cube, Freeciv, Bomberclone, kdegraphics, WebCalendar, FFmpeg, GnuPG, metamail, Curl, libextractor, Crossfire, Lurker, Zoo, and several other packages. Ubuntu released an important kernel upgrade that addresses several vulnerabilities. FreeBSD did not report any security updates this week.

My list of tools is aimed at non-professional system administrators who manage Linux machines in a home or small-office network. On my network, I use a number of security-related programs that I usually run as cron jobs. None of the programs are mentioned in the Top 75 Security Tools list, but I like them because they are easy to install and configure, and they work well. I also have a few recovery tools that I use when a system is having problems.

I wanted a quick and easy way to encrypt text for people that I didn't have public keys for. This allows for some security, and for easy decryption. For decrypting, my favorite method is to just copy the message to my clipboard and use KGpg to decrypt it. KGpg will ask you for the passphrase, and not require a public key to decrypt, just the correct passphrase will do.

The Pietermaritzburg Linux Enthusiasts Group makes one terminally ill teenager's dream of owning a laptop a reality.

Xandros recently released a version of its desktop Linux software aimed at the European market, tying in some of the advanced and emerging mobility services that are being developed and deployed in that region. If you support end-users who travel between Europe and the U.S., and want a Linux laptop, this could be the right system.

Exclusive We'll see you in hell or at least Santa Clara

IBM and Oracle representatives - backing Eclipse's BPEL designer project - are expected to square off with representatives from Iona, Sybase and ObjectWeb - who are pushing the rival Eclipse STP (SOA Tools Platform) Project - to propose a merging of the teams' initiatives ... is a need for a seperate open source business process execution language (BPEL) environment for SOAs ...

[ED: Important issues, perhaps dealth with too lightly, however, I am predisposed to listen to a Sybase argument given the superiority I have seen in its application syntax over either Oracle or IBM. - Hc]

Knoppix.org reports - The KNOPPIX 5.0 Live DVD contains some major changes in the unionfs-based file system, new hardware detection and autoconfiguration, and a more 'genuine Debian' oriented selection of packages.

OSDir had a look at the latest KNOPPIX offering in their KNOPPIX 5.0 Screenshot Tour. Sweet!

In essence, of the companies touting open source, IBM is one that has understood it, hence, it will profit from its corraboration efforts in the market. Eventually it will just become a reality instead of a buzz word as it is now employed by many.

Lists.ubuntu.com reports - Significant changes in this release include a KDE frontend to the new live CD installed Espresso, new artwork thanks to kwwii, a simplified package manager and much more (not to mention the Vista style widgets). OSDir took this release for a 'flight' in their Kubuntu 6.04 Flight 5 Screenshot Tour.

The soon to be released Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell has more than its share of gee-whizz factors, but will it be enough to make serious inroads into the enterprise sector where Novell so dearly hopes and needs to be to make its Linux business a success? <i>Alastair Otter</i> takes a quick pre-release peek at Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

You'd think that a man who's got a few billion dollars in the bank, likes to be known throughout the world as someone that is charitable, and who likes to profess that one of his goals was to put a computer in every home -- someone like that wouldn't have a problem with this project.

No, wait, maybe a little insight into that last statement -- a computer in every home, all running Microsoft software, that's what he really said. They kind of edited history recently when they quietly dropped the last part of the quote... Kind of brings the whole charitable aspects of this third-world computing thing into focus.

[ED: Perceptive -real voice of Linux Today as it once was, i.e., without the facts - HC]

[While] Governor Mitt Romney, who recommitted decisively to continue support for ODF ... Secretary of State William Francis Galvin, an announced opponent of ODF, has stated that he will run for reelection ... one candidate – and appropriately enough, a candidate that is challenging Galvin for his job at that – has already decided to make ODF adoption an issue in his campaign.

Turbolinux, Inc., a global leader of Linux-based solutions, today announced that it was honored with an NEC CLUSTERPRO Award for Best Sales of Linux High Availability Clustering Software at the CLUSTERPRO 10th anniversary celebration.

Search engine allowed to search

According to Intel, Viiv is a set of key Intel technologies that are designed to bring the performance and connectivity of PCs to the world of consumer electronics. When the new branding was unveiled late last year, the details were still fairly sketchy, but Intel have now released specifications.

There are several possible reasons why you might choose to use the command line interface (CLI) as your desktop environment. Jem Matzan walks through how to set up your virtual terminal to be more productive for desktop work.

A WOW player has been booted from the online game World of Warcraft for using the Wine emulator over the Linux operating system and a macro programmable keyboard.

The bloke, who is a network network engineer for an ISP, reports his experiences with the Blizzard administrators here. He thinks that the use of Wine might affect the software Blizzard use to detect third party programs designed to cheat the game.

What? And hell didn't freeze over?

Anti-software patent campaigners had a rare moment of harmony with the European Patent Office yesterday, coming out in support of a European Parliament motion of patent harmonisation between Europe and member states.

[ED: Greed, not the interests of the people seems to be protecting us from European software patents. Who would have believed it? - HC]

This seems to be the mother lode of Debian server tutorials.