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DD-WRT is a 100% free firmware for the Linksys WRT54G/GS and the Asus WL-500 deluxe 802.11g wireless routers (which run off a minimalist Linux OS).

The firmware is maintained by BrainSlayer (mailto:brainslayer@braincontrol.org) and is hosted at dd-wrt.com (http://www.dd-wrt.com/). The first versions of DD-WRT were based on the Alchemy Firmware (http://www.wrt54g.com/) from Sveasoft Inc (http://www.sveasoft.com/), which is in turn based on the original GPL'd Linksys Firmware and a number of other open source projects. DD-WRT exists as a direct result of Sveasoft's demand for $20 in order to be able to download their firmware.

The newer version(s) of DD-WRT- v23 (currently in beta development)- are a complete new project. DD-WRT offers many advanced features not found in the original Linksys firmware, or even firmware purchased from Sveasoft. It is also free of the product activation or tracking found in the Sveasoft firmware.

Digg Story

Happy Holidays from the release team!

Hi, In the recent 10.X series, kernel package has started producing image packages whose maintainer scripts use debconf for user interaction. Unfortunately, this meant that any hook scripts called in the maintainer scripts for the image package (update-grub comes to mind), if they wrote anything at all to the STDout, would cause debconf to throw hissy fits, since it was expecting commands on STDOUT, not random chatter from the hook scripts.

Linux has a number of useful bandwidth monitoring and management programs. A quick search on Freshmeat.net for bandwidth returns a number of applications. However, if all you need is a basic overview of your total bandwidth usage, iptables is all you really need -- and it's already installed if you're using a Linux distribution based on the 2.4.x or 2.6.x kernels.

While your focus is on local turf battles are you paying attention to why and what the E.U. is threatening you dearest Microsoft? If you paid attention you too might be taking other action than the promise that Microsoft will really deliver an Open Format ever despite its promises to do so. You see that the E.U. has gone down that path and has lost patience. Just perhaps you too should be looking a bit more closely at world events over parochial local and national politics?

This news story appeared on LXer yesterday, however, the staid, balanced presentation style of the NYT is no match for Groklaw (as found on lwn.net) it is indeed a story and view worth repeating.

The recent discussions on KDE versus other Linux desktops - accidentally started by KDE-user Linus Torvalds - showed an interesting new development in the eternal debate. First of all it didn’t come as a surprise that Linus uses KDE, after all Fritz Elfert made it very clear back in 1996 that KDE stands for “Kernel-Hackers’ Desktop Environment”

Red Hat GFS At The Heart Of A Modern Cluster Solution With Virtualized Storage For Web Services

Red Hat, a provider of open source to the enterprise, announced that Messe München International (Munich International Trade Fair - MMI), a leading trade fair company, has deployed Red Hat Global File System (GFS) as its cluster file system for its web services. Red Hat GFS runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and will enable MMI to realize high-performance and scalability for the future, which were the main deciding factors for the trade fair company.

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, announced that it has successfully moved Skanska's business-critical intelligence systems from Unix to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution powered by Intel-based hardware. Red Hat's collaboration with Skanska has resulted in cost savings within Skanska's IT infrastructure department and has improved the performance of the company's servers and applications.

Supposedly there are a myriad of remaining complaints on the recently released Firefox 1.5 that go on for pages despite the early admission that they were unable to reproduce at least 60% of those cited. Some indeed are real and a few I have direct experience with almost daily. Nonetheless, the seeming magnitude of some of these problems, at the very least, are over stated. Moreover, fixes are available and unlike the lack of responsiveness exhibited by Microsoft and its lead product Internet Explorer the Mozilla developers makes serious attempts to solve every problem that they can verify. The constraints they face are the ability to reproduce the behaviour and the personnel to pursue a solution once defined. However, the severity of many if not most of the problems appears to have been over stated.

The foregoing is not to make light of real problems some users are encountering using even this new, improved version of Firefox, hence, I have a few suggestions at the end on how to search for some solutions and to report problems so that that may receive the attention they deserve.

Here is a nice review of a lesser known but very robust linux distribution which could apeal to newbies in Linux.

ATI A Year in Review. As 2005 comes to an end, both NVIDIA and ATI have fought a competitive battle not only when it comes to their hardware lineup but also display drivers for alternative operating systems. When discussing this subject matter, GNU/Linux users have been quick to criticize ATI Technologies whether it is due to poor installation support, distribution compatibility, rudimentary control panel, or simply the performance level of its drivers. On the contrary, even though NVIDIA had unveiled its GeForce 7 series, 2005 has not been the best year for the green developers.

PORTLAND, Ore., Aug. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) -- Palamida(TM) today announced alliances with two major open source organizations, Eclipse Foundation, Inc. and SourceForge.net. In addition to extending the reach of its software intellectual property compliance solution, IP Amplifier, the new relationships will also ease open source developers' concerns about the utilization of their custom-created intellectual property, and allow organizations to be more confident in their use of open source software.

4PSA, a custom solutions provider for servers, has announced a new version of 4PSA Server Controller, a software package designed to monitor multiple Linux/UNIX servers and to manage accounts on remote Plesk servers from a single, centralized, Microsoft Windows interface.

In December 2004 it was decided that DotNetNuke would break out its existing core modules into separate Projects so that they could be enhanced, released, and supported independently from the core Web Application Framework. It was further decided that some additional modules would also be added as official Projects to provide an increased level of richness to the platform. The first modules that we determined were going to be added were the TTT Forum and TTT Gallery, authored by Tam Tran Minh of TTT Corporation. I was already working closely with Tam on these modules, and I volunteered to co-lead the development of these Projects and to help morph them into modules that take full advantage of the DotNetNuke Web Application Framework.

[Ed: This is a questionable submission that verges on a commercial for products. I'm running it because the products mentioned have value to some of our readers. If you know of free utilities that will do the same jobs, please make a comment. -adelste]

If Sony BMG can screw up your computer with rootkits and other dangerous tricks, so can any other trusted name in music or movies. The latest release of a CD/DVD play-or-clone package from China lets you render the latest DRM schemes harmless by stripping out the bad stuff when you copy or play CDs and DVDs.

IONA Technologies, a provider of high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, and ObjectWeb, a well established and respected open source community with a focus on the development of industry-grade distributed middleware, announced that the Celtix open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project has achieved its third key milestone.

The on-schedule delivery of Celtix Milestone 3 provides the community with additional transport support, broader specification compliance and significantly enhanced usability. Additionally, a multiple licensing approach that supports both LGPL and EPL creates greater opportunities for open source communities such as the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and others to take dependencies on Celtix code for their ESB runtime functionality as part of ongoing open source projects.

Many VRML vendors implemented a different subset of the spec, and it never gained traction. And so 3D on the Web faded away. It turns out that VRML lives on in its XML flavor, X3D, which has grown to encompass VRML's siblings H-Anim (Humanoid Animation) and GeoVRML. This article focuses on a couple of uses that X3D is ready for now, and takes a look at where VRML might go in the future.

The Indian information technology and business process outsourcing industry is poised to grow ten-fold by 2010, according to a report released Tuesday.

While Indian companies will continue to maintain their 46 percent share of the global business processing outsourcing (BPO) market and 65 percent share of the IT outsourcing market through 2010, the combined market is estimated to grow from the current level of $30 billion to $300 billion by 2010.

These two sectors of the Indian economy will earn $60 billion in exports by March 2010, an increase from 3 percent of gross domestic product to about 7 percent, according to a report by the Indian software trade association Nasscom and global consulting firm McKinsey.

Developers of four major Web browsers -- Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer (IE) -- gathered at an informal meeting in Toronto on November 17 to review plans and share progress on security improvements and standards. The intents were making security information more meaningful to users, and balancing security for high-traffic sites (such as banks) and smaller organizations and businesses.

The old silo method of chip development, with hardware and firmware developers barely interacting with each other, won't cut it in today's fast-moving industry. Learn about the development tools and processes that speed system on a chip design and get all your developers working together effectively.