Showing all newswire headlines

This article concludes "Companies find that their Linux server setups are less hardware-hungry than Windows-based systems, if the results of a recent survey are to be believed." The poll favors Linux and the author of this article misleads readers. Perhaps the title should be "Shilling for Microsoft". -ED

Softletter announced that it will host "Marketing and Selling Open Source Software 2005", a two-day event for open source software vendor executives, sales and marketing managers. The event will take place October 6-7 in Burlington, Mass, and Nov. 10-11 in San Jose, Calif. Well-known guest speakers on the preliminary agenda include John Roberts, Kevin Carmony, Matt Asay, Andrew Aitken, John Weathersby, Maria Winslow, and James Curtin.

The Linux edition Cherry CyMotion Master keyboard is coming to the United States. According to the German company, the $65 Linux-centric keyboard will be available from major US technology distributors late this fall, following the port of its drivers to Red Hat Linux. I tested the keyboard this week, and I rank it "recommended".

TJ, the director of IT at a manufacturing company, explains what happened when he tried to move his company to open source...

lcamtuf (Michał Zalewski) has now written a book "Silence on the Wire". And o'reilly made an interview... Recently the eccentric security researcher Michal Zalewski published his first book, entitled Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks. Because the book is everything except a security manual, Federico Biancuzzi chose to interview Michal and learn more about his curious approach to information security. Among other things, they discussed the need for randomness, how a hacker mind works, unconventional uses for search engines such as Google, and applying AI to security tools.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski pledged Tuesday to do his part to make Oregon an attractive place for open-source software development, promising to raise the state's profile within the open-source movement and to raise the movement's profile inside Oregon.

New users tend to make some common mistakes when trying out GNU/Linux for the first time. The reasons for these mistakes are varied: because GNU/Linux is a different kind of operating system; because Windows fosters bad habits; because users choose the wrong distribution; because Mercury is in retrograde; and myriad other possibilities. Here are some solutions to five commonly encountered GNU/Linux problems.

Linux and open source win the race against Microsoft for Kinetic, a start-up business that develops sports performance technology. Co-director of the company, Rob Shugg said he uses Linux wherever he can to save money, and attract the quality developers and community support required to create powerful tools and applications. "We started the company with our own savings and some money from Business ACT's Knowledge Fund, so there was no way we could afford anything else, but in truth, we never even considered buying any software, everything we needed was available on Linux," he said. "We use Linux where ever we can."

This year's aKademy saw a whole new innovation: The KDE Appreciation Awards, also known as the "aKademy Awards". Their purpose is to recognize outstanding contribution to the KDE community. The awards are for best application, best contribution to KDE and the Jury's Choice Award. The jury consisted of the well-known KDE hackers Aaron Seigo, Brad Hards, David Faure and Matthias Ettrich. If you want to know who the winners are, read on!

Not a dupe. We covered OSCON extensively on LXer but now the talks themselves are starting to show up on ITConversations.

Tim O'Reilly and Nathan Torkington speak about the O'Reilly radar, which tracks the latest happenings in the tech world. Tim describes O'Reilly media as a company that tries to identify the future and spread the future. Open Source Software (OSS) is changing the way the software industry works

Want to help a technical high school in Sicily develop open-source software? They're waiting for you.

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Carla Schroder explained reasons to use Debian and gave an overview about several derived distributions. Sean Michael Kerner reported about Debian's debut in China with Sun Wah's enterprise Debian offering.

Expensive groupware is simply overkill when all you want is to decide whose turn it is to do the dishes. This month, Peter uses his old Linux™ box to build a miniscule Web-based household calendar. In these Linux on board column installments, Peter looks at Linux running on various kinds of hardware -- PDAs, embedded devices, or just ancient hardware no one thought was useful anymore. He alternates between looking at specific Linux devices and showing you in detail how to use Linux on decrepit hardware that's past its reputed prime.

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University has received a large donation of Internet bandwidth from TDS Telecom that will allow it to more than double the number of visitors it can serve, in the future helping up to 50 million people a day review or download free software. For a five-year period the Open Source Lab will receive 600 megabits of bandwidth - a volume of Internet connectivity that is more than five times higher than the total used by the rest of the university. The bandwidth is worth several million dollars, officials say.

MadPenguin.org has published a lengthy interview with MEPIS Linux creator Warren Woodford. The article offers insight into the two-year-old distro's rapid and widespread proliferation. Woodford's secret? "Give desktop customers what they want: a simple, reliable set of applications that are easy to acquire, install, and use," according to the article.

IT shops are being bombarded by mixed and incorrect messages about the legal aspects of open source software and the current status of grid and virtualization technologies, says Donald Becker, Beowulf Project co-founder and founder and chief scientist of San Francisco-based Scyld Software, a subsidiary of Penguin Computing. Becker sounds off on these subjects in this excerpt from our interviews during and after the recent LinuxWorld Conference & Exposition in San Francisco.

In recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft for the first time acknowledges that Mozilla's browsers pose a competitive threat and the software giant also notes that security vulnerabilities leave it open to legal action.

“Using open source is not just a matter of being against any proprietary system, but rather one of overall development. We also need to move into developing practical projects that will help develop skills, core competencies and allow for cost-effective solutions to some of local government's needs,” he says.

Two serious security flaws have turned up in software widely distributed with Linux and Unix. The bugs affect Electronic Mail for Unix (Elm), a venerable e-mail client still used by many Linux and Unix systems administrators, and Mplayer, a cross-platform movie player that is one of the most popular of its kind on Linux. The Elm flaw involves a boundary error when the client reads an e-mail's "Expires" header. A specially crafted e-mail could exploit the bug to cause a buffer overflow and execute malicious code on a system, according to security researchers.

I accept fully that many sites, including some I run, need advertising to operate. My Wi-Fi Networking News site has Flash ads on it right now, for instance. But I am, unfortunately, finding that Flash ads are now often highly intrusive even on sites I trust. They cycle endlessly. They use visual effects to knock my eyeballs on the floor. They play audio without my permission (even more annoying when I'm already playing music in iTunes or using voice over IP via iChat AV or Skype).