Showing all newswire headlines

As I've noted, I don't claim to have any insight into how this lawsuit will conclude, whether it will blow up into a long and bloody battle between Oracle and Google, or whether it will be concluded by some quick and relatively amicable solution. But I do believe that whatever happens, whatever it might nominally "win", Oracle has certainly and irrevocably lost more in terms of trust and goodwill within the free software world than it will ever understand. The message is clear: Fork all the main open source projects that Oracle owns or transfer energies to a replacement.

Writing about Ubuntu even a little critically brings out two types of people: those who get their fanboy bat out to beat the crap out of me and those who actually have solutions to the problems I present. Truthfully, I don't mind the fanboy factor; at least you're reading. And I did get help with my Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 upgrade problem.

Aquia released the first fully-functional open source social software suite this week. It is built on the Drupal platform and is expected to compete with established, proprietary Enterprise 2.0 software vendors.

A critical vulnerability in the Linux kernel that gives attackers access to root via X server has been patched by Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile, kernel developer James Morris reports on the first-annual Linux Security Summit (LSS), which covered topics including usability, hardening the kernel, and API standardization.

Installing a Linux server is easy, especially if you download one of the latest CentOS ISOs. There’s a nice wizard to walk you through the installation process, and it’s perfectly acceptable to do a standard default install. But, if you intend to do any serious hosting or expect production quality performance out of the system, or if you are just as particular as I am, than a bit of customizing of the install at the beginning could save you lots of time later on down the road.

In a post on their Connect blog, security specialist Symantec reports on a new trojan for Android that masquerades as a free Tap Snake game, while secretly transmitting GPS coordinates to a server in the background. These coordinates can then be retrieved and displayed in Google Maps via the GPS Spy Android app sold for €5 by the same vendor, Maxicom. According to Symantec, the Tap Snake process can't easily be killed and continues to run in the background.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Monday that multitouch support and gesture-based interaction will arrive in Ubuntu 10.10, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. The feature will be tightly integrated in Unity, Ubuntu's new lightweight netbook environment.

KDE 4.5 is a milestone release that took several months to complete, fixing over 16,000 bugs. While it also added new features, the selling point of this release is the stability that typically comes with a x.5 version of KDE. The desktop, applications, and development platforms have matured, and many of the outstanding bugs have been resolved.

Boxee is an Open Source cross platform media center application which is again based on another Open Source media center application called XBMC. The latest boxee comes with live news support via Livestation.

A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone's credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally. By setting up daily reporting, this notifies you within, at most, 24 hours of when any file was changed, added, or removed. It also helps establish an audit trail in the event your site is compromised. These instructions are designed for an end user, where you don't need to have root access, to implement and assumes your server has the aide binary installed. Most hosts will have this installed already, or will install it for you upon request.

In the 1990's Novell's NetWare dominated the networking industry with over 70% of the global market share. Their technical certifications were the industry's gold standard and offered titles such as Certified Novell Engineer, Master Certified Novell Engineer, Certified Novell Directory Engineer, and Novell Administrator. Just ten years later, the networking giant of the 20th century would find itself in a struggle to maintain relevance in the new millennium. The solution came as a change in strategy that would shift the company's focus from networking technologies to low level software and a new venture into an open sourced operating system of their own.

Untangle Gateway is a Debian-based network gateway with pluggable modules for network applications like spam blocking, web filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention, VPN, SSL VPN, firewall, and more. Untangle is considered as the the world’s first commercial-grade open source solution that provides a free and better alternative to costly, inflexible proprietary appliances.

Torrent Search is a torrent searching application for the Gnome desktop environment. It looks for torrent files on different websites, and allows the user to filter the results, making it very easy to find the torrent you want.

Many open-source developers and business people are upset that Oracle is suing Google over Java patents in Android. These people have reason to worry. This case could change not just how they use Java but how open-source development is done at all. So why would Oracle, a Linux-supporter in its own right, introduce the evil of software patents into open-source programming? My answer: Because Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, thinks the company can profit from it.

Canonical released a multitouch/gesture stack for Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat"). The uTouch 1.0 stack is equipped with a gesture recognition engine and gesture API for Meerkat, which recently arrived in alpha 3, offering Software Centre improvements and a Netbook Edition revamped with Canonical's new "Unity" interface.

This demo shows you how to import the Java servlet application files into the Rational Application Developer workspace, edit a few classes, and deploy the application on a WebSphere Application Server. Finally, you get to see the solution stack work in a real life scenario. This 4-part demo series shows you how to implement the solution stack (Rational Application Developer, WebSphere Application Server, and DB2 Express-C) on Ubuntu Linux, as well as how to integrate them in a Java application.

Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu operating system, proudly announced a few minutes ago the goals for the next version of Ubuntu. Yes, we are talking about Ubuntu 11.04, dubbed Natty Narwhal and scheduled for release on April 28th, 2011.

SUSE Linux was one of my very first distros; I used to buy it from CompUSA and other places back when I first got started with Linux. These days, of course, one can simply use openSUSE instead of buying it at a store. This week I decided to look at openSUSE 11.3, the latest and greatest version.

The most recent pvops kernel 2.6.32.19 allows to enable kernel modesetting (KMS) under Xen 4.0.1-rc6 on top of Ubuntu Lucid Server and Fedora 13. Actually , current setup of Xen 4.0.1&PVOPS on top of Ubuntu 10.04 Server is different from http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Xen4.0 : How to install Xen 4.0 (1) and brief instructions follow bellow. Status of the problem in general along with list of video adapters been tested may be viewed at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPVOPSDRM.

Last Summer while in hollidays in Algarve, I noticed at the supermarket cashier after a reboot that they were using Red Hat Linux.