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Monday, February 08, 2010 When Linux Nerds Choose Mates from the Windows Herd. Look...let's face this together. Dating can suck. Now when you are young, it's an adventure. One has relatively little "baggage", the emotional scars are few and the dating world is your oyster...so to speak. And you haven't even begun to think about their therapeutic value yet. Ah, youth... But then you find yourself at midlife, choosing from a large pool of potential crisis'. So many to choose from. Maybe there is a divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained, and oh yeah, there's that messy incident with the hacking conviction... Those tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss. Throw your use/obsession of Linux into the mix and what do you get? More than likely a room at your mom's house and a NASA-level computer bank in her basement.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government.

The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

More than 2,600 partners will converge at this week’s VMware Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas. Lots of news will surface at the conference. But I'm looking behind the curtains for new clues involving VMware's strategy for Zimbra, the recently acquired open source email provider. Here's an update.

Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.

All of these require a working setup with ifuse, gvfs, libimobiledevice (aka libiphone) etc as per our previous article. In today's article, StoneCut reviews GTKpod, Rhythmbox, Banshee and Songbird and their current status regarding iPhone/iPod syncing.

Many people use BitTorrent clients to download popular movies, music, and television shows for free, although this practice is illegal in several countries. But legal issues aside, distributing files through torrents is an excellent way to reduce server bandwidth and spread them quickly. For example, many Linux distributions will distribute their ISOs using torrents in addition to their server mirrors. BitTorrent makes distributing large files easy and fast because the files are hosted on users’ computers. In order to download the files associated with torrents, you need a BitTorrent client. KTorrent, a KDE project, is a feature-rich client that is completely self-contained from the moment you start searching for torrents until the last chunk finishes downloading. Ktorrent is available for download in most Linux repositories and requires minimal KDE dependencies to run.

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip [TPM] with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

Many eons ago, GNOME 1.4 still lived, and it was good. It was extremely configurable and hackable. You could use either Enlightenment or Sawfish as the window manager, and could customize it to your heart's content. It was even friendly to homegrown GTK+ hacks. And then tragedy struck: the GNOME maintainers decided that 1.4 needed a ground-up rewrite, and thus GNOME 2.0 was born.

The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office, depending on your requirements. Despite the scores of additional features found in products like Microsoft Office, most workers only need a simple word processor or spreadsheet to complete their day-to-day office tasks. If your staff are not “power users” then having a full-blown office suite on their desktop can be overkill. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at office suites that can manage you business information without emptying the company coffers.

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site. According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block.

Last month many developers were scurrying to prepare for the 2.6.33 merge window. When they weren’t doing that, here are a few of the items that were under discussion, starting with the Big Kernel Lock…

Our story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre. To protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things - fast.

Increase your internet speed with Namebench. NameBench is a program that searches for the fastest DNS in your area. After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area. After that all you have to do is edit your connection settings to use the fastest DNS available. NameBench is available for Windows and Mac systems, but most importantly it is Linux compatible.

There will be a ClearHealth 3.0 Community Edition intensive training event on Saturday, February 20th at SCALE 8x in Los Angeles. Learn about the features, operations, technical info, and installation details of the 3.0 edition at this seven-hour event.

Moonlight 3.0, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plug-in software on Linux and Unix platforms, is now being offered in an alpha release, according to Web pages from the Mono project, which has jurisdiction over Moonlight. The release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3, said Novell, which sponsors Mono.

New figures from webmasterpro.de show surprisingly high market share for OpenOffice.org around the world - peaking at 22% in Poland and Germany. Has the rise of OpenOffice.org to become a true rival to Microsoft Office begun?

Many administrators who use Postfixadmin, a web based tool to manage virtual domains on Postfix, would like to secure the transactions between the PostfixAdmin program and the administrator. At the same time often you do not want to add the extra burden of SSL on the whole domain but just want to secure one directory. The solution is to create a certificate for that one directory only and also locking that directory with a password so only administrators can gain access. The example is on an Ubuntu 9.10 server, which will be very similar to most server procedures.

SourceForge, the open source project hosting site, has announced that it has turned off the "blanket block" on access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.