Showing headlines posted by grouch

Enterprise IT managers concerned about costly or proprietary data backup and recovery now have an Open Source option.

Multi Distro includes nine live CD Linux distributions in one ISO file that you can burn to a single disc. It uses the GRUB boot loader to present the user with a main menu from which they can choose which distro they want to run. By showing you how to make your own live CD composed of multiple live CD distros, Multi Distro packs a big punch.

The Ubuntu project has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support (LTS) today. Ubuntu 6.06, better known by its code name "Dapper Drake," is the first Ubuntu release to offer an extended lifecycle, a GUI installer for desktop systems, and support for Sun SPARC systems. In a press conference yesterday, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talked about the Dapper release, and how the project plans to address enterprise needs.

Even if you have no intention of getting up close and personal with Linux, it may pay to download and burn a version called Knoppix (go to http://www.knoppix.org and click on the US/UK flag logo for an English version of the page or order it on DVD or CD from http://www.linuxcdmall.com/knoppix.html).

The government-run Central Trust of China has mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible, demonstrating the government's desire to widen the nation's usage of open source software.

Mozilla's Firefox browser has been updated to fix 13 security vulnerabilities -- five of them rated critical, according to a report June 2 by eWEEK's Ryan Naraine.

Some of the flaws affecting Firefox also exist in Thunderbird, Naraine writes

[Includes links to eWeek's report and DesktopLinux's report on Thunderbird. -- grouch]

“Historically with all of our clients we find that when we’re working with them if we recommend a Debian based solution, their total support costs are lower than they are with some of the other distributions,” said Peddemors, referring to Red Hat and Novell’s Suse.

[I admit to yielding to my prejudice and posting this story solely because of the above quote. -- grouch]

Creator Michael "STIBS" Stibane calls STX Linux "a desktop Linux distribution especially targeted to older hardware." I tested version 1.0 of the Slackware 10.2-based distro on an old laptop with a 300MHz Celeron processor, 80MB of RAM, and a 4GB hard disk. I found this young distro for old hardware has promise.

The head of the One Laptop per Child project, Nicholas Negroponte, says he must be doing something right if he is upsetting Microsoft and Intel

Nashville, Tenn. -- My only real problem with this year's Red Hat Summit was trying to decide which talks to attend whenever I wasn't writing, eating, or partying. The problem wasn't finding sessions I was interested in, but deciding which one to attend when several appealing talks were happening at the same time. Here's a brief recap of what I learned in three of the 90 break-out sessions available to attendees.

Linux Gazette #127 is now available.

• Talkback, by Kat Tanaka Okopnik
• The Mailbag, by Kat Tanaka Okopnik
• News Bytes, by Howard Dyckoff
• FVWM: How Styles are Applied, by Thomas Adam
• FvwmEvent: conditional window checking by example, by Thomas Adam
• With Knoppix at a HotSpot, by Edgar Howell
• Review: amaroK (audio player for KDE), by Pankaj Kaushal
• State of the antispam regime, by Rick Moen
• Ecol, by Javier Malonda
• The Linux Launderette

Dynebolic is a live CD distro packed with tools for working with sound and video files. Dynebolic uses the Squashfs filesystem to fit a lot of applications into a small space, along with a speed-tweaked kernel and the tools to perform well on low-end equipment. The upcoming Dyne:II release also lets you add and remove tools to create your own custom version of the distro. Here's how.

IBM is borrowing some important pages from the Open Source playbook in its pushes to re-architect its most valuable software assets, including Websphere and Tivoli.

Open Source is changing the way that Gartner Group measures the application development market. The big loser as a result may well be proprietary Java application development tools, according to this Sean Michael Kerner report.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes.

MySQL AB has issued updates to its MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 series to address a SQL injection vulnerability. MySQL's action follows the PostgreSQL project's release last week to address the same issues.

Google has announced that it will accept no fewer than a whopping 630 open source projects for this year's Summer of Code. The number is up from last year's 410 projects. Sean Michael Kerner files this report.

SeaMonkey 1.0.2 is now available. This release contains important security and stability improvements, and the SeaMonkey Council recommends that all users upgrade.

Almost everyone at O'Reilly owns an iBook or PowerBook and almost everyone runs Mac OS X. It's not everyone's ideal operating system, however. Recently, free software editor chromatic explained to Mac editor Derrick Story why he switched back to desktop Linux. Here's what he wants in a usable Unix desktop.

SGI Altix and SGI InfiniteStorage Systems Boost Performance 5-10X for Multiple CFD and Structural Analyses