Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

I've been using KMail for several years, but I get in ruts and don't notice new features until I trip over them by accident. One such feature is Templates, which has become one of my biggest time-savers.

GNU is 25 years old this year, and every Linux user on the planet should take a few minutes to eat a piece of birthday cake and give thanks. Because it's more than just software.

Lenovo caused a small furor when it announced that it was no longer selling Linux on Thinkpads to us unwashed masses. Though it was news to me that they had ever started...Remember Dell's first few insincere forays into the Linux desktop market, where you had to have the cunning and skills of a Yeti hunter to find Linux boxes on Dell.com? Lenovo was even worse- I never did find their alleged Linux offerings."

I used to think that Gnome 1.4 was the Last Good Gnome. Because when Gnome 2.0 came along, everything I liked was gone. It was dumbed-down to the point of unusability, and the roadmap called for yet more dumbing-down. So I switched to KDE for my main workstation, and IceWM, XFCE, and Blackbox for lower-powered PCs. For all these years I haven't seen much to like in Gnome. Not until Ubuntu Hardy Heron, that is.

This True IT Tale of Horror takes place in an American public school district. It is my hope that this reassures parents everywhere that their precious future generations are being well-prepared for life by the finest and most dedicated minds in education. Dedicated to what, you ask? Well...um...

Google's Chrome browser is the most revolutionary, transformative technology to ever hit the planet. It will end hunger, tame avarice and greed, and beat swords into plowshares. But plows are destructive, so they will be strictly ornamental and have pretty flowers growing over them.

But let's not forget that these Linux-come-lately party-crashers are very late to the party, and have been whining and foot-dragging and making excuses for years why they couldn't sell Linux PCs, or even bare PCs with no operating systems. If you wanted to buy Linux preinstalled on a computer, you had to find an independent shop. Which wasn't easy, because if they also sold Windows then they were under the eye of Sauron just like the big vendors, and were punished for selling Linux.

While the big Linux news revolves around the desktop wars, one of the few remaining Redmond strongholds is the unholy MS Exchange/Outlook duo. For whatever reason, despite their innumerable defects, fragility, expense, cruddy performance, and friendliness to malware, businesses are reluctant to give them up.

But to my way of thinking, Nominum didn't fix a thing. The article describes combining four techniques for foiling what they are now calling the Kaminsky Attack. I guess "cache poisoning" isn't glamorous enough. The techniques sound questionable, and the fixes only applies to their expensive, closed proprietary caching server. Nobody else benefits from this fix. So it's not a fix at all- it's as though they were claiming to have cleaned up a small volume of water in a large swimming pool.

Does attracting hordes of Windows users to your FOSS project benefit your project, or help the advancement of FOSS? Or do you just get buried under complaints and demands? Should FOSS developers write applications for Windows?

FOSS is rather like a good sourdough culture, because a properly cared-for sourdough culture will live and feed people forever. You can't take from it without giving it a little something back because then it will die.

It painted a picture of Open Source software as being a minefield of grumpy litigious geeks who want to cash in with fat lawsuits, and no clear guidance for how to stay out of trouble. Oddly, this all seemed to come from a most unlikely source, the director of the Gnome Foundation, Stormy Peters. Even unlikelier, it was from her talk at LinuxWorld, which hardly seems a good venue for spreading misinformation of any kind, let alone old moldy misinformation...As usually happens with stories like these, reader comments were a mixture of "Die evil FUD-sucking scum!!" and "Er, it seems rather unlikely that Ms. Peters said these things."

As powerful as all this cool technology is, it's also fragile, as I learned yet again today. A storm blew in and it was a doozy- high winds, machine-gun rain, lightning, and thunder that felt like it was RIGHT HERE. What can the mighty Linux and FOSS machine do in the face of Mother Nature pitching a little fit? Not a darned thing. They're not even relevant.

Fortunately we rabble measure by a different yardstick, and can see the real value of this post. Which is some random computer user somewhere on the planet had the expertise to dissect and analyze a BIOS flaw, and then had the best bully pulpit of all time, the Internet, to share his findings. Despite the rise of this brave new police state era, we don't need to know anything about theAlmightyCthulhu. We don't need his home address, or work history, or DNA and fingerprints. We don't need to know who his family is and a record of everything they'v ever done. All we need to know is in that forum post- if the information is true and correct, it stands on its own. He even gives instructions for reproducing his work.

I like the word "farewell". It carries a lot more meaning than plain old "good-bye". Wikipedia defines it as "...a wish of happiness or welfare at parting, especially a permanent departure." So it's fitting to bid Brian Proffitt, who managed Linux Today, LinuxPlanet, AllLinuxDevices, JustLinux, and LinuxPR for the past six years, a very fond farewell.

Goldfarb represented that anyone can use Moonlight: "Moonlight is usable for anyone on any distribution of Linux (redhat, ubuntu, etc.) -- it is not limited just to Novell as Mono is." And he linked to the covenant, saying it "applies to all downstream recepients of the software." Is that true?

[This relates to the discussion here. Inflammatory headline by me! -TC]

Comodo, a global leader in Identity and Trust Assurance Management solutions, announced today that it would offer free SSL certificates to any online businesses affected by the security flaw recently detected in Debian - the LINUX distribution. While Comodo stressed that the SSL certificates it issued are not vulnerable (it is the private keys generated by the users that may be vulnerable), it is offering assistance to Comodo customers as well as to anyone using a competitive SSL certificate from VeriSign or others by offering a new SSL certificate free of charge.

Jurors found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of first degree murder on Monday, concluding he killed his estranged wife in 2006. The verdict followed a nearly six-month trial and nearly three days of deliberation.

Also, San Jose Mercury News has a writeup.
SFGate trial blog

To the developers at OLPC, and the tireless volunteer community contributors unsettled by Nicholas’ plans — remember that no matter what happens, your work has not been for naught. Far from it. You brought the smiles to children’s faces in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, Uruguay. Your work astounded me with the results, after little more than half a year, in the mountains of Arahuay, Peru. Bryan Berry’s team is kicking ass on establishing a pilot in Nepal because of your work. And if you haven’t read the linked articles yet, now’s the time. Nothing can take away the real, palpable impact you’ve already had on children’s lives.

Cryptmount is a friendly front-end to a batch of Linux utilities used to create encrypted volumes, such as device mapper, dm-crypt, and the kernel's loopback device. It requires root privileges to create encrypted files or partitions, and then once it's set up users can mount and unmount their own encrypted volumes on demand.