Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Extreme Networks, Inc. on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

These days there are plenty of ways to back up your computer files. The options are easy when you're dealing with one computer -- just back up your files to an external hard drive and forget about it -- but when several machines are involved, each with a different operating system, things can get complicated. If you frequently work on more than one computer, having access to your synchronized files no matter where you are can also be useful. PowerFolder, a backup and file synchronizing service, helps you cover all your bases, no matter what platform or how many computers you're using.

As the battle for ultra-slim PCs heats up, a US company has released the Linux-based CherryPal, a PC that the company claims uses just 2W of power at peak performance. The CherryPal mini-desktop runs an embedded version of Debian on a Freescale processor running at 400MHz, with 256MB of RAM and 4GB of internal flash storage.

Glubble is a free proprietary Firefox add-on from Glaxstar that limits the activity your child can perform online by blocking access to Web sites and filtering Google search results. For parents, a tool like Glubble can seem like the perfect answer to the problem of protecting kids from the unsavory elements of the Internet. But as I discovered through my use of Glubble, the questions surrounding the idea of Internet filtering don't come with easy answers.

The most widely used open source software packages for the enterprise are exposing users to significant and unnecessary business risks, according to an open source security study from security firm Fortify Software. The study, released Monday, concludes that open source software development communities have yet to adopt a secure development process and often leave dangerous vulnerabilities unaddressed.

Well, the dog days of summer have begun to set in, so it's not too surprising that the Linux blogs were relatively quiet last week. Linux geeks across the nation were no doubt seeking refuge wherever they could -- it's hard to withstand flames on the blogs when you feel like you're aflame yourself!

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

Nobody knows yet what the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will consist of, but the few available indications are so ominous that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has started a campaign to raise public awareness of the possibilities. According to Matt Lee, an FSF campaign manager, ACTA threatens to "create a culture of fear and suspicion," and, in the worst-case scenario, undermine and demonize free software.

A bug in Mac OS X can cause loss of data in VMware Fusion virtual machines, company officials have warned. Fusion is VMware's virtualisation product for Mac OS X. According to VMware, the underlying problem is in the way Mac OS X handles unbuffered I/O. The issue is variously referred to as either a bug or "a disagreement between Fusion and OS X about what sequences of disk-write calls are legal to make."

The SQO-OSS project aims at developing a software quality assessment platform to Free Software developers. SQO-OSS is a project funded through the European Commission's Framework Programme 6 and consists of a number of European organisations with knowledge relevant to build such a platform, among which KDE e.V.. After more than one and a half years of research, design and development the SQO-OSS developer now have made available a first demo showing some capabilities of the Alitheia system. Alitheia stands for the ultimate and business-like truth.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2008

In this week's Roundup, the judge in the SCO v. Novell suit finally hands down a ruling, a member of the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML standard speaks out, debunking the Linux virus myth, a review of 12 web browsers for Linux, finding the fastest filesystem, a test drive of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and what Linus Torvalds thinks about BSD developers. On the lighter side, we end with a review of the Linux Hater's Blog by Steven Rosenberg and Unix and Linux humor - know your SysAdmin.

The most interesting story the media is downplaying is the ASUS announcement that it will have a ROM boot chip on all its motherboards, which will boot Linux instantly on start-up. When you flick the switch the machine is instantly on. (It's about time.) Of course, you will have to press another button for the machine to load Windows.

Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks - the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC (which, of course, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring supports very well). Many in the community have asked if Mandriva is going to get directly involved in this market. Well, the answer is yes! Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming Gdium netbook system, produced by Emtec.

Stephen Dukker believes he has what the world is looking for: The People's PC. But it's not really a PC. The chairman and chief executive of NComputing in Redwood City, Calif., is pursuing a computer revolution with a small box that turns low-cost desktop computers into servers that feed dozens of work stations.

Wikipedia is considering a basic change to its editing philosophy to cut down on vandalism. In the process, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit would add a layer of hierarchy and eliminate some of the spontaneity that has made the site, at times, an informal source of news.

Another step was taken this week in the tortuous case which the SCO Group initiated against IBM in March 2003 - but by no means is an end anywhere in sight to the company's misery. Unlike Neil Armstrong's historic statement, it is not a giant step for anyone. Some background - SCO sued IBM for breach of contract in March 2003, claiming that the latter had contributed code to the Linux kernel which it did not own, code which had been developed in conjunction with SCO. SCO claimed to have rights to all the IP for UNIX, which it said it had purchased in toto from Novell in 1995.

Judith Kung Fu may be just one of more than 14 million computer-generated characters in the 3-D virtual world Second Life. But with her help, her creator may one day save your life. In Second Life, Judith has walked through the walls of a human cell. She has, in a flash, conducted complicated science experiments that took the world's best minds years to complete.

If you've been waiting for an Asus Eee PC with a larger screen, larger storage and larger keyboard, the Eee PC 1000H could well be the model you've been waiting for. How much will it cost, and what are the specs?

Last Sunday, Terry Childs, a network administrator employed by the City of San Francisco, was arrested and taken into custody, charged with four counts of computer tampering. He remains in jail, held on $5 million bail. News reports have depicted a rogue admin taking a network hostage for reasons unknown, but new information from a source close to the situation presents a different picture. In posts to my blog, I postulated about what might have occurred. Based on the small amount of public information, I guessed that the situation revolved around the network itself, not the data or the servers. A quote from a city official that Cisco was getting involved seemed to back that up, so I assumed that Childs must have locked down the routers and switches that form the FiberWAN network, and nobody but Childs knew the logins.

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months. Linux -- especially Ubuntu -- has become so reliable and simple that for most end users it's simply not worth thinking about, any more than we think about tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. Does this mean desktop GNU/Linux has become so boring that it's not worth noticing?