Showing headlines posted by slacker_mike

Vivek Goyal of Red Hat has published the initial Linux patches for implementing ELF executable signing and verification. This support is similar to Linux kernel module signature verification and is necessitated with the arrival of SecureBoot.

In the open source channel, many developers could stand to focus a bit less on technology itself, and a bit more on making products look and feel smart, intuitive and elegant–especially when it comes to communicating with end users. Most Linux distributions don’t get this right, but Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, shines as an outlier. Here’s how.

Registers in Vim are best thought of as scratch spaces for text, some of which are automatically filled by the editor in response to certain actions. Learning how to use registers fluently has a lot of subtle benefits, although it takes some getting used to because the syntax for using them is a little awkward.

Designing interfaces to deal with storage technologies is not only hard, it’s terrifying. This is especially true if you aren’t familiar with the storage technologies involved and have to learn how they work on-the-fly, even if you don’t have easy or any access to work with some of these (typically quite expensive) technologies first-hand.

Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed (or more so) as that of the computing culture from which it arose. Based on the collection and analysis of discourse on gender and sexism within this movement over a six–year period. I suggest three possible causes: (a) some geek identities can be narrow and unappealing; (b) open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people; and, (c) the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.

Barclays Bank plans to slash software development costs by 90% by building a private cloud infrastructure and moving more applications to machines running the Linux open source operating system.

Unifying the most basic bits of our stack is unlikely to be ever complete, but at least we’d like to unify the most boring bits where there’s really no point at all in being different.

The intro on the main page states that "CRUX is a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced users", and I would suggest to take this seriously. It's unlike installing Linux MInt or Fedora, it's not even like installing a modified Gentoo, more somewhere between Gentoo or Linux from Scratch and Slackware, with the latter being the easy one.

Since SpaceFM is entering the GTK3 realm (SpaceFM can now be built on anything from GTK 2.18 “I won’t give up my lenny!” thru GTK 3.6.x), I’m starting to hear more feedback about GTK3 and experiencing a few things for myself. While SpaceFM’s GTK3 port has been running very well with the few non-broken themes I could find, there are some intrinsic problems with any GTK3 app due to GTK’s poor maintenance, as well as a growing culture of enforced conformity from GNOME devs. Some of the things you’re about to read should make your hair curl and your blood boil.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.2. This is our 32nd release on CD-ROM (and 33rd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.

Stella is an excellent mutation of the RedHat's freeware workhorse, with all of its good stuff, and none of the bad, which mostly revolve around the lack of desktop productivity applications and plugins.

Very cool forum post by an openSUSE user who deployed openSUSE at the high school he works at. In addition to the forum post here is a link to pictures of openSUSE in use at the school. pics

The KDE team officially released the sources for KDE Software Compilation 4.8.3 today. I grabbed the tarballs from the packagers site a few days earlier, so that I could again have a full set of Slackware packages for you.

Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.10, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.8.

Downed web site sparks debate on project's health