Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Users running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system are getting something a little extra thrown into their contracts: developer support. Sun is wrapping extended support for its Solaris Express Developer Edition, previously only available to application developers, into existing and new Solaris customers' contracts without charging extra, the company said.

The Internet most of us experience is not the World of Ends suggested by the end-to-end system design concepts around which the Net was originally architected and built. Instead we have something that is faster-than-dialup, and faster-than-it-used-to-be; but is not The Net. Instead it is the part of the Net that's left in a pipe that's optimized for television, for one-way few-to-many "content delivery" and for locking users into client roles, while servers labor somewhere else.

O’Reilly is running an interesting series of articles written by a number of different women in tech, about how they got to where they are and their adventures along the way. It’s a good read with a lot of different experiences and viewpoints. http://www.oreillynet.com/womenintech/

Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task. Creative Commons (CC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses each have their advantages, but they are mutually incompatible. The two groups are beginning to move toward simplifying the situation, but in the meantime there are several things you can do to make license compatibility easier.

What would happen if manufacturers were responsible for the disposal of their used-up products? The Computer Take Back Campaign (CTBC), a coalition of environmental groups across the United States, hopes that the result would be both a national recycling network and the removal of hazardous materials like lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants from products so that companies would not have to worry about them later. The CTBC has been promoting this idea with limited success since 2002, but this year it finally seems on the brink of acceptance.

Taking some tentative steps into the world of web development, James Archibald discovers the sleek power and functionality of the Web Developer extension for Firefox. Although aimed at 'real' web developers, the extension proves to be handy for the novice too.

Software maker Red Hat Inc., which had planned to introduce a new version of its Linux software for personal computers in August, said on Tuesday that the product won't be out until next month at the earliest.

At the large school in Mexico where I'm employed as a system manager, I proposed (and got) a Linux server to replace an old Windows 2000 file server and domain controller for the alumni. I then was faced with the task of adding 3,000 users to this new CentOS 5 server. I wasn't about to add thousands of users and their passwords one by one to the new Samba primary domain controller (PDC) system. With a little help from OpenOffice.org Calc, a utility called Expect, and shell scripts, I automated the process.

Linux software maker Red Hat yesterday announced that the latest version of its operating system would be delayed for another 30 to 60 days. The latest version of Red Hat was originally expected in August.

A thread on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list compared the security of SELinux in the 2.6 Linux kernel to what's available in OpenBSD. The general opinion was that SELinux and its policy language are too complex, leading Damien Miller to note, "every medium to large Linux deployment that I am aware off has switched SELinux off. Once you stray from the default configurations that the system distributors ship with, the default policies no longer work and things start to break." Ted Unangst summarized, "the problem with security by policy is that the policy is always wrong."

Red Hat Inc., the world's biggest seller of Linux operating-system programs, said profit rose 64 percent after sales of new products topped analysts' estimates. The shares rose 5.1 percent in extended trading. Net income climbed to $18.2 million, or 9 cents a share, from $11 million, or 5 cents, a year earlier, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat said today in a statement. Sales rose 28 percent to $127.3 million for the quarter ended Aug. 31, beating analysts' estimates in a Bloomberg survey. The company also gave an earnings forecast that matched estimates.

The Ubuntu Linux team is planning to release Gutsy Gibbon, the latest version of its OS, tomorrow.

Security experts have discovered TIFF-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in OpenOffice, which could allow attackers to remotely execute code on Linux, Windows or Apple Mac-based computers.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the United States as a nation needs to 'financially incentivize the adoption of Electronic Health Record technology'. While the intentions are good, what this seems to translate into is a rush in the next few years to get EHR software installed at all costs. If this is done in an uncontrolled fashion with proprietary EHR software the long term consequences will be disastrous and expensive.

Contrary to yesterday's report, the lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) in its distribution of BusyBox may not be headed for a quick settlement. Nor will the settlement necessarily be out-of-court. Yesterday, Monsoon issued a news release that announced that the company was in "settlement negotiations with BusyBox." Graham Radstone, Monsoon chairman and chief operating officer, said, "Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved."

Mathieu Desnoyers posted an updated version of his Linux Kernel Markers patchset explaining, "following Christoph Hellwig's suggestion, aiming at a Linux Kernel Markers inclusion for 2.6.24, I made a simplified version of the Linux Kernel Markers. There are no more dependencies on any other patchset." He continued, "the modification only involved turning the immediate values into static variables and adapting the documentation accordingly. It will have a little more data cache impact when disabled than the version based on the immediate values, but it is far less complex."

The One Laptop per Child project has announced a new scheme in the US and Canada to accelerate the machine's slow uptake. In other news from the organisation, learning programmes are set to begin in various African locations in October.

FaunOS offers a full KDE desktop system with a comprehensive set of applications as either a live DVD or a live USB flash drive. The USB format is the distro's primary focus. FaunOS is based upon Arch Linux, and ships with Arch's package management system. The more I tested FaunOS, the more impressed I was

GNU/Linux offers a bewildering variety of flavors -- or distributions, as they're called. To a newcomer's eye, many of these seem virtually identical to each other. Yet, the more you learn about a distribution and the community that surrounds it, the more different they become. Here, in alphabetical order, is a list of the seven distributions that have most affected GNU/Linux as a whole:

What's the best desktop Linux? For me, it's SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What's the best desktop operating system for you?