Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Swiftfox is a Firefox-based browser, but there is one big difference between it and Firefox -- you can't share Swiftfox with a friend or place it in a repository of a Linux distribution because the Swiftfox license prohibits repackaging and redistribution.

Ubuntu Linux backer Canonical has launched a beta version of its Launchpad service, part of an effort to make open-source programming methods a better match for Microsoft.

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has a short article talking about Dolphin and KDE 4. "The Linux-based Dolphin file manager is now scheduled for official inclusion in KDE 4, the next major release of the KDE desktop environment. Dolphin includes several unique usability enhancements that aren't available in Konqueror, KDE's current file manager..."

Over the last few years, we've had quite a few requests for a writeup on the inner workings of the Ars website. Unfortunately, I'm the least productive writer on the face of the planet, so said writeup never materialized. Until today! I'm going to be writing a series of posts covering the soft underbelly of Ars. It might take a week to get through it, it might take a month.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 82 for the week of April 1st through April 7th, 2007.

In response to the growing concerns regarding H.R. 811, particularly with regard to the inspection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) voting system components, I wanted to provide this article, previously published in the November 2006 issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. It is especially important to understand that COTS software products can include both open source (such as Red Hat Linux) and closed (or trade secret) source (such as Microsoft Windows [TM]), and that neither paradigm necessarily guarantees security. Indeed, the examination of source code for "correctness" is well known in the computer industry to be intractable (i.e. not fully solvable in reasonable time), but that does not mean that it should not be inspectable.

[It is interesting that that the voting machines are not required to be inspected, but then for those who got elected everything seems to be just fine. - Scott]

An Atlanta IT security company is finding success by employing open source software, not just in the network security appliance it sells, but on its own desktops and servers.

Leading Asterisk developer Digium Inc. has snagged a licensing deal with a subsidiary of Japanese telco giant NTT in what it sees as a major breakthrough for the open-source PBX system in that critical market.

The Linux Foundation releases LSB 3.1 with new testing toolkits for easier cross-distribution app development.

MontaVista Software recently released the latest version of its real-time Linux operating system (RTOS), MontaVista Linux Professional Edition 5.0. New to the product are a faster response time, an updated Linux kernel, advanced protocol support, and a host of tools for developers of RTOS systems and applications.

The free software community has two independent projects working toward the implementation of a free Flash player: Gnash and swfdec. There has been some talk recently about these two projects, their goals, their accomplishments, and whether it makes sense to have them both. In an effort to bring more light to the situation, LWN held a conversation with the principal developers of both projects.

If you want to monitor and manage your Internet bandwidth, perhaps to make sure your ISP is not overbilling you, try vnStat, an open source, Linux-based application that gives you a clear picture of your bandwidth usage. This command-line application is simple to install and easy to use.

The key developers behind forthcoming changes to the Firefox browser reveal their plans for how the popular program will change.

Whether or not the GPL 3's controversial "grandfather" clause ever sees the light of day, it's sure to carry impacts of one sort or another, not just on Novell and Microsoft, but also on competitors, business customers, and smaller Linux toolmakers. Just about any way you flip the coin, somebody's bound to get short-changed (or to feel that way, anyhow).

NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode -- it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions, Wired News has learned.

Emacs a text editor, but it can be much more: a personal information manager, task manager, and an email client, for instance. For me, Emacs is a tool for writing and publishing -- especially when used with Muse mode.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Bluetooth support in Solid. 'Breadcrumb" navigation widget from Dolphin is made more modular to allow use in other KDE contexts. Support for different caret (text cursor) styles in Konsole. Various bugfixes in TagLib. Better AIM protocol file transfer support in Kopete. KWord gets the ability (through Kross scripting) to use an OpenOffice.org instance to import from supported file formats. KPackage starts to be ported to the SMART package management scheme. The beginnings of user documentation for the Bovo game application, whilst the initial draft of the Mailody handbook nears completion.

The Debian GNU/Linux Project has a new leader. Sam Hocevar, a French developer, who has been with the project since 2000, was elected as leader for 2007-08 on Sunday.

At long last, the Debian project team released Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0 -- codename "Etch" -- on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007. The release follows "21 months of constant development," according to the team.

In my apparently never-ending quest to revive and refresh my aging 32-bit box I decided to try installing theJAD (JackLab Audio Distribution) system. To recapitulate the source of woe with this particular machine, I'll remind readers that its PS2 ports are physically damaged, forcing me to switch my mouse and keyboard to the USB ports (the problem has something to do with the HID module). Under normal circumstances this switch wouldn't be a problem, but many contemporary distros and live discs cause the keyboard to vanish from recognition by the system, leaving me with an unusable machine.