Showing headlines posted by wjl

Today is the day the Ubuntu crowd was impatiently awaiting - release date of Gutsy Gibbon, real name Ubuntu 7.10. Some pages in the interweb, like the very cool and useful one of Vivek, call it “Download of the day” already. But before firing up your favorite download manager and starting a download, consider a few points to make it a smooth experience.

First I saw a note on Google news. Then on Heise. And the reference was to Groklaw. So they seem to be starting, the patent wars on Linux.

Times are changing. Today, you should think small to really think big. To avoid the greenhouse effect, you could start thinking about devices which take less power, for instance, with the additional plus that it would save on your current bill of course. And these days, thanks to the efforts of great open source minds and a handful of clever hardware manufacturers, you can set up a complete home and small office network, together with external web hosting and a real in-house DMZ (de-militarized zone) for less than $ (or €) 1,000.-

Watch out, parents - close the windows, and protect your kids. Ballmer is on the move again, this time to put the final nail into his own coffin.

What is Indiana? No one seems to know. Some people are excited. Some people are confused. Some people are scared and angry. Why? What is Indiana? The answer is, "Exactly!"

Security expert Bruce Schneier today wrote about the “Storm Worm” again. Go and read it and become very afraid if you are running the Windows operating system. Become even more afraid if you are responsible for a bunch of them, like in a company. And then get a clue and morph them all into something better, like installing any of the Linux/Unix/BSD variants.

A week or so ago, French Debian developer Raphaël Hertzog asked about setting up Planets for the users of the Debian operating system, something he had done for the French-speaking community already. Now German developer Holger Levsen has done it on his pages on the domain debian-community.org.

Hans ‘The Beez’ Bezemer, a fellow sysadmin and consultant from the Netherlands, came up with a great story. He asked himself why watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ on DVD has to burn additional CPU cycles for decrypting, when the topic and author of what he’s watching are all against wasting energy. And he discovered that the crypto chain of HD-DVD has already been broken!

Last night, my son Jeremy posted some news on his blog, which sounded really weird. But it's all true I fear: the German "ARD" broadcasted some "Tatort" crime series which showed a cop hunting pedophiles using IRC chat. The shown chat was the Kanotix channel on Freenode.

Peter Enseleit wrote a summary about using GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) on Linux.com. He mentions several tools for the Gnome and KDE desktops, as well as plugins for free and proprietary operating systems. And I explain - again - why this is important.

Found it on All About Ubuntu: long-term Wall Street Journal writer Walt Mossberg tried Ubuntu from a newcomer’s point of view. I have commented on both of them.

Debian and SELinux developer Russell Coker did a nice comparison of Debian and Fedora. I’m often asked about that, even from companies, so if you need this to compare the different versions of Debian (from stable to unstable) with Fedora or RHEL or even CentOS, go ahead and read it.

After lots of rumors, which went on for some half year already, now it is official: today AMD put out a press release about their efforts to open the source to their graphics cards.

Yesterday my brother Willi called from a friend’s place. He had called me a few days ago already, and asked my opinion about an all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax machine from HP, and I showed him the tests from the OpenPrinting database, which say about the HP OfficeJet 5610: “works Perfectly “.

Today, Shuttle Europe announced that they start selling two of their small form factor machines with pre-installed Novell (formerly SuSE) Linux distributions. They offer a "business" machine with SLED 10 from €529, and a "home" machine with OpenSUSE from €489.

Today, I read a short note in the latest (print issue) c’t magazine about Singapore Airlines, who currently assemble Panasonic PCs into each seat of their new Airbus A380 fleet. All of the systems will run a Red Hat-based Linux variant on a VIA hardware, and screen sizes differ from 10.6″ in economy to 23″ in first class. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies, gentlemen - and penguins...

Patrick Winnertz, Debian developer to-be, writes in his blog that he was able to get all legal stuff sorted out and with the help of a "sponsor" (means: a Debian developer) uploaded Virtualbox to the "Main" repository of Debian.

Seems that World Domination is not so far away. In Germany, ~ 80 million people are using Linux - even if they have never used a computer at all. And yes, that means: all of us are.

This is for my brother Willi, who recently bought a new laptop. He has to run Vista and Office on it, and asked me how he could still be safe when underway and checking his mail, or using the web.

(A typical DOH! experience. But I still wanted to share it because it could get newbies thinking... - wjl)

Jabari Zakiya wrote an article headlined “Beware of Skype” in the Free Software Magazine. He suspects that the recent outage of the Skype network had to do with the US of A’s revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), something which is planned (and soon done) here in Germany as well: the spying of the state onto its local citizens.