Showing headlines posted by dave

Linux is at the top of the world's Top 500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers, but does it have what it takes to stay there?

This week, advisories were released for turqstat, centericq, lm-sensors, kdebase, python, XFree86, Mailutils, Shorewall, mozilla, mod_ssl, clam, mod_ssl, Zebedee, umount, squid, and mod_ssl. The distributors include Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

The Auditor security collection is a GPL-licensed live CD based on Knoppix, with more than 300 security software tools. Auditor gives you easy access to a broad range of tools in almost no time.

A report released Monday by Symantec said that there were more vulnerabilities for Mozilla browsers than for Internet Explorer. Symantec's "Internet Security Threat Report" covers security trends from January 2005 through June 2005. During that time, according to Symantec, Firefox had 25 vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities while Microsoft's Internet Explorer only had 13.

If you run a business, finding an efficient system for managing invoices is critical for sustaining a positive cash flow. Here's how you can create an easy invoicing solution using OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc.

If Inkscape were at the 1.0 release level, I could easily forget a reviewer's responsibility and gush about it like an adolescent in love. Fortunately, it is only at version 0.42.2, and has enough gaps in functionality that I can view it more sensibly. A Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) program, Inkscape faces a pack of competitors, including Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Macromedia FreeHand, OpenOffice.org Draw, and Xara X. Yet, even at its current early stage, Inkscape has already distinguished itself from the crowd. By focusing its development on the basic interface, objects and paths, and text objects, Inkscape already shows an awareness of interface and usability issues that makes it one of the most promising desktop free software projects of the last few years.

Software company's decision to repurchase $200 million worth of shares follows recent, vocal requests for financial change.

Developers discuss whether Linux project needs to change policy in light of recent legal moves.

Microsoft's Alan Yates steps in the manure in responding to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division's late-August declaration for OpenDocument and other open software standards.

As prospective developers learn more about the powerful new Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, the strategy to create applications for the next-generation chip may embrace the Linux and open source community, similar to what IBM did with the Power processor.

As many systems administrators will tell you, attacks from automated login scripts specifically targeting common account names with weak passwords have become a substantial threat to system security, especially via SSH (a popular program that allows remote users to log in to a Linux computer and execute commands locally). Here are some common-sense rules to follow that can greatly improve security, as well as several scripts to cut down on the computing resources wasted by these attacks.

Google's Summer of Code (SOC), a program that matched computer science students with free and open source software (FOSS) projects and paid for results, is over. Despite some organizational problems, the SOC attracted an overwhelming response from both students and projects, and early indications are that the program has produced a wide range of projects and attracted a number of promising students to the FOSS communities. Whether the program will be repeated, however, remains undetermined.

Audio/video hardware manufacturer Neuros Technology has embraced the benefits of open source development.

Bluetooth is an open, IEEE connection standard for wireless device communications. Here's an introduction to Bluetooth on GNU/Linux, including how to enable support for it, some programs that monitor Bluetooth communications, and some hardware devices that use Bluetooth.

Press Release: Munich, Germany (20 September 2005) -- In an interview with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, EU competition commissioner Neelies Kroes said that the Commission is evaluating informal complaints that have been filed against Microsoft, and would not "wait and do nothing" while an ongoing anti-trust proceeding is still unresolved in court.

Since the OpenDocument standard for office files covers spreadsheets, the productivity suites based on it, such as OpenOffice.org (OOo) and KOffice, can share spreadsheets between applications -- theoretically, that is. In practice, there are still a couple of obstacles for this kind of interoperability among OpenDocument spreadsheet processors, regardless of their origin and license. One is the issue of macros, as I discussed earlier. A bigger one is that, while formatting of spreadsheets is covered by OpenDocument, the actual formulas that make them useful aren't.

European business analysis firm Quocirca recently released a report on "Migrating to Linux on the Desktop." Overall, the report is well-balanced and presents a positive approach to migration from Windows to Linux.

Despite the the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act, email users are still subjected to vast quantities of spam and virus-laden messages. Roaring Penguin's CanIt-PRO is a Sendmail-based application that helps block spam, viruses, phishing attempts, and other nastiness. I found it to be one of the better commercial Linux email filtering packages.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) announced today that Computer Associates (CA), NTT DATA, and Open Country have signed on as members to the group. The group also formally announced the release of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.0, and support for the standard by major vendors. Executive director Jim Zemlin said that all the major distributions had "come out and certified or are certifying to the LSB 3.0." The list of vendors and organizations certifying their distributions includes Red Hat, Novell SUSE, the DCC Alliance and Asianux.

After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell's SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it's nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution. Once you've got this program on your GNOME-based laptop, you'll wonder how you ever did mobile computing without it.