Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

As a computer journalist for the last 25 years, I've received a lot of review copies of software. As something of an obsessive magpie, I've tended to keep most of it, “for reference”. Until yesterday, that is, when I finally threw out all those copies of OS/2, Lotus SmartSuite, and my entire collection of Microsoft software. This included Windows NT 3.5, Windows 2000, Microsoft Office and many, many more. What's makes this little spring-cleaning exercise particularly apt as well as cathartic is that all of us - and not just me - may finally be witnessing the end of the Windows era.

Dell yesterday announced a brand new range of laptops ranging from ultra-portables to high-end desktop replacement machines. The really interesting news for Linux fans, however, was Dell’s new “Latitude ON” system which allows for almost instant-on booting when you want to check an email or something on the Internet without booting the entire operating system.

It is common for the open source community to be called upon by vendors--including proprietary vendors--to be beta testers for Linux releases, according to an industry player. Peter Cheng, open source evangelist and founder of an open source services provider company in China, told ZDNet Asia the practice of recruiting Linux testers is common among Web 2.0 companies.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

This video is fromnuvalo who writes: "This is the latest kernel from Wii-Linux, which supports USB, Bluetooth, etc. This video shows how it boots T2 SDE for PowerPC, with its X server and the login. The colors are messed up as the X server writes its colors in RGB format, and the Wii frame buffer only supports yuv2. Anyway, it is possible to run an X server without too much effort."

If you have a process ID but aren't sure whether it's valid, you can use the most unlikely of candidates to test it: the kill command. If you don't see any reference to this on the kill(1) man page, check the info pages. The man/info page states that signal 0 is special and that the exit code from kill tells whether a signal could be sent to the specified process (or processes).

Have you ever wanted to create an installer program on a Linux system, but didn’t want all the hassle of an actual install builder? I have. So I’m going to show you how you can create such an installer with very little hassle. I can’t actually claim credit for this method though; I actually got the idea from Sun’s JDK installer for the Linux platform. You download a “.bin” file, change the file mode so that it is executable and then run it. It displays the end user license agreement, gets some feedback and then goes about installing Java for you. Well, if you open that .bin file up in a text editor (say vi) you’ll see that it’s nothing more than a shell script with a binary chunked onto the end. Thus my plans for world domination were born…

Previously, we've interviewed the lead-developers of Arch and Gobo Linux. Two distributions for the more advanced users out there. This time, we're going in the complete opposite direction to understand more about a user friendly Linux-distribution: Ubuntu.

Sun Microsystems has taken another step in its long journey towards greater support of open source by delivering the first beta of its next crop of NetBeans. The NetBeans 6.5 beta builds on the open source integrated development environment's earlier support for dynamic languages with support for PHP.

Students and linguists from Makerere University have translated the open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox, into Luganda at a Translate@thon held on the campus in Kampala, Uganda last week. The two-day gathering brought together almost 200 students and allowed them to make a practical contribution to their language’s presence in the digital age.

The key to IT security is secure software - software that is written with not only features, but also security, in mind, says David Jacobson, technical director at Linux services company Synaq. However, says Jacobson, software is seldom developed with an eye on back-end security requirements. Developers are usually under pressure to deliver on required features within tight deadlines which leave little time to check for vulnerabilities each step of the way. The result is that most software is inherently vulnerable.

Firewall Builder (fwbuilder) is a graphical application that can help you to configure IP traffic filtering. It can compile the filtering policy you define into many specifications, including iptables and various languages used by Cisco and Linksys routers. Separating the actual policy you define and the implementation in this way should let you change what hardware is running your firewall without having to redefine your policy for that platform.

OpenID sounds like a great idea - essentially single-sign on for multiple web sites or web applications, without participating sites having to see your credentials. But is it trustworthy and safe in the light of recent revelations concerning a flaw on the DNS system on which it relies?

In a significant victory of free and open source licences the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - which deals with IP issues - has upheld an open source licence, in particular referencing the Artistic Licence from Creative Commons.

The Task Spooler project allows you to queue up tasks from the shell for batch execution. Task Spooler is simple to use and requires no configuration. You can view and edit queued commands, and you can view the output of queued commands at any time.

This Law.com Legal Technology piece on how awful Linux is for law firms strikes me as the funniest piece of FUD I've read in a long time. If you loved Rob Enderle, you don't want to miss it. Here's just one sentence to give you an idea: "Meanwhile, a Linux DIY installation like a DIY auto repair, is extremely complex, convoluted, time consuming and often dicey, something a lawyer may not want to bet his or her practice on." Legal Technology should really be ashamed to publish such biased inaccuracies. Perhaps they don't know. Lawyers do tend to be Windows users and in my experience not so cutting edge in the tech department.

[Above are PJ's comments. This news pick links directly to the article she's commenting on. - Sander]

Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids' Linux. It's available pre-installed on PCs and laptops from Dell and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn't been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing. Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn't just targeting data center servers, although that's on its list.

"So it's been a week since -rc1, and -rc2 is out there," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds,announcing the 2.6.27-rc2 Linux kernel. He noted,"there's a lot of random changes in there, and I'm hoping we're starting to calm down. The shortlog is still a tad too big to make it on the list (again, as usual - normally I end up posting shortlogs for -rc3 and later when they become more manageable) but let me just say that it isn't really all that interesting. Theres' a lot of small changes here, but nothing that makes you go'Wow!'. Not that there _should_ be anything like that in -rc2, of course, so I'm not complaining."

Yesterday I discussed Beagle and Tracker with regards to their preferences settings, the time to index a collection of both HTML and PDF files, and how to extract information from individual files. In this article I'll go over the interfaces used to submit queries and the syntax used for complex queries for both projects.

News earlier this week that IBM is buying French business rules player Ilog for $340m has once again shone a spotlight on this relative backwater of enterprise technology. While business process management systems have managed to move into the mainstream, some of the business rules companies have remained in something of a niche. But what are the options in open source business rules management systems, and why would you want one?