Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Fedora 9 now lets you create a bootable Linux distribution on a flash drive with persistence. In other words, you can not only boot any PC that will accept USB drive booting into Linux, you can even boot into your own personal desktop. Now, that can be useful. With Fedora on a stick drive, no matter where you go or what PC you're using, you'll have your own Fedora desktop already set up just the way you want it. Fedora 9 is an excellent, modern Linux; if you enjoy using it, you'll enjoy even more being able to use it on almost any PC at hand.

The global Internet community is bracing for the potential of malicious attacks on the domain name system with the discoverer of the DNS exploit that send shockwaves through the industry last month expected to reveal full details of it on August 6 at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

[The flaw in this logic is of course that the details of the exploit have already been revealed. If you only start to brace for impact now, you're far too late. -- Sander]

I've been thinking about how to best improve the Linux* userland over the last few days. I was venting pretty loudly about my Linux gripe of the day -- I don't even remember what I was complaining about at the time, but it was a mess of shell scripting, pipes, and about half a dozen command line programs that were conspiring to drive me up the wall. Before I could get into a really quality rant, the kind that would peel paint off the walls, the friend who I was giving an earful to asked me a question, probably to shut me up.

"So what would you do to fix it?"

That's not exactly a new question, but I hadn't been asked it before. So I put a little thought into it.

FbTerm provides you with a fast terminal emulator that runs directly on your system's framebuffer. Using the framebuffer brings improved performance while allowing you to render UTF-8 text in the terminal. FbTerm aims to be at least as fast as the normal Linux kernel terminal while providing internationalization support and modern font handling with fontconfig. It allows you to create as many as 10 different terminal windows on the same framebuffer, each window having scrollback history.

Hospitals aren't normally known for lightning-fast moves, but when you're a community-based institution tasked to care for underserved communities, sometimes you have no choice but to be flexible, hungry, and savvy, especially when it comes to the critical software choices that power your operations.

The University of Leicester in England is launching a major programme to help develop a new paradigm for future global computing environments. In order to improve code and data mobility over wide area networks the boffins will, err, study Ancient Mediterranean crafts-people from the late bronze age through to classical times...

If advanced calendar applications like Evolution and Sunbird are overkill for your needs, try Day Planner, a simple yet efficient calendaring utility. If you want to view your calendar as a timeline, check out Calizo instead.

A new database management system (DBMS) designed for web applications and cloud computing could be the start of a new direction in DBMS development and, indeed, in software as a whole. Drizzle - unveiled recently at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) by MySQL director of architecture Brian Aker - is described as a "slimmed down version of MySQL" and defined as much by what it doesn't do as by what it does.

3Leaf says its new V-8000 Virtual I/O Server v. 2 is the first input/output virtualization tool to run on off-the-shelf, commodity x86 servers. V-8000 is designed with an enhanced backbone I/O fabric of up to 40 GB per second, giving servers a wide road for heavy I/O operations.

Knock me down with a feather - apparently the OSP covers the GPL. In order for specifications covered by the OSP to be implemented in the free software ecosystem, and therefore for such specifications to be claimed to be interoperable with free software, a number of requirements must be met. One of those requirements is that free software implementations of the specifications must be permitted. The FAQ for the OSP has recently been updated to address some aspects of free software implementations.

Microsoft’s annual geek gathering, TechEd, is not the place you’d expect to hear words like “Linux” or “open source” - at least not without a good punchline. But times are changing and Linux and open source received an honourable mention during yesterday’s opening keynote address at TechEd South Africa 2008. It was a brief mention at the tail end of an hour and a half-long opening session, but it was there.

The open-source community is no longer the sole province of technology geeks. The mood is shifting. As the mistress of ceremonies at OSCON (the Open Source Convention) commented: instead of open source trying to figure out its place in the enterprise, today the enterprise is seeking its place in open source. And that, among other trends, is causing changes in the community. Which is not to say that open source isn't still remarkably geeky and willing to celebrate that personality attribute.

The GTK+ Indirect Renderer is a new GDK backend for the GTK+ toolkit. It renders each toplevel window to a Cairo image surface, and lets the application sort out the details of blitting these to a device. This is useful for applications that want to use GTK+ widgets in contexts that are not officially supported, such as games that use SDL or OpenGL. Please note that this is a work in progress. Critical parts - like keyboard input handling - are missing, and the code quality is still very low. That said, it already renders fairly well, and takes mouse input.

I am really excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase! For a long time now we have been shipping a package called example-content with each release of Ubuntu. This package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea -- Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists? It can give artists a platform of millions of Ubuntu users to show off their work and it really excites me because we are applying the Ubuntu ethos to free culture.

While Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has a wide and well established fan-base, fewer people are aware of the wider organisation that supports his vital kernel development work. Linux Foundation was formed in 2007 by the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), and sponsors Linus Torvalds financially so that he is free to focus on his altruistic, albeit commercially beneficial, task. Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's executive director, is the man charged with managing an organisation that appears to have only the noblest of goals â?? the betterment of open source software, for the good of all. As well as sponsoring Torvalds, its other aims include fostering standards around Linux, providing a fund to contest any legal issues and managing the Linux trademark.

Looking for up-to-date Fedora DVD images? Want to change the default software selection?Or just fancy a new Linux project? Neil Bothwick shows you how to remaster Fedora with your own customisations -- read on for all the details...

This article describes how I set up two wireless routers in my apartment, to provide a PSK2 encrypted wireless connection for all my household equipment. They are linked together using WDS (also PSK2). I use OpenWRT built directly from SVN. For hardware, I'm using two Asus WL-500G Premium (which uses a broadcom-based wlan).

Last night I found this great post in our forums where a user called Gerbal describes how he painted his XO. Unlike my motivation for undertaking such a project - impressing the ladies and the geeks at the next user-group meeting or presentation that is - Gerbal did it in anticipation of a trip to South America.

Last month at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON), it seemed like Microsoft was everywhere you looked, avouching its interest in open source. Thanks to the company's history -- including some very recent history -- a great many in the open source community viewed the company's presence with mistrust, suspicious of Redmond's motives and apprehensive of what would follow. Surely Microsoft must want something, so what is it?

As you can read in this topic, there is an official warning from Ubuntu NL against using Ultimatix, the successor to the discontinued Automatix. The program is meant to make installing often used program and codecs in Ubuntu easier. However, it does this on a dangerous way that can harm your system.