Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Sendmail mail transfer agent tends to be one of those programs that one either loves or hates. Both its supporters and its detractors will agree, though, that Sendmail played a crucial role in the development of electronic mail before, during, and after the explosion of the Internet. Sendmail creator Eric Allman took a trip to Brisbane to talk to the LCA 2011 about the history of this project. Sendmail is, he said, 30 years old now; in those three decades it has thrived without corporate support, changed the world, and thrived in a world which was changing rapidly around it.

Yesterday Juliet Kemp showed us how to perform basic server tests with telnet. Today Carla Schroder shows how to test TLS/SSL-enabled POP3 and IMAP servers.

Many large projects mark their significant releases with launch parties. Some become legend for their over-the-top festivities. Photos populate the share sites. Blogs are written for weeks following. But openSUSE has come up with a uniquely Gecko idea: a Secondlife.com virtual dance party.

The first Alpha release of Mandriva 2011 is now available along with the first alpha release of its newest offspring, Mageia Linux. This is the first-ever ISO release of Mageia Linux since this free software project was formed last year by many Mandriva developers after the uncertain future of Mandriva's parent company. The Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1 release carries the Linux 2.6.37 kernel, RPM 5.3.8, NetworkManager 0.8.2, KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0, GNOME 2.32.1, Xfce 4.8.0, GCC 4.5.2, Chromium browser, Firefox 4 Beta 11, Wine 1.3.13, and many other updated applications.

Who has two thumbs and isn't at all surprised at Nokia throwing MeeGo under the bus? This guy. The Nokia partnership with Microsoft is appalling and bad news for MeeGo, but not a surprise at all. What comes next? That's up to Intel.

HTML5 won't be finished for another three years, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has warned. On Monday, the standards body said that it has extended the charter of its group hammering out HTML5, with plans to advance the proposed spec to last-call status in May. Then we wait – for three years.

A Qt loyalist reckons that his cross-platform app and UI framework has got a bright future, even though Nokia has swallowed Microsoft's Windows Phone. Qt ecosystem director Daniel Kihlberg, responsible for Qt sales, marketing, and services, has blogged that Qt "will continue to play and important role in Nokia".

A Scribus document consists of a series of objects that are added to a page, and contained within a frame. In addition to the usual cut, copy, and paste functions available in most applications, frames in Scribus share a general set of editing attributes and, so far as possible, the same set of properties.

Mike Beltzner – the man who oversees development of Mozilla's Firefox browser – will leave the organization after the release of Firefox 4, the latest version of the browser due for official release later this quarter. Beltzner joined Mozilla six years ago from IBM Canada and worked on six major Firefox upgrades, beginning with Firefox 1.5. "I’ve been getting antsy for the past few months, as some people may have noticed," Beltzner wrote on his personal blog, "and have decided that it’s time to challenge myself by jumping into an industry about which I know next to nothing."

The venerable telnet is still a useful tool in the server administrator's toolkit. Juliet Kemp shows how to test basic SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, and IRC server functions with telnet.

The MPEG standards body – not to be confused with the MPEG LA patent-pool organization – has announced plans for its own royalty-free codec. At its annual meeting in March, the organization will begin accepting proposals for a new video-compression technology designed to provide better performance than MPEG-2 under a royalty-free ISO/IEC Type-1 license.

Yesterday's announcement of Microsoft and Nokia hooking up over Windows Phone 7 on Nokia's smart-phone has rattled the free software / Linux communities. There's more than 100 comments in our forums about this announcement and this isn't the only tech community where there are outraged customers and other parties disappointed in Nokia's decision. In particular, many are upset because with Nokia's decision it basically pushes the MeeGo Linux operating system and the Qt tool-kit to the back-seat.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2011

MPEG LA, the organisation which acts as a patent pool for many royalty bearing standards, including H.264 and MPEG2, has begun a search for patents which are considered "essential" to Google's open source and royalty free WebM/VP8 video codec. The move by MPEG LA is the first step in possibly creating a patent pool which would be able to demand royalties for the use of WebM/VP8.

Whether you are upgrading components for a system refresh, selling an old laptop on Craigslist, or recycling your desktop PC, there comes a time when you have to wipe a storage device in preparation for giving it to someone else. Chances are, you don't want whoever gets physical access to your old hard disk to have unfettered access to its contents: files, email, passwords, the embarrassingly-high frequency of Justin Beiber sites in your browsing history. You'll find several open source utilities for wiping away personal data — so this weekend, why not take stock of your options and put together a deep-clean routine?

The Android Market gets a much-needed updated and makes some important strides forward in how apps are distributed. For a couple of years now the Android app purchasing experience has been largely on-device as the web based “market” page was little more than a page with a handful of top-selling applications.

Version 1.0 of the Open Source Hardware Definition (OSHW definition), first initiated in July 2010, has now been published. Originally planned as a singular licence, the process expanded to cover a range of licences by creating a definition of what open source hardware is. The OSHW definition attempts to codify a definition for hardware that has a design made publicly available for others to study, modify, distribute, make or sell things based on that design.

Lubuntu is best known as a lightweight and speedy Linux distro, but when it comes to beauty and elegant, it is still lacking. Its default theme is rather plain and boring and its library of themes is limited too. Luckily, there are tons of beautiful themes out there that you can use and you can easily theme it up to make it the best looking distro out there. Here’s how:

Canonical published a database of 1,300 certified components for Ubuntu, said to enable ODMs to more quickly bring to market Ubuntu- or other Linux-based computers. Meanwhile, Canonical and Autonomic Resources announced an "ARC-P-UEC" cloud computing platform for the federal government based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud running on Dell Blade servers.

Lantronix announced a Linux-based wireless device server with IPv6 and extended temperature support. The PremierWave EN is built on a 400MHz Lantronix ARM9 processor, offers 64MB of RAM and 64MB of flash, provides dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n with extensive wireless security features, and includes USB, Ethernet, I2C, SPI, and serial connectivity.