Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2011

In this week's Roundup we have Glyn Moody in defense of hackers, LibreOffice keeps making waves, Xfce 4.8 is released, our own Paul Ferris explains how to be a catalyst for FOSS and just what is this 'Steve Jobs' dilemma Linux is supposed to have? Enjoy!

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org are launching in late February from the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles during my talk about Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. However, for any Bavarians living near Munich, you may be able to get a sneak preview.

Pardus Linux, the independent Linux distribution hailing from Turkey has seen its next major update with version 2011. Pardus is funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, which is a governmental agency that manages, funds and conducts research in the areas of education, Science, and technology in Turkey. Its underlying goal is to guide and advance Turkey's competitiveness in the global market in these key areas. Pardus is used by the Turkish Armed Forces, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkish Police, Turkey's Social Security Institution, and the Ministry of Defense. For ordinary users around the world, Pardus is just a really nice distro.

I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed. You'll find corrections now, notably from Ed Burnette at ZDNet, who is a programmer-journalist, and by Paul Ryan at ars technica. That is what journalists are supposed to do, if they see wrong information. It's part of the ethics of being a good journalist, and the other part is to issue corrections when the mistake is your own. To their credit, many journalists have now corrected what they wrote initially.

Long-time blog readers should know that I don't rely on tools to defend my enterprise. I rely on people first, followed by tools, then processes. However, today I took a moment to consider the myriad of really cool work happening (mainly) in the open source tool community. When I started counting, I found about seven projects that are likely to help you defend your enterprise.

Version 11.0 of Calculate Linux has been released. This release of the Gentoo-based operating system, which we benchmarked last August, brings many improvements to this promising distribution that -- like Sabayon and others -- makes it easier to run Gentoo on desktops and servers.

HTML5, which has been developed by the WHATWG group, is to lose its version number and be referred to only as "HTML". Ian Hickson, the author and editor of the W3C's current HTML5 draft, announced this decision in a blog posting. Hickson said that, when the group announced that the HTML5 specification was progressing to "Last Call" in 2009, the plan at the time was to publish a "snapshot" of HTML5 in 2012. However, due to the high demand for new features, the group has now decided to switch to a different development model.

When it comes to PCI compliance, there's no such thing as "too careful." One of the keys to being careful enough? Isolating and protecting servers that handle cardholder data from the rest of your network. You already know that you need to keep systems holding cardholder data secure and prevent access from outside your network. But there's more to it than that — PCI-compliant systems should be isolated from the rest of the company's systems as well. Businesses have a range of systems and networks, and the access and policies that go with the various systems should reflect their importance and sensitivity of the data held on the systems.

The aftermath of Oracle's purchase of Sun and the subsequent forking of a number of open source projects, has highlighted the necessity to protect the integrity of the commons and to keep commercially sponsored open source projects honest, and true to the principles of free and open source software.

In last weeks column, I talked about “many-core” processors and why cache coherency may limit the number of cores you can place in a processor. This week I want to be fair and balanced. Large scale SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing) is possible, but is usually expensive. Turning a pile of servers into an SMP is, therefore, very desirable and has been advancing on both the hardware and software fronts. I have had a chance to ponder this topic quite a bit over the last several weeks, but not for the reasons you may think.

With over 100 audio and video formats, FFmpeg is at the heart of countless multimedia programs, and it is one of the show-piece projects on the open source scene. Originally founded by Fabrice Bellard, Michael Niedermayer started maintaining the project in 2004. However, a team of 18 developers has now ousted him and appointed seven new project maintainers, among them the main x264 developer, Jason Garrett-Glaser ("Dark Shikari"), and Ronald S. Bultje. Some of the most active FFmpeg developers had been dissatisfied with Niedermayer's project management and had accused him of slowing down the development of the codec library, which is licensed under the GPL / LGPL, by focussing on unnecessary details and causing superfluous discussions.

When you mention hacking in the general public, the image most people think of is a nerdy guy breaking into a computer system from his bedroom. This month, I take a look at some of the tools available to do exactly that. Of course, this is for information purposes only, so please don't do anything nasty. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Most people have heard of tools like Nmap or Nessus, but here I look at some other available tools for playing with networks.

Need to capture some data from you users? jQuery Mobile forms differ from traditional forms in a couple of ways but can save you some headaches when building your app.

The Linux blogosphere is "all shook up" these days, skewering Sony for suing a hacker for jailbreaking the PS3, and hammering Mozilla for skimping on hardware acceleration in the Linux Firefox 4 beta. Meanwhile, Google's decision to drop H.264 from its Chrome browser for open source alternatives received praise from the open source world, but also a surprising amount of criticism.

Last month I looked at some of the interesting data you can get out of /proc/. But /proc isn't just for getting information out of the system and into convenient text form. You can also use it to put information into the system, and thereby change it. The sys/ directory, which is where kernel variable information is kept, is where most of the things you might want to alter live. Changes made here will take effect immediately; no need to reboot. A real boon for working sysadmins! Note that you'll need appropriate (root) privileges to change these values. See here for a discussion of using sudo with pipes.

While it was just a couple weeks ago that a VIA Technologies representative had admitted to me their Linux / open-source strategy is basically dead (and they had failed in delivering their Linux goals for 2010), it seems that today the first Chrome 9 (VIA VX900 IGP) documentation has been released. It appears to originate from VIA Technologies but this public release is coming to the community through the OpenChrome driver project. This documentation covers the 2D, 3D, and video engines for these integrated graphics processors.

Instant messaging is typically regarded as a social tool, but it also plays an increasingly important role in the workplace as a medium for professional communication. One of the most important technologies that has helped to advance instant messaging as a business tool is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an XML-based open standard that fosters interoperability between real-time messaging platforms.

LOS ANGELES -- Canonical Chief Executive Officer Jane Silber has been added as a keynote speaker, with Leigh Honeywell, for the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 9X in February.

December saw the release of the latest major update to VirtualBox, Oracle's desktop visualization tool. In its previous incarnation, it was voted as our readers' favorite virtualizer, so let's look at what 4.0 has to offer.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the next version of Ubuntu Linux will adopt Nokia's Qt cross-platform development framework. Due in April, Ubuntu 11.04 (& Natty Narwhal& ) will offer Qt libraries as an alternative development environment to Gtk+, further extricating Ubuntu from its traditional embrace of all things GNOME.