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On Saturday March 20, I spent my lazy Saturday morning browsing the web for Linux news. I surfed over to DistroWatch.com & read the latest happenings in regards to Linux distributions. I read a news blurb on latest release of dyne:bolic 1.2. dyne:bolic is self described as a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD. I was intrigued by the prospect of playing with a multimedia studio on live CD that won't interfere with my PC's current setup. I downloaded the ISO via Azureus Java bittorrent client. I burned it to CDR using K3B and booted my DAW off the dyne:bolic CD.

Despite the many and severe problems highlighted in my previous article, all is not lost in the drive to increase the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries. Many measures can be taken to help increase the use of FOSS in developing countries.

Companies looking to migrate from Exchange to a Linux-based messaging system or that want broader groupware functionality will find a good solution in Scalix's Email and Calendaring Platform. From the user's perspective, the Outlook experience is very good, although the Web client could use some improvement. Email and Calendaring Platform is priced at $60 per user, $600 for a server with 500 mailboxes and $3,500 for the Enterprise Edition. More information is available at http://www.scalix.com.

Far from penalising Microsoft, Wednesday's decision by the European Commission assures a bright future for the company as a patent licensing operation. That's according to Jeremy Allison of the team behind Samba, an open source implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) file sharing protocol, who notes that only two open source interests were called to testify before the EU investigation.

Pink Software says its open source TurboCASH accounting package has exploded the myth that every country, or even every company, has unique bookkeeping needs.

For better or for worse, Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is a wildly popular way of exchanging information. On Windows and Mac OS, most people create PDF files by first creating a PostScript file and then using Adobe Acrobat Distiller to generate a PDF. Linux, however, has no version of Distiller. There are a number of ways to create a PDF in Linux, but one of the most popular methods is to use a utility called ps2pdf.

Released earlier this month, GnomeMeeting 1.0 is a free, open-source, H.323-compliant application that supports videoconferencing, audio conferencing, text chat and IP-based telephony. In eWEEK Labs' tests, we found GnomeMeeting 1.0 worked reasonably well, although we did have difficulty setting up our audio and Universal Serial Bus-based video cameras to work on our test systems. This was mainly a Linux issue in our tests; anyone who wants to try GnomeMeeting, and hasn't installed a USB video camera, should plan on investing some time installing drivers. GnomeMeeting also supports FireWire-based cameras.

A FlashMob Supercomputer is created by connecting a virtually infinite number of computers via a high-speed LAN, to work together as a single supercomputer. A FlashMob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized ad hoc for the purpose of working on a single problem. It uses volunteers and ordinary laptop PC's, and is designed to allow anyone to create a supercomputer in a matter of hours.

A memory leak in mod_ssl allows a remote denial of service attack against an SSL-enabled server via plain HTTP requests. Another flaw was found when arbitrary client-supplied strings can be written to the error log, allowing the exploit of certain terminal emulators. A third flaw exists with the mod_disk_cache module.

Wind River will integrate third-party real-time debug and analysis tools with Workbench, its Eclipse-based development suite for embedded Linux and VxWorks (formerly, "Wind Power IDE 2.0). ScopeTools, from Real-Time Innovations (RTI) will be the "first significant tools" integrated with Workbench when it arrives later this Spring, according to Wind River.

Dr. Larry Augustin was present at a moment in history of sorts—the genesis of the term "open source" in Mountain View, Calif., on Feb. 3, 1998. That was when a small group of Silicon Valley software folks (which also included Eric Raymond and Christine Peterson) sat down to decide that there needed to be an actual name for what this new and uncharted genre represented. So he owns a deep perspective on open source. And last week, he shared some of that perspective at the first Open Source Business Conference here by outlining his eight simple rules for open-source business strategy.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and software maker Novell Inc. will sell personal computers worldwide loaded with the Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. Novell's SUSE Linux operating system will be distributed on Hewlett-Packard's desktop and notebook PCs aimed at business users in North America followed by Europe and Asia, according to a statement from the two companies. Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard will also provide global support, training and consulting on Linux, the statement said.

The objective and intended application of General Public Licences (GPLs) are well known and succinctly stated. Code licensed under GPLs can be copied, passed on and passed around, improved and amended by anyone who wishes. The intended legal obligation is that any changes and amendments must be done under the terms of the existing license: it must be done under the same terms as the licensee received it. In context of "free software" it must be "free" not in terms of "free of consideration" but "free" in terms of being unrestricted in terms of use.

Inspired by the release of Nmap 3.5, the latest version of the award-winning network security tool, I've been exploring network security issues for a couple of weeks now. Nmap's major skill is port scanning -- learning which ports on a machine are "open" and what applications are using them. Sound network security planning dictates that you take a look at your network machines to see what the bad guys can see from outside.

There are many available scripting languages that support web services. PHP is one such language, with a powerful arsenal of open source functions and tools.

...It’s called Linux and not only is it also very good, it is essentially free, growing in popularity at an unprecedented rate and starting to get the big boys worried! Linux’s reputation for stability, security and immunity to viruses prompts a lot of people to ask if it is an alternative to Windows for the average PC user. I reluctantly have to say no, not just yet.

The challenges in front of Novell's partner community include skills development and the ability to recognize and exploit new opportunities, as well as the need to understand the culture that the Linux community is bringing to the enterprise environment space.

Mandrake 10 has it, SUSE's rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a "test" version with it since last year, and now we'll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure. This is not in line with the basic "it's ready when it's ready" dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors.

In this interview we learn how the System Configuration Collector (SCC) project began, how the software works, why Siem chose to make it open source, and information on future developments.

Parts 1 – 6 of this series describe a service domain that represents a collection of comparable or related Web services through a common services entry point. In this article, we discuss how to keep up with the information that is available from the service domain. Why should you and why shouldn't you care about the information? We introduce several ways of using the information and discuss some approaches for optimizing its management.