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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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Interview with Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer
5 hours, 28 minutes ago
The so-called "distribution for the average Joe" market has been expanding at a rapid pace in recent years. While the vast majority of these projects is invariably based on Linux, we have also witnessed a few attempts to create a user-friendly "distribution" based on operating systems that traditionally belonged to the hacker's domain, notably FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. One of them is PC-BSD, a project launched in 2005. Its main goal? To hide the complexity of FreeBSD and to deliver an alternative to Linux on the desktop. Its main claim to fame? The web-based software installation infrastructure called PBI. Its community? Over 8,000 registered forum members and a growing network of world-wide community sites. All this thanks to the original vision and undying conviction of Kris Moore (pictured on the right), the founder and lead developer of PC-BSD. -
Can open source replace Microsoft Exchange?
7 hours, 28 minutes ago
Open source projects and vendors are trying a variety of technical approaches to replacing the expensive but ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange. While none is yet a drop-in replacement, some administrators can get a TCO advantage by switching. -
Linux jumps to 13.4 percent of the stalling server market
9 hours, 28 minutes ago
According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit. -
Complete Dose of Linux Poison
11 hours, 28 minutes ago
Proprietary software is often looked down upon in the free software world for many reasons: -
Open source: What you should learn from the French
13 hours, 28 minutes ago
A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education. -
The Upside Down Of HTML On Unix and Linux: Backward
13 hours, 58 minutes ago
If today's title throws you off a little, that's good. I was going for an allegorical representation of the output of today's Perl script in the title of this post. The beauty of it is, even if I don't succeed, I have done my job, since (although this script is supposed to produce upside down and backwards HTML pages) the outcome of any input handed off to today's script may, or may not, have every single line reversed and in top to bottom order. In fact, when it comes to the more complicated issue of handling tags that dictate image, span, table, style and other such extravagant beautification, it may turn out a web page so horribly disfigured that you'll hardly recognize it. ...although, maybe that was the point. I allow my friends to talk me into wasting my time on folly like this far too often. ...probably because I enjoy it. -
Things you should never EVER type in Linux. Ever!
14 hours, 28 minutes ago
I feel that I need to put a warning at the top of this post because try as I might in the subject to be clear about what I mean, I know that someone will go and type/execute one of these things into their production server at work and then be horribly distraught and/or cause some sort of power grid catastrophe across the Pacific Northwest or something. -
Novell's third-quarter loss widens, but Linux booms by 30 percent
14 hours, 58 minutes ago
Novell beat Wall Street's estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell's third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007. The company reported that annual adjusted operating margin to be between eight to ten percent, up from earlier expected seven to nine percent. -
Microsoft to drop $486 million for European shopping site
15 hours, 28 minutes ago
Microsoft said Friday it has reached a deal to acquire Greenfield Online, the owner of consumer shopping sites, for about $486 million. -
Judge: Qualcomm violates Broadcom ruling
15 hours, 58 minutes ago
The legal drama between wireless chipmakers Qualcomm and Broadcom continues this week. -
ATI R500: Mesa vs. Catalyst Benchmarking
16 hours, 28 minutes ago
With Mesa 7.1 having been released this week and the open-source R600/770 3D support just around the corner, we've taken this opportunity to see how the open-source Mesa 3D stack compares to AMD's monthly-refined Catalyst Linux Suite with the fglrx driver performs for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. In this article are Mesa 7.1 and Catalyst 8.8 benchmarks for the Radeon X1300PRO and X1800XL graphics cards. -
Open source: What you should learn from the French
16 hours, 58 minutes ago
San Francisco - A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education. -
Buddi - Personal Finance & Budgeting Program for openSUSE
17 hours, 28 minutes ago
Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. Designed to keep the software simpler but still effectively help users to manage their finances. Buddi is released a free opensource software released under GNU GPL license. Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems. -
List of Email Clients Available in Ubuntu Linux
17 hours, 58 minutes ago
An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka e-mail reader is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail. -
Intel Acquires Mobile OSS Firm OpenedHand--Advances Moblin
18 hours, 28 minutes ago
Intel is pushing forward with its Moblin mobile Internet and Linux project, focused on mobile and automotive Internet devices based on Atom processors. Its latest move is acquiring OpenedHand, which provides software development and consulting services, in addition to maintaining several ongoing projects focused on mobile and embedded Linux. OpenedHand's team maintains and contributes development efforts to the Matchbox window manager (on Nokia's devices), the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, Poky (an embedded Linux distro), and more. In essence, Intel gets a distributed set of open source applications and Moblin development resources in picking up OpenedHand. - More News
Linux.com : Features
Gerald Carter of Likewise talks about LDAP for Linux (video)
Some GNU/Linux desktop deployments require secure authentication from a Windows Active Directory server. Gerald Carter, a long-time member of the Samba team and an enthusiastic free software developer, now works for Likewise. You can learn from this discussion if you are considering becoming a software developer, are looking for a good business model for your free software-based company, or are looking to manage your network more securely.
Track your investments with Grism
My dad has been pestering me for some time to find him an open source tool that he could use to follow the market trends. He's been thinking about investing a little something in the market, but not without due diligence. Grism, written in Ruby, is the tool my dad now uses to easily follow the changing market trends. It allows you to create watchlists and portfolios and offers charts to help you gauge the performance of particular stocks.
EVDO and VoIP for remote audio transmission
A cellular plan using an EVDO modem can provide a connection with bandwidth of approximately 3Mbps to the client and 1.5Mbps up to the provider (comparable to DSL) for a much lower cost than alternatives such as satellite. For applications requiring high-quality audio transmission from remote locations, such as the radio remotes we do at the radio station where I work, a Linux laptop with an EVDO modem and VoIP software offers an inexpensive and reliable solution. Here's what you need to get started.
Automatic backup for sporadically connected clients with Box Backup
If you're a frequent business traveler who keeps important company files on your laptop, using a centralized management solution to back up files automatically during a fixed time interval won't work. Instead, consider Box Backup, which backs up files from a laptop directly to a backup server over an encrypted link.
Behind the doors of the Free Software Foundation
The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology.
Make etexts pretty with GutenMark
Project Gutenberg, the online library of more than 25,000 free books, is a treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning electronic text files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works. Hard line breaks, for example, may ruin the text flow, making it virtually impossible to read the book on a mobile device. Another problem is that most books are stored as single files, so locating a particular chapter or section in a lengthy book can be a serious nuisance. Then there are minor but annoying formatting quirks, such as inconsistent handling of italicized text, use of straight quotes instead of smart ones, and so on.
LyX 1.6 is ready for release
This month saw the release of LyX 1.6 release candidate 1. Occupying a position somewhere between a word processor and a mark-up editor, LyX is designed to meet the needs of professional and academic writers by allowing them to focus on their content rather than formatting and layout. It achieves this by eschewing some of the WYSIWYG conventions of a word processor. We've covered LyX in the past, so this time we'll focus on the enhancements that the 1.6 release brings with it.
Four Twitter clients for Linux
Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others' updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
Voiceroute execs talk about going (mostly) open source (video)
Voiceroute, a software PBX vendor, originally started as a proprietary software company but went (at least partly) open source earlier this year. In this video, CEO Ming Guang Yong says the company should have moved toward open source "a lot sooner," and explains why. He and CTO Navin Kumar also talk about some of the specific differences between their open source and proprietary versions, including how and where they draw the line between the two, and share their thoughts about dealing with open source developers and building a successful open source development community.
Inside the SFLC's "Practical Guide to GPL Compliance"
One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues. As part of this effort, the SFLC has already published "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects." Its latest effort in public education, released last week, is "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance," a 15-page guide for FOSS projects on how to avoid violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The guide is a practical summary of its subject, but its wording is unnecessarily legalistic, and its structure and omissions sometimes fall short of the goal of being a standalone reference.
Cisco buys PostPath, targets Microsoft Exchange
No one saw this coming. Cisco, the networking giant, announced today it was buying PostPath, maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server.
Easy file uploads with Droopy
Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that's slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat server, then to your machine. File transfer services like RapidShare and MegaUpload are fine, but not for confidential information. Of course, you could set up an FTP server on your box, but you don't want to leave that door open all the time. Luckily, there's now an easy solution: droopy.
PostPath: Enterprise-strength open source alternative for Exchange
For enterprise system administrators looking for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, but not the high costs associated with it, PostPath email and collaboration server could be a smart business investment. Boasting interoperability with Exchange environments for a third of the cost, thanks to its use of the Postfix mail server and many other open source components, PostPath provides drop-in capability and compatibility with Exchange environments without the need for making changes to Outlook on the client side. Being compatible with Exchange means that it can be managed using Microsoft's Active Directory infrastructure. The latest version, PostPath v3.1.2, adds support for Blackberry Enterprise Server and ActiveSync, allowing you to use mobile devices to access your email.
A business built on open source, virtualization, and clouds
ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don't want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing.
Nepomuk and KDE to introduce the semantic desktop
If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop -- a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first.
Frag 'em in your own backyard with Sauerbraten
If you like first-person shooters, you'll love Sauerbraten. This open source game might not have the visual finesse of other FPSes, but what it lacks in the graphics department, Sauerbraten more than makes up for with its various single and multiplayer modes, including an experimental role-playing game mode, and a unique WYSIWYG in-game map editor. Sauerbraten blends the best of FPSes like Quake and Max Payne to give you a unique gaming experience.
CVL lets you tinker with HDR images on your GPU
If your desktop hardware includes a graphics processing unit (GPU), you can do some cool image processing with the CVL suite of tools, which includes in image viewer, an image tone mapper, and a command-line tool for non-interactive image processing.
A video tour of openSUSE 11 (with KDE 4 desktop)
SUSE has been around almost since the dawn of consumer-level desktop Linux, and openSUSE 11 upholds the SUSE reputation for having not just a wide range of available applications, but also excellent documentation and a fine user-to-user support community. For this video we chose the KDE 4.x desktop option. KDE 3.5x and GNOME are also available as defaults in openSUSE.
South American FOSS show is a big deal
Last week's 8th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Free Software Regional Sessions) at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was an opportunity for around 1,300 FOSS enthusiasts to share experiences, learn more, and have fun together.
Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL
SQL injection attacks can allow hackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands on your database through your Web site. To avoid these attacks, every piece of data supplied by a user on a Web form, through HTTP Post or CGI parameters, or other means, must be validated to not contain information that is not expected. GreenSQL is a firewall for SQL -- it sits between your Web site and MySQL database and decides which SQL statements should and should not be executed. At least that's the idea -- in execution, I found some open doors.
