Free Republic

Kerala, a tiny coastal state in south India, is a site of significant popularity of free software and GNU/Linux. What lessons can Kerala teach other areas about using free and open source software? Kerala, as a state, is strongly grounded in principles of socialism. Most of the educated middle class is leftist, at least in principle. The state is credited with a near 100% literacy rate and better social statistics than most of the rest of the country. And all this is reflected in a spirit among the people to question any decision imposed on them. They resent lack of...

A major reorganization is in the works for China's open-source software industry, with discussions under way over how local Linux vendors and industry organizations can cooperate more closely -- including the possibility of a merger between several of the country's top Linux companies. If the discussions result in a merger, it would be one that involves some of the biggest names in China's Linux industry, including Turbolinux China Software, Red Flag Software, and Beijing Co-Create Open Source Software, according to executives involved with the discussions. Closer cooperation among Chinese Linux vendors and industry organizations is essential if the country's software...

A group of former high-level execs from Red Hat are planning to launch a startup called rPath that will support customized Linux distributions. RPath’s core Linux offering, based on the Conary open-source project, represents a new way to build and maintain Linux without the overhead associated with RPM specification files and large binaries required for mainstream Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, sources said. Conary is a distributed software management system for Linux distributions that enables developers to branch a distribution and intermingle other components from the Internet, rather than use a full distribution from a single vendor....

For a while it seemed as if the free software community was treading water by improving automatic configuration tools and device support, fighting ridiculous legal issues, and arguing over tools instead of concentrating on its original goal of providing free replacements for proprietary programs. But quietly, in the background, a number of important programs have begun to bring "proprietary functionality" to free software. Here are eight free software desktop applications that could change the balance of power between Windows and GNU/Linux by replacing proprietary software with free code. Flash4Linux/SWF Writer For Linux Macromedia's Flash development environment can be used to...

Linux/Unix e-mail flaw leaves system wide open By Matthew Broersma, Techworld Two serious security flaws have turned up in software widely distributed with Linux and Unix. The bugs affect Elm (Electronic Mail for Unix), a venerable e-mail client still used by many Linux and Unix sysadmins, and Mplayer, a cross-platform movie player that is one of the most popular of its kind on Linux. The Elm flaw involves a boundary error when the client reads an e-mail's "Expires" header. A specially crafted e-mail could exploit the bug to cause a buffer overflow and execute malicious code on a system, according...

INTRODUCTION: linuximgDeveloped by Linus Torvalds in 1991, Linux is a free operating system which “belongs to the world” and today, it has millions of happy users worldwide. Its being free doesn’t mean its being meaner than other operating systems. On the contrary, the industry experts are most impressed by its power and richness and more and more users are embracing Linux. Changing operating systems is definitely a big labor but this one-time labor is nothing if compared to all that one does to tackle those terrible blue screens of death, frozen windows, system crashes, viruses, data loss and spy wares....

Avnet Partner Solutions has created a new channel program that offers certification, sales and technical training to solution providers and ISVs selling Linux. The Enablement, Partnership, Incentives and Co-Marketing (EPIC) program is jointly funded with Novell to help solution providers craft Suse Linux-based solutions on IBM’s eServer platform. The initiative also includes marketing development and planning services and margin-based sales incentives for Novell products, according to Avnet executives. “The Linux market is big. We participate with Novell in a big way in an effort to drive more business into the Intel space with the Suse OS,” said Fred Cuen, president...

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. The small Colorado company had carved out a nice niche specializing in selling Linux for Macs and other machines that use IBM's PowerPC chips. In the days following Apple's bombshell, Terra Soft quickly announced plans to seek out alternative hardware on which its Yellow Dog Linux could run. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based...

IBM Woos the World's Geeks - Big Blue will let software developers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China use company products for free. IBM announced an initiative Monday to encourage developers in emerging economies to work on the computing giant’s open standards technology, a computing framework for which hardware and software specifications are publicly available. As part of the initiative, the Armonk, New York-based company said that for the first time, developers in Brazil, Russia, India, China—popularly known as BRIC countries—will get instant access to IBM’s hardware and software portfolio from their desktop at no charge.

Family Services Woodfield (FSW), a nonprofit organization in Bridgeport, Conn., is dipping its toes in open source waters with the help of virtual machines. FSW helps families through difficult life situations: anything from illiteracy, domestic violence, or HIV, to helping a youth coming out of juvenile delinquency or a family caring for an aging grandparent. FSW maintains partnerships with other agencies it uses as resources, and it is continuously designing new programs to better serve its constituency. The agency receives government funding as well as private donations, and so must keep up with reporting requirements, and since it provides psychiatric...

10 Days as a Linux User: A GNU Perspective on things Posted by Gsurface on 18 Aug 2005 - 14:18 Introduction I know what you’re saying, and I agree. The idea of spending 10 days in someone else’s shoes certainly isn’t new but do you really think you will ever see Mr. Spurlock record a show depicting a similar situation or setup? You’d fall asleep during the opening credits. Now, it might not be a life or death adventure but at least it’s one that I’ve never heard of or read before and if I could just offer a small...

US software firm Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) expects to sell 250,000 units of its new Novell Linux Desktop in the next 12 months in Argentina, the first Latin American country where the company has launched the new solution, according to Novell southern region channel and alliances manager Gonzalo Pérez. "This is the first launching of the product and we expect to expand its coverage to Uruguay within 15-20 days, where we have already tested the products, and to Chile within a month," he added. Novell Linux Desktop includes Linux operating system and the most recent version of OpenOffice.Org, an office tools...

Thin is in again, at least for a spell, as hardware makers use Linux to sell companies on the idea of forsaking full-fledged PCs in favor of stripped-down "thin clients." In the 1990s, Microsoft foes Oracle and Sun Microsystems advocated, with little success, using thin clients that they called the Network Computer and Sun Ray, respectively. The sales pitch--that it's cheaper to leave the heavy lifting to central servers and avoid the management and security headaches of PCs--hasn't yet won over the masses. This week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, thin-client sellers used Linux to spruce up their offerings....

China stakes its claim to become the next IT outsourcing superpower, with an emphasis on open source It may have been the worst conference presentation I've ever seen. Behind it, however, was one of the most compelling trends in the IT industry today. In a conference room tucked away on the second floor of San Francisco's Moscone West convention center, a scant handful of reporters had gathered at LinuxWorld Expo 2005 to hear a sales pitch. But this wasn't your everyday vendor briefing. Doing the selling was a consortium of Chinese software companies called the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Center...

Mac enthusiast sites reported Friday that Apple Computer's operating system for Intel-based computers, which is currently in the hands of developers, has both been leaked to the Internet and cracked so that it will run on non-Apple hardware.

Thousands of secondary schools students in the French region of Auvergne will receive CDs containing free and open-source software when they return to school in September. The project, which has been funded by the local government, will distribute 64,000 packs of CDs to students, according to Linux Arverne, a Linux user group involved in the initiative. The project aims to get students and their families more interested in free and open-source software. Every student between the ages of 15 and 19 attending a school in Auvergne will be given a pack containing two CDs. The first CD contains free software...

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Oracle's (ORCL:Nasdaq - news - research) buttoned-down president Charles Phillips gives the opening keynote address and there's not a silly penguin costume in sight, you know the grownups are in charge at this year's LinuxWorld. After two days, the big Linux trade show here hasn't produced any big surprises or high drama. But there is plenty of evidence that the alternative operating system is sitting solidly in the mainstream. So solidly that "over 50% of our customers will use Linux in the next five years, if not sooner," Phillips said. By most measures, Linux is growing...

Here are excerpts from the Deposition of SCO employee Erik W. Hughes [PDF]. It's a large PDF, so be patient. Our thanks to Frank Sorenson for picking up this deposition and scanning it for us. Hold on to your hats. He confirms that the Linux Kernel Personality did indeed include Linux kernel code, and as a result, both UnixWare 7.1.2 and 7.1.3 included Linux kernel code until May of 2003. While Hughes testifies that in addition to the obvious candidates (Caldera's Linux distributions), two releases of UnixWare included the Linux kernel in some way, as part of the LKP --...

Hewlett-Packard this week plans to release Linux versions of its Virus Throttler security technology and ProLiant Essentials Intelligent Networking Pack, the company confirmed Friday. The antivirus software was developed at HP Labs as a tool for mitigating the effects of virus infections. It has been available with the company's ProCurve switches and on Windows versions of its servers since February of this year but had not previously been available for Linux users. Effective Tuesday, HP will begin selling the Linux version of Virus Throttler with its ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, a company spokeswoman said Friday. The software can either be...

FVWM, the F Virtual Windows Manager, is a window manager for computers running the X Window System. While KDE and GNOME offer more features, they are also heavy on memory usage. FVWM is light and fast, and you can customize it to meet your needs, and apply these customizations throughout your organization. The default FVWM screen is very basic -- just a simple blue desktop. Clicking anywhere with the left mouse button brings up a menu with a couple of built-in options, including xterm. You can also move around the virtual desktop by moving mouse cursor off the edge of...