Free Republic

How many times have you heard this statement: "It's the year of the Linux desktop." Not recently? Then how about "Linux is making gains on the Windows desktop"? Still leaving a bad taste in your mouth? Bet I know why. For years, both the statements above have been over-used to the point that either idea is now completely meaningless. Not due to anything negative with the Linux desktop, mind you, rather due to inherent differences in how Linux is marketed to the world, who its intended audience is and whether mainstream adoption even matters in the first place. Let's blame...

Average people, the kind you see walking down the street, buying milk at the grocery store and frequenting Walmart, Kmart and other similar retail chains are a very fickle bunch. They are also very demanding. Not one of them would accept damaged goods willingly. If they buy a television and it doesn't work they take it back. If they buy an item of clothing and it is damaged in some manner it is sent back post haste. If they buy a piece of meat and two hours later it is green, that piece of meat is forcefully returned to the...

Open...and Shut For years Microsoft has raged — and whined — against the open source machine, once going so far as to castigate open source as being "un-American". Something must be wrong with a development model, as Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Jim Gray once lamented, that evaporates the possibility of profit in software sales. And yet open source has marched on, eventually claiming mainstream acceptance as it helped highly capitalistic companies such as Google create hugely profitable businesses. While these companies thrive, however, Microsoft remains cautious, as evidenced in its product strategy and in its hiring patterns. As Microsoft has watched...

COMMENTYou may think your day job is demanding, but it's often nothing compared with providing tech support for the family. That's where Linux comes in, says Jack Wallen.The problem with working in IT is that when we go home, our job often continues. Sometimes, keeping our children's computers running can be a bigger challenge than sorting out the adults at work.But if you install Linux at home, you can avoid the headaches. That's because sound reasons exist for migrating young users from other operating systems.1. Viruses and malwareMalware is always at the top of my list. Youngsters are prone to...

A flaw in the implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets protocol (RDS) in the Linux kernel can be exploited to gain root (also known as superuser) rights or permissions on a victim's system. Attackers can exploit the hole to get complete control remotely once they have broken into the system. Dan Rosenberg, who discovered the vulnerability, has published an exploit for demonstration purposes; in a test conducted by The H's associates at heise Security on Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit), it opened a root shell. Kernel versions 2.6.30 to 2.6.36-rc8 are said to be affected. Linux developers have already provided a patch, in...

Big business loves Linux for servers and they seem to like it more than you might expect for the desktop. That said, enterprises still have some concerns about Linux. Here's the top five as picked by people who responded to The Linux Foundation's recent corporate and government end-user survey: "Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users." Before diving into these problems, I'd like to point out something. These are the opinions of business people who, for the most part, are already Linux users. Questions like, whether KDE or GNOME is the better desktop interface or just how cool...

The world is awash in data. This fact is putting more and more pressure on file systems to efficiently scale to handle increasingly large amounts of data. Recently, Ric Wheeler from Redhat experimented with putting 1 Billion files in a single file system to understand what problems/issues the Linux community might face in the future. Let’s see what happened… Awash in a sea of dataNo one is going to argue that the amount of data we generate and want to keep is growing at an unprecedented rate. In a 2008 article blogger Dave Raffo highlighted some statistics from an IDC...

App turns iPad into client for multitasking, Flash by Brooke Crothers A longtime Silicon Valley company says it can turn Apple's iPad into an X terminal, allowing it to run Linux, do true multitasking, and even run Flash-based apps. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based StarNet Communications announced this week that it can transform the iPad into a an X terminal--generically referred to as a dumb terminal because the data processing is done on the server not the client--for Linux, Unix, mainframe, and supercomputers. (See "Update" below for notes about the iPad's keyboard and initial browsing impressions.) StarNet says it can enable the iPad...

Microsoft has been talking smack to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) of late, charging the search giant's Android operating system isn't as "free" as the company says it is and hinting that Android could end up entangled in a patent infringement lawsuit. But talk is cheap. On Friday, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) took a much bolder step, suing Motorola (NYSE: MOT) for allegedly infringing nine of the software titan's patents in its Droid mobile handsets, which are powered by Android. "Microsoft filed an action today in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against...

As more noise in favor of GNU/Linux is heard, some people might feel tempted to replace their solid, green-red-blue-and-yellow Windows system with an unknown, shady, black-and-white Linux penguin. Some of these users, thinking they are about to enter the Promised Land, fail to fully consider the disastrous consequences that abandoning the firm, old Windows tradition may cause. In this light, I found appropriate to let these naive migrants know a number of issues to consider before they take the leap to their doom. These issues are based on empirical, but honest observation and may bring upon me the deepest animosity...

The 17 year old hacker who goes by the name of Hexxeh has successfully ported the Chromium OS onto the iPad and has posted an image on his own blog showing the Chromium OS (the open source version of Chrome OS) running on the iPad as well. The developer, Hexxeh, is well known in the Chrome community and has even published some of his own Chromium builds, leading us to believe that this is not a fake one:

Greetings; I recently built a new PC and I plan to run Linux in a virtual machine using VMWare. I know very little sbout Linux and was wondering if anyone had an opinion on which of the seemingly endless versions was the best to use. Many thanks in advance.

It's been approximately two years since I've written the first article, A (cool) list of Linux tools. The article proved quite popular with my audience, as it allowed Linux users, new converts in particular, a quick taste of some of the more useful programs available for Linux platforms, across a range of categories. *********************************************************************************************This is an EXCERPT****************************************************************************** Since, a lot has changed. Two years is a long time. I have decided to write a new article, from scratch, cataloging an up-to-date collection of must-have programs. To make it even more interesting and useful, I decided to add screenshots wherever I...

Status: NEW Aliases: CVE-2010-3081 (edit) Product: Security Response Component: vulnerability (Show Security Response/vulnerability bugs) Version: unspecified Platform: All Linux

Could 2010 be Linux' breakout year? Linux is already making huge waves in mobile computing, with the rise of the Android operating system, the momentum behind Meego, a bevy of Linux-powered netbooks, and an army of Linux-toting tablets on the horizon. With Web-based computing becoming the norm, flexible and robust Linux could finally become the OS of choice for device manufacturers. For over a decade, Linux watchers have predicted that one day the open source operating system will become the dominant player -- and yet that day never seems to arrive. Already, of course, Linux has a very healthy share...

If the idea of using Linux in your business is one that makes you nervous, chances are you've fallen prey to one or more of the many myths out there that are frequently disseminated by competing vendors such as Microsoft. After all, each Linux user means one less sale for such companies, so they have a powerful motivation to spread such FUD. In fact, the ranks of businesses and government organizations using Linux grows every day, and for good reason: it's simply a good business choice. Let's take a look, then, at some of the top anxiety-causing myths and dispel...

I am sick and tired of this site being taken over by Catholics ( of which I am one ) stories or proverbs. This is a news site not a religion site. Go do that somewhere else. I am not opposed to your prostilazion(sp), just not here. We lose credibility if any religious group dictates or can be quoted from this site. As a long term member of this site I regret posting this information, but the site has been buried in Catholic stuff recently and it should be shunted to some separate page.

"Security through obscurity" may be a catchy phrase, but it's not the only thing that's catching among Windows users. The expression is intended to suggest that proprietary software is more secure by virtue of its closed nature. If hackers can't see the code, then it's harder for them to create exploits for it--or so the thinking goes. Unfortunately for Windows users, that's just not true--as evidenced by the never-ending parade of patches coming out of Redmond. In fact, one of Linux's many advantages over Windows is that it is more secure--much more. For small businesses and other organizations without a...

Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this...

Jim Robinson has laid down the law with regard to tech thread flame wars. I am motivated to make sure we tech-thread-heads are aware of this. This vanity is a heads-up with regard to Jim's comments last night, and I've added a few thoughts of my own as an observer. Here's what Jim said: To All: [That goes for everyone.] I don’t see any reason whatsoever to be having flamewars on FR over computer products. Those who have a problem with Apple should just not buy the product and that takes care of that. Don’t come to FR to flame...