Free Republic

I guess you could say I started cheating on Windows back in October of 2010. That’s when Apple debuted the revamped MacBook Air. For the first time, I could resume working almost as soon as I flipped the lid on a laptop, thanks to the way the notebook leveraged its flash memory. (Intel and Ultrabook makers wouldn’t offer a similar instant-on experience until a year later.) The Air was a work of art, but it didn’t feel complete until OS X Lion arrived last year. With key time-saving features like Auto Save and Mission Control for faster multitasking, I started...

Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years. The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called 'sysret'. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack....

The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows. The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows....

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

This set of patches implements the core Linux support for the AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architecture. ARM introduced AArch64 as part of the ARMv8 architecture and consists of a substantially revised exception model (with 4 exception levels: EL0 - user, EL1 - kernel, EL2 - hypervisor, EL3 - secure monitor), new A64 instruction set based on larger register file, new FP/SIMD instructions. The new ABI is LP64 and takes advantage of the larger register file and mandates FP. AArch64 documentation currently available (publicly, though click-through agreement required): - Instruction Set Overview:http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.genc010197a/index.html - ABI (PCS, ELF, DWARF, C++):http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ihi0059a/index.html The AArch64 Linux port...

The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isnÂ’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. ItÂ’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.In early June, Red Hat came under fire from the FOSS press for their...

An estimated 300,000 computers, most of them in the United States, Italy and India, could be infected and lose their Internet service, Queen's University associate professor Thomas Dean said Friday. Dean said Canadians can go to www.dcwg.org to check if their computers are infected and take appropriate measures. If computers have been infected due to the scam, they haven't been able to perform anti-virus software or system updates, leaving them vulnerable to other malware, said Dean, who teaches in Queen's University's department of electrical and computer engineering.

I have been having trouble for the last 2 weeks trying to resolve this issue..

Just got my 35 dollar Raspberry Pi Debian Linux computer and thought I'd show fellow freepers how to get on the web and freep on the cheap. It's a Linux setup so it's pretty secure compared to Windows. I'm installing a web server on it now (Apache) and trying to get a cheap USB wifi dongle to work so I can disconnect the ethernet cable...the less cables the better! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX5Fdt7uu4&feature=youtu.be

The recent hubbub over Linus Torvalds’ comments towards Nvidia as well as Nvidia’s response to those comments have once again brought up intense debates between Linux users and the rest of the computing pack. Reading the comments on Engadget or The Verge for these news articles, I realized that the general public has some misconceptions about Linux and its ecosystem. I use Linux distributions every single day both on my phone and on the desktop. When I read such comments, I find it kind of funny, but also kind of sad that the Linux that I use so routinely and...

In a lengthy email interview with TechCrunch's Scott Merrill, Linux creator Linus Torvalds allows that he's a bit baffled at how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the MacBook Air - even several years after the Air's first release. Torvalds pronounces the Air "special" and "ahead of its time", elaborating that he wants his office to be quiet, with the loudest thing in the room the occasional purring of the cat, and that when he travels, he wants to travel light, contending that a notebook weighing more than a kilo (2.2 lb.) is less than ideal,...

Linus Torvalds developed Linux in 1991 while at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He became a US citizen in 2010.Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy of Finland.He was nominated for the award in recognition of the fact he had created the original Linux operating system and has continued to work on it, deciding what modifications should be made to its kernel - the code that lets software and hardware work together.Today variants of the system power much of the world's computer servers, set-top...

The US Navy has signed off on a $27,883,883 contract from military contractor Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones. The contract covers the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 beginning to install Linux systems. The no-bid contract was awarded to finish the work and get the Navy's drone fleet fully operational using a Linux backbone. The Navy's only listed VTOL drone is the Northrup-Grumman MQ8B Fire Scout, which is designed to be carried by frigates and to provide electro-optical and infrared reconnaissance...

(Brief disclaimer - while I work for Red Hat, I'm only going to be talking about Fedora here. Anything written below represents only my opinions and my work on Fedora, not Red Hat's opinions or future plans) Fedora 17 was released this week. It's both useful and free, and serves as a welcome addition to any family gathering. Do give it a go. But it's also noteworthy for another reason - it's the last Fedora release in the pre-UEFI secure boot era. Fedora 18 will be released at around the same time as Windows 8, and as previously discussed all...

At the Fedora 17 Final Go/No-Go meeting today, the F17 Final Release (RC4) was declared GOLD and ready for GA on May 29, 2012. Thanks to everyone who came today, and to everyone who helped get the Beefy Miracle ready for public devouring. :)

"At the heat of a thousand hot dog cookers, the seventeenth release of Fedora shall be forged by contributors the world over, and it will be known as: Beefy Miracle. The mustard shall indicate progress. For six months, participants in the Fedora Project shall freely contribute to the release of the distribution, in the spirit of the Four Foundations -- Freedom, Friends, Features,  and First -- and moreover, they shall relish in Fun, as a community without Fun would be like a day without sunshine. Upon release, a free and open source operating system shall be available to  all, catering...

Lennart Poettering has written a guide for optimizing systemd to the extent that a two-second boot-time or less for this popular free software project. The systemd optimization guide can be found on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. While right now there's many manual steps to lower the systemd-controlled boot-time, the goal is to eventually incorporate these tweaks into upstream distributions as the defaults. "It is our intention to optimize the upstream distributions by default (in particular Fedora) so that these optimizations won't be necessary. However, this will take some time, especially since making these changes is often not trivial when the general...

As I briefly mentioned in my recent article on the influence of the Linux desktop, with a new major Windows release just around the corner we are being treated to an onslaught of articles proclaiming the failings of Linux on the desktop. You'd think that such articles wouldn't be necessary if the Linux desktop had indeed failed. One recurring theme is the idea that Linux has terrible hardware support. The premise is always that Linux is impossibly difficult to install and that lots of hardware just doesn't work with Linux. The author almost always proclaims his or her love for...

Summary: The leading Linux desktop and the number one desktop of all, Windows, are both undergoing radical transformations, but which will be the better for it? Windows 8 Metro vs. Ubuntu 12.04 Unity 2012 has already seen a major update of what’s arguably the most important Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 and we’re also seeing the most radical update of Windows with Windows 8 Metro coming since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1. So, which will end up the better for its change?1. Desktop interfaceUbuntu replaced the popular GNOME 2.x interface with Unity when their developers decided the GNOME 3.x shell wasn’t...