Free Republic

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...

Sun Microsystems Inc. has tapped into the pulse of the identity management market. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has recently taken its Web single sign-on (SSO) offering open source, while at the same time announcing high profile implementations of its Java-based identity management software. Identity management is software that automates administrative tasks, such as resetting user passwords. It can also reduce the time it takes IT managers to provision numerous user accounts and can automatically expire old user passwords, which often raise security concerns. Sun's plan to open source its Web SSO -- a major component of its identity management...

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...

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...

"- id Software, in keeping with tradition, has released the source code for the nearly six-year-old Quake III Arena. The source code can be compiled for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux; though it's a freely available download, the code is still protected under the GPL license. The code for the Q3Radiant map editor is also included, and is subject to the same terms as the Q3A source."

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....

IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday. The contribution would allow the addition of dynamic hypertext markup language accessibility technology to version 1.5 of Firefox, the company said. With this technology, Web pages can be magnified, automatically narrated or navigated from a keyboard instead of from a mouse, IBM said. For instance, the amount of tabbing required to navigate a spreadsheet can be minimized for people with mobility disabilities. In addition, developers can work on "rich Internet applications"...

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...

Enough has come out about the failure of the 9/11 Commission to include critical information about Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 attackers, to suggest a new Commission to investigate the original Commission. The cure may not be that drastic, but it is that important. In short, a special Army intelligence operation known as “Able Danger” identified Atta and four of his accomplices, and identified Al-Qaeda cells in Hamburg and Brooklyn and elsewhere, a year before the 9/11 attacks. They offered then to share that information with law enforcement agencies including the FBI. Those offers were cut off by Clinton Administration...

OSDL has announced a patent commons project. This is a huge step legally. Eben Moglen is encouraging everyone to support the project: "OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear." More details on Business...

SAN FRANCISCO--IBM has updated its Workplace desktop software product with support for the Firefox Web browser, the company said on Tuesday. IBM's Workplace software provides functions such as word processing, document storage and calendars. The processing actually takes place on a central server that people access with a Web browser. Previously, IBM supported only Mozilla and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox is the default Web browser in Red Hat and Suse Linux, though it's also widely used on Windows, and has been gaining market share. special coverage LinuxWorld SF Open-source hopefuls join Linux stalwarts to talk shop and hawk wares at...

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 --...

Some nice screenshots Here..

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...