FOSSPlanet

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip [TPM] with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

Many eons ago, GNOME 1.4 still lived, and it was good. It was extremely configurable and hackable. You could use either Enlightenment or Sawfish as the window manager, and could customize it to your heart's content. It was even friendly to homegrown GTK+ hacks. And then tragedy struck: the GNOME maintainers decided that 1.4 needed a ground-up rewrite, and thus GNOME 2.0 was born.

The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office, depending on your requirements. Despite the scores of additional features found in products like Microsoft Office, most workers only need a simple word processor or spreadsheet to complete their day-to-day office tasks. If your staff are not “power users” then having a full-blown office suite on their desktop can be overkill. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at office suites that can manage you business information without emptying the company coffers.

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site. According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block.

Last month many developers were scurrying to prepare for the 2.6.33 merge window. When they weren’t doing that, here are a few of the items that were under discussion, starting with the Big Kernel Lock…

openSUSE is looking for information from its users about the distribution by way of a survey, which runs through the end of February. The survey is meant to "give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general. Let us know where things are in good shape and areas where improvement is needed." Click below for the full announcement.

Our story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre. To protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things - fast.

Increase your internet speed with Namebench. NameBench is a program that searches for the fastest DNS in your area. After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area. After that all you have to do is edit your connection settings to use the fastest DNS available. NameBench is available for Windows and Mac systems, but most importantly it is Linux compatible.

James Bottomley has announced this year's Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit, which will be held just prior to LinuxCon in Boston on August 8 and 9. It will be held in conjunction with the Virtual Memory (VM) summit, so there will be three tracks (storage, filesystems, VM) as well as joint meetings for all participants. Proposals for discussion topics and requests for invitations are being solicited; click below for the full announcement. "Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years."

There will be a ClearHealth 3.0 Community Edition intensive training event on Saturday, February 20th at SCALE 8x in Los Angeles. Learn about the features, operations, technical info, and installation details of the 3.0 edition at this seven-hour event.

Fedora has updated chrony (F11, F12: denial of service) and ocsinventory (F11, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated squid (denial of service) and kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

Moonlight 3.0, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plug-in software on Linux and Unix platforms, is now being offered in an alpha release, according to Web pages from the Mono project, which has jurisdiction over Moonlight. The release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3, said Novell, which sponsors Mono.

New figures from webmasterpro.de show surprisingly high market share for OpenOffice.org around the world - peaking at 22% in Poland and Germany. Has the rise of OpenOffice.org to become a true rival to Microsoft Office begun?

Many administrators who use Postfixadmin, a web based tool to manage virtual domains on Postfix, would like to secure the transactions between the PostfixAdmin program and the administrator. At the same time often you do not want to add the extra burden of SSL on the whole domain but just want to secure one directory. The solution is to create a certificate for that one directory only and also locking that directory with a password so only administrators can gain access. The example is on an Ubuntu 9.10 server, which will be very similar to most server procedures.

SourceForge, the open source project hosting site, has announced that it has turned off the "blanket block" on access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Media player maker Archos has posted a full Linux distro that will run on its Archos 5 machine. The 5 ships with Android as standard, but open sourcerers can download a special, emebedded build of Angstrom Linux and use it to replace the Google OS.

Oracle's open source strategy was looking a little fenced in this morning, after the database giant lost one of its most prominent voices and OpenOffice was snubbed by Ubuntu developers. Ken Jacobs resigned from Oracle late last week, according to reports. Jacobs was vice president of product strategy in Oracle's server technologies division, and was seen as the vendor's friendly face when it came to dealing with the Open Source community.

There are concerns in the GNOME accessibility development community about what the Oracle takeover of Sun means for the efforts led by Sun's Accessibility Project Office (APO). Orca project lead Willie Walker has been laid off and is looking for work, possibly in areas that will not allow him to continue contributing to Orca. In addition, assistive technology specialist Joanmarie Diggs has published an open letter to Oracle concerning the future of the APO and its work. "Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail."

ComputerWorld reports on the outcome of the charity auction at linux.conf.au. "A $12,750 donation from Linux Australia on the night brought the total funds raised for the air rescue service to more than $33,000. [...] 'Free open source software is founded on generosity and these supporters have certainly taken that value to heart,' Life Flight Trust CEO David Irving said in a statement. 'The funds raised will enable 13 people to receive emergency flights, which is a great outcome for the community.'"

Debian Etch is soon to be unsupported by the Debian team, therefore all Debian Linux Servers need to be upgraded to Debian Lenny. I have upgraded many Linux servers to Debian Lenny over the past months, so I am providing this guide on how to upgrade Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

Linus Torvalds is not Bill Gates.

He’s a programmer, and an honest man. So when he finds something he likes he says so, without artifice, and that’s all it means.

I hope people will understand that following Torvalds’ blog post extolling the Google Nexus One.

Apparently Linus has the same problem my son does (along with millions of other people). Directions are not his strong suit. So for him, Google navigation was a killer app.

Trouble is, in many ways Linus Torvalds is not “just a programmer.” He’s a brand name. He is, however reluctantly, a celebrity. So a simple blog post can read like an endorsement.

Put it this way. If Steve Ballmer picked one of the many Windows Mobile phones and said, “this is the one I like,” other makers of Windows Mobile phones might be upset. So he doesn’t.

Linus just did.

Google is trying to build a competitive ecosystem in Android, and Android is not the only Linux-based system in the mobile space. It’s like saying which one of your children you like best.

If you want to go the full paranoid on this one, you could even call Linus unpatriotic. After all, Motorola has staked its future on Android, and here he is making nice with a device from HTC, a Chinese company! (I know. Motorola has had its stuff made in China for years.)

This is as crazy as Jay Leno appearing in an ad for David Letterman’s TV show. It’s inconceivable! (I don’t think the word means what you think it does.)

Turns out the biggest surprise in the Oracle-Sun drama was not the split within open source over mySQL.

It was the split within Oracle over mySQL. (Picture from Oracle’s Collaborate 2007 event.)

Ken Jacobs, who was one of CEO Larry Ellison’s first 20 hires, says he is leaving the company after seeking to run mySQL and being turned down.

Jacobs gets credit for keeping InnoDB moving forward after its 2005 acquisition. This was a big win for open source.

InnoDB was an integral part of mySQL, and there were fears then Oracle planned to box-in mySQL by controlling its storage engine. But that didn’t happen, Oracle was able to claim open source bonafides.

Now Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, is in charge of mySQL, which could lead to the same fears expressed over InnoDB when Jacobs took it on.

Screven, however, also has some open source mojo. He was interviewed by Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin in 2008, touting the company’s commitment to Linux. “We didn’t view GPL as something that was going to get in the way of business in the least,” he told Zemlin.

Trouble is that while Linux is an enterprise product, and has long had substantial server market share, mySQL began as something smaller and simpler, not scaled. The code base was moving toward greater scale before Oracle bought it, but during the debate even open source advocates like Matt Asay admitted it wasn’t a direct competitor.

This was always at the heart of the dispute. Would open source be allowed to develop a true competitor to Oracle? Would Web start-ups have to make a costly switch from open source as they scaled, or commit to open source in their business plans, raising costs substantially?

Internet success happens in Internet time. A start-up subsisting on pizza, even a small open source project, can be discovered by the masses and become world famous within a year. Will there be an easy migration path, or will that path be slammed shut?

Ask Edward Screven.

Paula Hunter will differentiate CodePlex from sites like Google Code and groups like the Linux Foundation by trying to bring enterprise IT shops into the open source mainstream.

Hunter was named the new executive director of the CodePlex Foundation late last week, and spoke to ZDNet Open Source.

The CodePlex Foundation is based in Seattle, but Hunter lives in New Hampshire and works in the Boston suburbs. That may prove an asset as Hunter works to distance the foundation from its roots as a Microsoft open source site.

“My responsibility will be to embrace the business community,” she said, adding she plans on hiring a technical director soon. She also plans to develop something like the old Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) user advisory board, covering a range of industries beyond software.

“One primary area we’re trying to focus is the commercial software development area, and certainly the east coast is not only a center for software companies but large enterprise IT shops,” she said.

Hunter is the foundation’s first employee. Even the permanent board of directors has yet to be named. This gives her enormous influence on the group’s direction. But she emphasized to ZDNet that the direction has already been set, and that her plan is to execute on it.

“It’s not necessary for one company to shoulder the burden of this effort. There are plenty of companies that can benefit. Over the next few weeks I’m going to create a program and set of benefits for those people we want to sign on board.”

The direction was described by Sam Ramji, a former Microsoft executive now with Sonoa Systems, when the new foundation was set up last year. That is, provide a way for Fortune 500 companies outside the software industry to make contributions, gain the benefits of open source, while maintaining some code control.

Andy Updegrove is pleased with the appointment, noting her work with United Linux and the OSDL, which was merged with the Free Standards Group to create the present Linux Foundation.

“Paula knows her way around the block,” he wrote, and most stories about the appointment emphasize she’s an open source “veteran.” This makes me feel old. Hunter got her degree from Bentley College in 1983, when I was five years into my own journalism career.

Do you use Linux in your enterprise? These are the ten ways that I've seen it used. The world's largest technical support, software and hardware companies use Linux on a daily basis for a variety of tasks and solutions. This post gives you an overview of all the ways in which large companies use Linux. Most don't use Linux on the desktop but do use it in ways you might expect (and a few you might not expect) a company of that magnitude to use it. They've leveraged Linux for some of the most critical workloads and 100% uptime service levels. Welcome to the world of enterprise Linux.

After 3 months of hard work, the new version of GLX-Dock/Cairo-Dock (2.1.3) is out. The new version brings a lot of fixes for some existing problems such as smoother auto-hide, automatic detection of indirect rendering for Intel/ATI cards, but the most visible change in Cairo Dock v2.1.3 is the new configuration panel which is now very easy to use.

As we've written about this week, The Christo Rey Catholic Church houses a 25 computer learning center for the residents of East Austin. The HeliOS Project provided the computers and manpower to make this place a reality. This center serves the disadvantaged people in the area and we are proud to provide instructors and volunteers to teach computer classes there and maintain the equipment. I had a meeting with Christina Collazo, the Director of a non-profit, Centro de Aprendizaje ¡Sí Se Puede! that serves this church and the surrounding community. She agreed that the answer was simple. We will dedicate this learning center to Bruno Knaapen.

Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together. When we announced the acquisition two years ago, we said that we were committed to cross-platform innovation—that we’d “continue to offer stand-alone versions of ESP that run on Linux and UNIX,” and that we would provide updates to these versions to address customer concerns and add new features. Over the last two years, we’ve done just that. We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models.

LXer Feature: 07-Feb-2010

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination of an illegitimate patent on voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) that could cripple the adoption of new VoIP technologies. A company named Acceris Communications Technologies, now C2 Communications Technologies, was awarded the bogus patent for hardware, software, and processes for implementing VoIP using analog telephones as endpoints -- covering many telephone calls made over the Internet. EFF and the law firm Fenwick & West LLP filed a reexamination request showing that both a prior patent and published reference materials described the underlying technology long before Acceris made its claim. Today the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted EFF's reexamination request, ruling that there were substantial new questions of patentability.

If you have enjoyed our collection of top 50 Linux quotes of all time, I'm sure you would love these funny computer-related quotes that I have put together. Although some of which are pretty old already, they can still tickle a geek's funny bone. Now get ready and enjoy this compilation of my top 50 funny computer quotes..

The magic SysRq key is an old tip to be used to recover from a frozen system, it is advised to be used when the system absolutely locks up - freeze.

Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop's graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.

I have looked around the way to find the IP address for Xen guest without login to guest. There were couple of posts and Xen FAQ which list some methods. The following code is very similar to Xen FAQ post in Network section.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) is a modified version of Ubuntu specially for the netbooks. The latest version of UNR runs Ubuntu Karmic in the backend, but the interface has been heavily customized to make it looks/functions good in small screen. Recently, I installed UNR on my netbook (as a replacement for WinXP). While I like the interface, I find that there are still many places that can be improved for better usability and performance. Here I will highlight several of my own customizations.

I'm sure some of you would love to install and use Photoshop on your Linux box. So while I prefer using GIMP, I will still show you how to install Adobe Photoshop inside Linux with the help of Wine (not the alcoholic drink). On this tutorial, I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" and Photoshop CS4.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Android is the name given to a mobile operating system using a customised version of the Linux kernel. It was first released in late 2008. The platform enables developers to write code in the Java language, controlling the device via Java libraries developed by Google.

X@FOSDEM is taking place at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. Nicolai Hahnle and Daniel Stone provided talks on R300 GLSL compilation and X11 and its problems, respectively. Intel's Eric Anholt also ended up giving a very brief talk on the Cairo-GL project. Luc Verhaegen is now starting to talk on cleaning/integrating the Linux graphics stack.

I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week. I got the original G1 phone from google when it came out, and I hardly ever used it. Why? I generally hate phones - they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever - and a cellphone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are. Which is not a good thing.

Look Ma – It’s one thing to think of yourself on top of the world but if you work in an Internet-based universe some folks just won’t let you be in 100 percent control. Dealing in different countries requires a solid understanding/appreciation of “their” view of the world. It is a shock to many, but Google did not develop the Internet. It may also come as a shock to Eric, Jerry, Sergey that they are not the Internet..

LTSP-Cluster can scale up to several thousands thin clients providing an enterprise-class infrastructure (load balancing, high availability, central management, monitoring) as well as large-scale remote access (Citrix like) for thousands of users at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary equivalent using open source technologies.

You can capture video of all of the amazing things happening on your desktop with one of Linux’s many screencasting applications. These programs are perfect for creating demonstrations for blogs and tutorials, and for illustrating projects with more than just still images.

If truth be told, few inventions are really worth patenting. Time and again, surveys show that in both America and Europe companies rate superior sales and service, lead time and secrecy as far more important than patents when it comes to profiting from innovation. And, although applying for patents is relatively cheap, the cost of maintaining them can be horrendous. If the idea behind a patent has any commercial merit, it will attract imitators-and the inventor must be prepared to defend it in the courts. In a majority of cases, the cost of litigation will far exceed any revenue the inventor may subsequently earn from royalties or licensing...

I have spent two days with my new laptop, the LC2210Si from LinuxCertified. Why did I order this laptop? It is one of many companies, known and less-known, who offer their hardware with Linux installed, instead of a version of Microsoft's Windows. You can read about the beginning of my research and these companies in my previous blog, “Buying a Linux Laptop ...”

For those of you who use GIMP, you know it is a really great alternative to Photoshop. Like any program, free or not, there is always room for improvement. Plugins are a an easy way to add functionality. GIMP has two different types of plugins, Script-fu and Python-fu. Right out of the box, you can add Script-fu plugins. To add Python based plugins, there is some additional steps and add-ons needed.

Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom. Flashrom allows users to perform BIOS, EFI, coreboot, or firmware flashes without having to undergo sophisticated boot procedures that require bootable floppy disks/CD-ROMs or even opening the computer's casing. We first featured flashrom here in an article entitled BIOS flashing comes to Linux at last. If you have no idea what flashrom is, that article can help you grasp the basics.

TestDrive is an Ubuntu application that is especially designed for non-technical users to easily download and run the latest Ubuntu development daily snapshot in a virtual machine.

Linus has taken some time off from playing with his new phone to release the 2.6.33-rc7prepatch. "I have to admit that I wish we had way fewer regressions listed by this time... But we've certainly fixed a few things, and it's been a week, so here's -rc7. I wish I could say that it's the last -rc, but I strongly doubt that, and we'll almost certainly have at least one more." See the full changelog for the details.

The GNOME Journal has posted a new set of articles, including an interview with Jonathan Thomas (OpenShot video editor creator), a Banshee update, a summary of the 2009 Boston Summit, an overview of PiTiVi, and a look at writing multimedia applications with Vala.

Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market. Luc has worked on support for flashing the BIOS on ATI graphics cards, native VGA text mode support, and other work to help the CoreBoot project. Today at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc Verhaegen is about to give a talk on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS.

From the Keep it Speedy dept.:
According to the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix Blueprint, the Ubuntu community have decided to drop OpenOffice from the default installation of Ubuntu Netbook Edition for the upcoming Lucid Lynx release, atleast for now. Now documents will be opened by default in Google Docs.

...The developers have been removing applications that are irrelevant on a netbook. While document editing is clearly a not irrelevant on a netbook, the developers feel that with netbooks being used mostly for internet related works, Google Docs will suffice.

Exaile 0.3.1 beta (a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python) has been released today and it's a preview of the new 0.3.1 version but should still be pretty stable to use already! The new Exaile version finally adds a long awaited equalizer, but also includes a revamped and much more powerful tag editor (ExFaso) as well as some other new features.

As you may remember from my previous post, I simply wanted to import three spreadsheets into an MS-Access equivalent, use the "Query By Example" (QBE) mode to create a simple report and export the result to another spreadsheet. I did the whole thing in MS-Access as well and it took me about twenty minutes. This time I decided to give Kexi 1.1.3 and Knoda 0.8.3 a go. Not that I really needed to, but just to see if they were up to it if I needed to execute another odd job like this.

The openSUSE Project has reached its first milestone for the upcoming 11.3 release, due in July. Milestone 1 is the first of seven planned between now and late May. The development team said its primary goal is to test build interactions between newly-added features. The first milestone features version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, development version 2.29.5 of GNOME, and the first release candidate of KDE 4.4 desktop environment. The release also includes an openSUSE debut of a new desktop option: LXDE, short for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LXDE is designed for computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks because it uses less CPU and RAM than other environments, the developers said.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle. Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum."

Using Linux in the public on a daily basis has made me realize that there is a right way and a wrong way to promote Linux to those who are unfamiliar with it. What is the right way to promote Linux you ask? Simple: You don't.

In the field of mathematical software packages, applications such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica, and Maplesoft's Maple system instantly spring to mind. These are both highly popular, proprietary, commercial, integrated mathematical software environments. Other types of mathematical software packages generally receive much less publicity.

Canonical announced a few hours ago the immediate availability of a new Linux kernel security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The update also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and it patches 10 important security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts. Kuhn, who plays a major role in the SFLC's GPL enforcement efforts, contends that Black Duck's patent is far from novel and describes techniques that he has been using for licensing compliance analysis for over a decade.

The hiring of Linux-savvy and revenue-minded exec-slash-blogger Matt Asay as the new chief operating officer of Canonical looks like a very good — and telling — move for the Isle of Man- (really London-but-don't-tell-anyone) based company that oversees the growing-by-leaps-bounds-and-all-other-ways Ubuntu Linux distribution and surrounding universe.