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openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 29
We are pleased to announce:
Issue 29 of openSUSE Weekly News is out! [0]
In this week’s issue:
* openSUSE 11.1 Roadmap
* Novell Client for Linux Public Beta for openSUSE 10.3
* People of openSUSE: Jan-Simon Möller
* John Anderson: Find duplicate files by content not name
* Lukas Ocilka: Package Search and One Click Install in YaST
* Miguel de Icaza: [...]
Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS released
The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS, the
first maintenance update to Ubuntu’s 8.04 LTS release.
In all, over 200 updates have been integrated, and updated installation
media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded
after installation. These include security updates and corrections for
other high-impact bugs, with [...]
Sourceforge Community Choice Finalists: Some Curious Choices
The Open Road: "Sourceforge.net has announced its 2008 Community Choice finalists, and includes a wide range of projects that I'm seeing for the first time..."
KDE Developer Quits
Practical Technology: "Being grumpy is almost part of the job description for developers..."
Home automation in GNU/Linux
Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.
New Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Search?
Microsoft is preparing a new bid for Yahoo's search business and has approached other media companies about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo's breakup, The Wall Street Journal said. Microsoft has already held talks with Time Warner and News Corp. among others, the paper quoted people familiar with the talks as saying.
A User's Freedom to Choose
Editor's Note: Lots of rancor about KDE 4 lately; but is it really worth the fuss?
Kaffeine 0.8.6 Review - KDE Video Player
Up to now I reviewed SMPlayer and 11 video players for Linux, and in this article I'll take a look at Kaffeine 0.8.6, the last version for KDE 3.x, and also a well-known video player for KDE. When it comes to video players, Kaffeine is my favourite, several reasons for it being that it plays anything I feed it with, it has good subtitle support and the interface it provides is clean and simple to use. Well, the interface is more a matter of taste, since most of the video players have it the same, no matter if they are for KDE or GNOME. But I prefer the players which only use a single window over the the ones who come with a main window for controls and menus and another one for playing the movie itself. As I said, only a matter of taste.
An introduction to the Kismet packet sniffer
Kismet is a wireless "detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system," and one of the growing list of essential open source tools for computer network security professionals. Kismet runs on any POSIX-compliant platform, including Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD, but Linux is the preferred platform because it has more unencumbered RFMON-capable drivers than any of the others. Monitor mode ability is critical to fully utilizing Kismet, because it allows Kismet to examine all the packets it can hear, not just those of whatever access point (AP) -- if any -- you are currently associated with. Almost as important to police, intelligence agencies, and black hat hackers is the fact that it allows Kismet to work passively, intercepting and collecting packets without leaving any fingerprints of its own behind.
Microsoft Rebuilds Open Source Sandcastle
Netstat -vat: "Sam Ramji who runs Microsoft's Open Source Lab has now confirmed on his blog that Sandcastle is now set to re-appear on CodePlex as a fully compliant open source project..."
Virtual Hosting With Proftpd And MySQL (Incl. Quota) On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.
How to write a thorough review of a Linux distribution
I have never written a review of a Linux distribution, but I've read more than I can count, and many of them have been maddeningly incomplete and not worth the time it took to read them. Here's a list of items you need to talk about in order to write a thorough review, covering every aspect of the distribution from the initial download to the final recommendation and everything in between.
In Note To Judge, Hans Reiser Asks For New Lawyer
Threat Level: "Convicted murderer Hans Reiser has asked his trial judge to appoint him a new lawyer, ahead of a July 9 sentencing hearing..."
Google gives away free Web application security scanner
Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications, such as errors that could allow a cross-site scripting attack or cause caching problems.
Linux Configure Netconsole Kernel Module To Log Messages Over UDP Network
Linux can be configured to log dmesg output to another system via network using syslog. It is done using kernel level networking stuff ia UDP port 514. There is module called netconsole which logs kernel printk messages over udp allowing debugging of problem where disk logging fails and serial consoles are impractical. Most modern distro has this netconsole as a built-in module. netconsole initializes immediately after NIC cards.
Michael Robertson, Where's the Cash?
Kevin Carmony: "I have been contacted by several Linspire employees and shareholders, asking me what the Linspire asset sale to Xandros means..."
OpenOffice.org extension will add PDF editing
Easy PDF editing is coming to OpenOffice.org, but you'll have to be patient for a few months. Recently posted to the OpenOffice.org Extensions site, the Sun PDF Import extension (SPI) is only in beta, and only works with recent developer builds of OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September release. Right now, the quality of the final release is anybody's guess, but the beta's capabilities fall squarely in the middle of the available PDF import tools.
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
A week ago we looked at the brand-new ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card under Linux. This graphics card launch was unlike any in ATI's history where with the introduction of a brand new product generation, Linux users were greeted by same-day Linux support -- both through their proprietary fglrx driver and with the open-source xf86-video-ati driver. In addition, some of the board partners are opting to put Tux on their product packaging and shipping the Linux drivers on their product CDs. As we had also exclusively shared, AMD will soon be approaching a feature parity between the Windows and Linux drivers. Today we're publishing our complete review of the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB as well as delivering additional benchmarks from the Radeon HD 4850 under Linux, of course.
Don’t confuse bad Linux support for bad Linux
Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here’s why it makes good Linux techies [...]
IOzone for filesystem performance benchmarking
IOzone lets you benchmark your filesystem performance, seeing how well record IO occurs for files of various sizes. With IOzone you can see more detailed information than the read, write, and rewrite figures that Bonnie++ reports. IOzone is great at detecting areas where file IO might not be performing as well as expected. IOzone is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click install, in multiverse for Ubuntu Hardy, and is in the standard Fedora 9 repositories.
