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11th May 2007
10th May 2007
9th May 2007

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News Alert


Linux and Open Source News for 10th May 2007

Mandriva Download

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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Parsix Size: 7.06 MB Status: 2 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 22:51:33


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Debian Size: 1.31 GB Status: 1 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 19:35:36


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Damn Small Size: 49.29 MB Status: 7 seeders and 10 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 15:12:56


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ultimate Boot CD Size: 94.88 MB Status: 63 seeders and 42 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 14:38:00


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ultimate Boot CD Size: 87.12 MB Status: 55 seeders and 26 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 14:36:15


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: ParallelKnoppix Size: 643.59 MB Status: 2 seeders and 3 leechers Added: 2007-05-10 13:04:57


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Source: ubuntustudio

The long-awaited Ubuntu Studio 7.04, a variant of Ubuntu aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast, has arrived: "The Ubuntu Studio team is proud to announce its first release: 7.04 for Intel i386-compatible processors. With this release, which you can download for DVD in little over .


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Source: blag

Jeff Moe has announced the release of BLAG Linux And GNU 60001, an updated version of the Fedora-based distribution for the desktop: "The first update to the BLAG 60k series, BLAG 60001, has been released. This is just a 'roll up' of recent package updates, including an update .


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Source: parallelknoppix

Michael Creel has announced the availability of the first 64-bit edition of ParallelKnoppix, a KNOPPIX-based live CD that provides an easy way of setting up a cluster of machines for parallel processing: "Big news - the first release candidate of a 64-bit edition of ParallelKnoppix is out. This .


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Source: dreamlinux

Jo o Batista Esteves has announced the third release candidate of Dreamlinux 2.2, Multimedia GL edition: "The Dreamlinux Team is pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate 3 of the 2.2 Multimedia GL edition. This will be the last test before the final version. Changelog: new Engage .



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Source: Linux Today

Desktop Linux: "Scientific Linux, a project based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 source packages enhanced with a variety of additional applications, released its v5.0 i386 live DVD on May 7. The SL5 live DVD features a 2.6.18 kernel, includes all client/workstation RPMs, and uses GNOME as its default desktop."


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Source: Linux Today

Linux Devices: "Artila Electronics is shipping a passively cooled ARM9-based system targeting applications such as industrial control and building automation. The Matrix-520 is based on a 180MHz Atmel SoC (system-on-chip), includes lots of I/O ports, and comes with an open Linux development environment and a stout metal case."


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxLookup: "Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced that 12 new customers have signed up to take advantage of the companies’ collaboration. These customers, from around the globe, are 1blu, Arsys, Fujitsu Services Oy, Gordon Food Service, Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., hi5 Networks Inc., Host Europe, Nationwide, PRISACOM SA, Reed Elsevier, Save Mart Supermarkets, and state of California, Department of Fish and Game."


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Source: Linux Today

SearchEnterpriseLinux: "Often, the first indication that you've browsed a malicious site is strange behavior that shows your host has been compromised. Or worse, someone is co-opting the credentials they have harvested through the exploitation of your browser. There are ways to protect yourself of course: anti-virus, anti-spyware and personal firewalls being three of the best examples. Check out Firekeeper, a new tool for detecting and protecting against online threats, which has recently been released."


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Source: Linux Today

SearchEnterpriseLinux: " it was the most inspirational and uplifting keynote I’ve seen kick off an IT conference in the past three years."


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "Although OpenOffice.org doesn't allow you to create self-running Impress presentations, there is a tool that can help you with that. Using IndeView, you can convert your Impress presentations into a self-contained package that can run off a CD or DVD on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."


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Source: Linux Today

PR Newswire: "Sun Microsystems, Inc., today announced the release of a
fully buildable Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK(TM)) version for Java
Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) to the OpenJDK(TM) Community as free
software under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2)."


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Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva 2007 Spring Free (Mandriva 2007.1) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."


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Source: Linux Today

How Software is Built: "Perhaps surprisingly, access to the source and the right to distribute derivative works were not considered important by most respondents."


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Source: Linux Today

AlphaWorks: " ThinkPlace is a Web application for facilitating innovation through idea generation, collaboration, and refinement. ThinkPlace is unlike a suggestion box; when used within a company, it shares ideas within the entire company."


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Source: Linux Today

Andreas Otto: "I have written a new software called libmsgque which brings the features of MS PowerShell to Linux."


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Source: Linux Today

Polish Linux: "I’d like to proudly present ImageMagick – a set of tools for creating and processing bitmap images. This article explains how ImageMagick can help you perform many image-manipulation tasks easily and quickly using… the console. Yes, the same black-box hackers use to do nasty stuff :)"


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Source: Linux Today

Mandriva Club: "I was used to Nero from Windows and did not find anything even remotely as powerful. I wanted to burn mp3 files to an Audio CD without having to do all that manual conversion stuff (today even Linux users probably don't know how to do that ;). Since there was no proper tool and I just had gathered some QT experience through a university project I though "Why don't you try it yourself". And so K3b was born."


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxPlanet: "The model of the online social marketplace stepped into the enterprise Linux space today, after the launch of Red Hat Exchange. Think Facebook for enterprise products, with a touch of direct-sales thrown in, and you have a pretty good picture of the new RHX "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "This year's show already has a different feel to it than the first two. The crowd is larger, for one thing. The event is a complete sell-out -- so much so that Red Hat had to stop taking registrations. Attendees have booked all the available rooms at the Sheraton and are spilling over into two additional hotels, and Red Hat is running shuttles between the hotels."


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Source: Linux Today

Click: "Blogging from the command line without a GUI -- and no e-mail gateway -- can be done almost."


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Source: Linux Today

eWeek: "That's the question Ian Murdock, chief open source platform strategist at Sun Microsystems Inc., posed in a session he chaired at Sun's CommunityOne Day on May 7 prior to the opening of the JavaOne conference."


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Source: Linux Today

Network World: "For any corporate wireless infrastructure to remain secure, using 802.1X for authentication is a must - after all, it provides much more granular control of authentication credentials and can provide accounting for wireless LAN usage."


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "What does the job of a security response team member entail? Cox says that the team is accountable for ensuring that vulnerabilities are addressed. "This involves a large number of things; from working with researchers and monitoring to find out about issues that affect us, through triage and investigation, to oversight during the release process.""


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Source: Linux Today

Tectonic: "Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) has begun to roll out a basic computer skills course covering open source software at its Soshonguve campus."


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxInsider: "Technology isn't cheap. Research and development of computer software takes money, and that's something few starry-eyed startups have when they begin thinking about the ones, zeros and dollar signs of the future."


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Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Networking Planet: " it turns your buggy, inflexible, inexpensive wireless router into a rock-solid routin' powerhouse, with all manner of useful services: name services, firewalling, port forwarding, RADIUS authentication, Ethernet bridging, IPv6 support, QoS, SMB/CIFS automount, and Internet access controls."


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a Web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities."


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Source: Linux Today

The Guardian: "But there remains an unanswered question: what will be Sun's relationship to the leading free software project, the GNU/Linux operating system, given that it has its own competing solution in the form of OpenSolaris?"


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Source: Linux Today

NixCraft: "It is possible to mount your remote filesystem as a local filesystem on your Red hat/CentOS Linux system using sshfs."



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Source: Slashdot: Linux

Sits writes "Chris Blizzard blogged from the Red Hat summit that an ATI marketing spokesman said, from the stage, that ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it. Does this mean ATI will finally resolve alleged agpgart misappropriation, and fast track the release of open source 2D drivers on its latest cards while releasing specifications for its mid-range cards? Or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

AlexGr writes to recommend an account of a meeting a couple of months back of representatives from more than 100 software companies discussing the state of open source software. The outcome is outlined in a 16-page report, 2007 Open Source Think Tank: The Future of Commercial Open Source (PDF). Among the surprising conclusions: participants noted a growing similarity in methods between open source and proprietary software development. They predicted some kind of convergence, where the best of both approaches gets adopted in each camp.Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

Placid writes "The BBC has up an article detailing the 'Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded' project which was announced by Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu's CTO, on the Ubuntu developers mailing list. Zimmerman stated that 'These devices place new demands on open-source software and require innovative graphical interfaces, improved power management and better responsiveness.' According to the article, Intel will have their finger in the pie too, as they've recently announced a prototype device running Ubuntu. Part of the project's goal is to maximise the power saving abilities of a planned low-energy chip codenamed Silverthorn. The chip will be just one-seventh the size of normal chips, and consume only 10% of the power of existing processor. What does this mean for projects such as OpenMoko? Healthy competition, or the beginning of the end?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

techie writes "MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications. The author writes, 'Is there really the level of competition in the open source world that we see in the closed source world? This is something that has been stuck in my mind lately as I have been told so many times by closed source developers that by opening the code you are creating your own competition. Today, I'm here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it's false.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

lazyeye writes "Keyboard Magazine has an in-depth article about the state of music production on Linux. While it does introduce Linux to the average musician, the article does get into some of the available music applications and music-oriented Linux distributions out there. From the opening paragraph 'You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

untouchableForce writes "Dell has announced that it will join forces with Microsoft and Novell to "make it easier for the Windows operating system and the [ ] Linux [operating] system to work together." This is not overly surprising given Dell's good relationship with Microsoft, and since they already sell SUSE Linux on some of their servers, but it is likely to put a stop to the OSS community's celebration of them distributing Ubuntu. The debate over partnership between Microsoft and Novell has been drawn out since the deal was signed and for some this will add additional fuel to the fire but shouldn't the OSS community be reading this as an acceptance of Company's acknowledgment of Linux?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.



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Source: ONLamp.com

Hey, it’s that time again. If you have an idea that you think would be beneficial for the Perl community, please check out our Call for Proposals. Get paid for open source work!


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Source: ONLamp.com

Hong Feng is a software developer and passionate free software advocate of many talents. He’s based in mainland China (although he gets around a lot) and he has a mission to help Chinese programmers make great contributions to free and open source software. I got to know him after he founded O’Reilly’s Beijing office in 1997, although he is now independent.
He’s developed several courses and is working on a 500-page book, aimed at both beginners and graduate students, that is meant to help them develop the discipline to be competent hackers. I can’t read the poem, but he tells me explores not only the major topics in computer science but such intellect-building activities as GO playing and the I-Ching, which presents original thoughts on “how to think about ancient Chinese intelligence in conjunction with modern math and technologies.”
Hong Feng’s approach fascinates me for combining a wide swath of influences with a joy in Chinese culture and pedagogical practices. He’s even written his personal story of development up as a poem, and set it to a melody from the time of the Great Cultural Revolution to his computer teaching. I can’t understand the song because I don’t know Chinese, but it’s available as an MP3 file.
He brings in the I-Ching by explaining that it was effectively a computer–designed very systematically–used to compute survival methods and determine their degree of luck. He has discovered four basic categories of modern physics in the 64 diagrams of the I-Ching: scope (time and space), mass, energy, and information. The I -Ching can be viewed as a theory of relativity concerning transformations among these four categories.
Modern math tools and physics research may help us rediscover the I-Ching’s structure and methodology, and its ancient intelligence can help us to free ourselves from constraints we have (implicitly or explicitly) placed upon ourselves. Some of the research Hong Feng cites include:


Jury Smirnov’s theorem concerning the metrizable measure of the topological space, discovered in the early 1950s, which describes the relationship between metrizable space with static boundaries and topological space with dynamic or floating boundaries


Einstein’s E=mc2 for transformations between mass and energy


Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information


But the Chinese from the very beginning treated all these in a unified manner, according to Hong Feng.
His Hackerdom Training Program is summarized online in Chinese and English. The course, and his recommended book list–much of which will be familiar to well-read programmers, but some of which could generate interesting discussion–ranges freely over system and application programming, scripting languages, third-generation languages, assembly language, software engineering texts, and books about the social impacts of open source. Hong Feng has structured it along nine degrees, like the levels of mastery in the GO.


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Source: ONLamp.com

I should listen more to Brian Aker. He gave me a tip at least two years ago that I should visit Linuxfest Northwest. He was right.

This free conference expanded to two days this year, with nearly a hundred talks. The latest estimate I’ve seen is that around 900 people attended. That’s impressive!

There are four talk slots per day, so if you go all weekend you can only catch eight full talks. I heard about everything from building a persistent file system on a USB drive for Ubuntu to LiveJournal’s scaling strategy to the open sourcing of Second Life’s code to the history and intent of copyright. Imagine a computer lab full of people from age three to sixty-plus all building their own Linux-capable thumb drives.

I didn’t expect that, and I’m supremely glad I went.

Of course, the Linden Lab and Silicon Mechanics-sponsored party in the American Museum of Radio and Electricity didn’t hurt, either. (A working theremin! A 75 year-old car phone! Free food and drink!)

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest next year (or can be), go to this conference.

Thank you to the founders, volunteers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees. I’ll be back.


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Source: ONLamp.com

Here’s a quote from p. 586 of one of our books:

Polymorphism is when a subclass “stands in” for its superclass.

10 points to everyone who can tell me what’s right about that statement as well as what’s wrong with it.


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Source: ONLamp.com

A few days ago, April 24 2007 to be exact, I performed a search on apple.com and out of curiosity, performed another search with HTML characters to see if they would be echoed back into the HTML. In other words, I was trying to see if apple.com’s search feature was susceptible to XSS (Cross Site Scripting). I found one attack vector and immediately alerted product-security@apple.com. A XSS issue on apple.com is of significant risk because it can be exploited by attackers to steal data from users that are signed on to apple.com.
On April 25, 2007, I received a thank-you email from Apple letting me know that they were investigating the issue. The email also stated: “Because of the potentially sensitive nature of security vulnerabilities, we ask that this information remain between you and Apple while we investigate it further” and included a case number.
On April 27, 2007, I received another email from Apple letting me know that the XSS vulnerability had been fixed. They asked me for permission to acknowledge me for alerting them of the issue at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302530.
[NOTE: When I discovered the XSS issue, I noticed there were other components of the design of the Apple website that contained symptoms of bad design (in terms of security), so I won’t be surprised if apple.com is vulnerable to other attack vectors. If I were responsible for security at Apple, I would initiate a source code security analysis of the apple.com web application immediately.]
I want to publicly applaud Apple for handling this in a prompt and courteous way. Having reported vulnerabilities to various companies in the past, I have to say that my personal experience with Apple was quite refreshing.



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Source: Linux DevCenter

For those of you who (like me) separate the root partition & user data, and don’t bother backing up the former because it’s a standard install & therefore easy to recreate: note that whilst this is in general true, it may not be in the case of /root.
I at least have a tendency to leave a handful of Useful Scripts there, in particular in the case of server machines. It is annoying to realise that the death of Machine X has also resulted in the loss of the Useful Script you had spent some time developing.
Conclusions I have drawn from this:
1. Back up /root.
2. Consider keeping the Useful Scripts more centrally, even if they are machine-specific in a couple of instances (I do this already with everything else I am not sure why I haven’t thought to do it for these. Some peculiar form of blind spot, evidently.)
In a further relevant note: the rescue mode of the Debian etch SPARC CD works fine, albeit quite slowly. The only real issue is that the cursor fails to show up on any of the screens so choosing the correct option is to some extent a matter of guesswork (most irritating when your guess results in hitting the “Reboot now” option rather than the “Choose another root partition” option). Useful Scripts now safely rescued, however; and backed up.


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Source: Linux DevCenter

If you define the problem as “A product 100% binary, bug for bug, compatible with Excel that releases new versions at the same time as Excel” you kinda stop even the hope of migrating someday in the future, because that ain’t possible.

— jmorris2 on LWN’s “A think tank’s view of free software”

Proprietary software companies such as Microsoft have their own source code and they have unencumbered access to read any free software source code they wish—without incurring any legal obligation to distribute their source code. If they truly wanted interoperability, they could pursue it anytime.



Updated: Fri May 11 23:55:03 2007


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