Linux in the news

Lexmark's loss is everyone's gain (ZDNet)

ZDNet UK comments on the appeals court ruling in the Lexmark v. Static Control DMCA case. "The court said that 'lock-out' codes in software that's designed to control or limit interoperability is not covered by the original-expression intentions of copyright law. Furthermore, said the court, SCC's reverse engineering was not a circumvention of Lexmark's Toner Loader Program but a replacement of it, so even if the code had been covered by copyright, SCC's implementation would have been allowed under the fair-use doctrine."

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Windows v Linux security: the real facts (Register)

The Register does some myth busting on the subject of Windows vs. Linux security. "Myth Statistics 'prove' that Windows has fewer, less serious security issues than Linux, that Windows issues are always fixed, and that they are fixed faster.
Fact Quite a broad collection of 'facts' exist in this category, but what they have in common is the (actual) fact that they are usually based on single metrics, on a single aspect of measuring security."

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LinuxWorld London: Sandals and suits in symbiosis (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports from LinuxWorld, London. "In the .ORG village, the heart and soul of the conference, the sandals were similarly serious. Despite being squashed into small corridors between stands, giving the effect of a perpetually busy village without the need for visitors, spirits were high and exhibitors were looking more professional than ever. The Association for Free Software even briefed its helpers on the association's activities, issues that people might raise, and how to give a good spiel to visitors. According to AFFS committee member Alex Hudson, the AFFS is working on making its standard of communication more professional, though he hesitated to use that dirty word."

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SCO stock falls to lowest price since it filed IBM suit (SL Tribune)

The Salt Lake Tribune notes SCO's steady decline. "Company spokesman Blake Stowell, citing corporate restrictions, declined comment on the stock price. He also would not discuss SCO's plunging revenues or uncertainty about the Unix-Linux courtroom battles, possible factors in the company's declining fortunes on the Nasdaq exchange."

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Dell to tighten Linux ties with Novell pact (News.com)

News.com reports that Dell will offer Novell's SuSE Linux factory-installed on new servers. "Dell has long offered market-leading Red Hat Linux as an operating system that can be installed in the computer maker's factories. But second-place SuSE has only been available as a special option for customers willing to pay for a customized system. Now the Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker is expected to elevate SuSE to Red Hat's level, sources familiar with the plan said."

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NoSoftwarePatents.com for Europe (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers a corporate collaboration against European software patents. "Red Hat, MySQL AB, and three German Web hosting companies have announced a partnership with software developer Florian Muller to support NoSoftwarePatents.com, an organization that hopes to stop the European Union from granting patents to what Muller calls a "cartel of patent superpowers" whose aim is to stifle competition."

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Open Source Wall Street

Analyst Dion Cornett publishes a weekly newsletter called Open Source Wall Street which looks at publicly-traded companies working with free software. The October 25 issue (PDF format) is available; it looks at IBM's results in China, Russia, India, and Brazil; competition with Microsoft on the desktop; VMWare; JBoss; and the Financial Times article. "One of the more interesting aspects of this article is that SUNW's president agreed with it enough to include it in his blog. Herein lies our primary criticism of SUNW, and the reason we do not believe that SUNW will outperform its sector: Mr. Schwartz does not appear to understand that [Intel's] profits would be lower were it not for a robust Linux operating system that facilitates migration from RISC to x86."

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Geolocation by IP Address (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal posits that determining geographic locations based on Internet IP address can be useful. "Geolocation by IP address is the technique of determining a user's geographic latitude, longitude and, by inference, city, region and nation by comparing the user's public Internet IP address with known locations of other electronically neighboring servers and routers. This article presents some of the reasons for and benefits of using geolocation through IP address, as well as several techniques for applying this technology to an application, Web site or user community."

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Secure Your Wireless with IPSec (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet looks at one way to secure a wireless connection. "Wireless is practically wide open for anyone with a laptop, a wireless card, and the appropriate set of tools. WEP is defeatable. MAC addresses are sniffable and spoofable. In short, you need the next level: IPsec."

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OOo Off the Wall: Floating Windows (Linux Journal)

Bruce Byfield explores the floating windows in OpenOffice.org. "Floating windows are one of the keys to using OpenOffice.org efficiently. In the same way that the design of OpenOffice.org nudges users towards styles and templates, it also leads them towards using floating windows to manage and apply resources."

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Using a Linux-based home recording studio (NewsForge)

Dave Fancella makes some music in a Linux-based home recording studio on NewsForge. "Open source software has been available for multi-track recording for some time, but only in recent months has it finally matured to a point where it can handle both entry-level and production-level tasks. In the past you had to spend thousands of dollars to be able to record, which put recording demo tapes, extended play records, and long play records well beyond the budget of a hobbyist or struggling band. Nowadays we have good quality open source software for recording and the Internet as a distribution mechanism. The cost to record is literally the same as the price of your computer and the time spent recording."

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Critical Server Needs and the Linux Kernel (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at Linux kernel features needed for mission-critical server environments. "This article provides some examples of features and mechanisms needed in the Linux kernel for server nodes operating in mission-critical environments, such as telecom, where reliability, performance, availability and security are extremely important. Here, we discuss four such features: a cluster communication protocol, support for multiple-FIB, a module to verify digital signatures of binaries at run time and an efficient low-level asynchronous event mechanism."

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Deploying a VPN with PKI (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet presents a tutorial on deploying a VPN using OpenVPN and OpenSSL. "The tutorial implements a certificate-based security infrastructure using OpenSSL and uses this to secure both OpenVPN client and server endpoints. We will highlight two great new features to appear in OpenVPN-2.0 (now in beta) that will make it a good choice for any VPN--single-instance server mode and certificate revocation list support."

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Reducing OS Boot Times for In-Car Computer Applications, Part III (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal goes for five-second boot times on in-car computers. "In our earlier articles, we compared the unnecessarily slow boot process to that of a car radio. The car radio boot times have climbed from nearly instant in the 1980s to several seconds today, but they still are rapid enough to be hardly noticeable. If you watch a modern radio right after you start the engine, you may see it do a small power-on self test, flash all the lights on the unit--much as dashboards in many cars do--and then power on the amplifier, producing sound within a second or two. We decided to use the radio as our benchmark of rapid usability and appliance-like behavior. We attempted to minimize the following two variables: time from computer power-on to video and time from computer power-on to audio."

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A week in the BSD CLI (NewsForge)

Jem Matzan spends a week exploring OpenBSD's command line interface. "I already knew that I could do pretty much anything from the command line if I was willing to sit down, read manual pages, and learn -- or if I really had to. To prove it, recently I forced myself to use only the CLI for a week. I ended up learning a lot more than just a few command line arguments."

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Postfix for the Linux business desktop (NewsForge)

Marcel Gagné looks at the Postfix mail transport agent in a NewsForge article. "The advantages of Postfix include enhanced security, relatively simple configuration, and excellent performance. Postfix's increased security comes partly from its modular design. Each process handles some portion of the mail delivery cycle and none of these processes run setuid root. As has been observed, Postfix doesn't even trust itself."

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iRiver ships Linux portable media players (Register)

The Register looks at a new series of Linux-based Portable Media Player (PMP) devices from iRiver. "The PMP-120 and PMP-140, each equipped with a 20GB and a 40GB 1.8in hard drive, respectively, provide MP3, ASF, WMA and WAV audio playback, along with MPEG 4, AVI, DivX and XviD video support. There's still photography storage and slide-show features, too, and the machines also provide an FM radio and voice recording facilities."

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Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

We know some LWN readers must be thinking: "we haven't seen any good FUD for a little while." For those readers, here's a low-clue piece by a "distinguished service provessor of law" in the Financial Times, which really should know better. "The bottom line is that idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul. The open source movement may avoid these difficulties for outside contributors who work for credit and glory. But how do the insiders, such as Linus Torvalds, cash out of the business that they built? And in the interim, how do they attract capital and personnel needed to expand the business? Traditional companies have evolved their capital structures for good reason." (Thanks to Neil Sheed).

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Brazilian government finances development of open source HIS (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews looks into the financing of an open-source health information system by the Brazilian government. " Approximately 60 thousand US dollars awarded for open source Care2x. This milestone for Care2x acceptance in Brazil was made by a federal supporting agency called FINEP of the brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT). The financial support was awarded to the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research (IPCT) of a large southern brazilian university PUCRS in partnership with the Alfamais.com group."

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How to be a Free Software zealot (NewsForge)

Robin 'Roblimo' Miller has some fun with free software zealotry. "This is when you either pass or fail the zealot/radical test. If you are an advocate, you want to convert someone. You speak to them on their level, you don't sneer at them, and you give them good reasons why they should hear you out. And perhaps, sooner or later, you get them to (at least partially) agree with you."

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