Linux in the news

Sununu Wants to Squelch FCC Flag Raising (InternetNews.com)

InternetNews.com describes proposed legislation to be introduced by representative John Sununu which would prevent the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from imposing technology mandates - like the broadcast flag. "'Whether well-intentioned or not, the FCC has no business interfering in private industry to satisfy select special interests or to impose its own views,' Sununu said in a statement. 'My legislation will ensure that decisions about the design and development of products and services to meet FCC rules are made by technology experts, not government regulators.'"

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Novell tells court: For SCO bankruptcy is 'inevitable' and 'imminent' (Groklaw)

Groklaw has fun with Novell's latest filings in its suit against the SCO Group. "Now that Novell has been permitted to analyze the Agreements, it is apparent why SCO was hesitant to produce them: they are direct evidence of SCO’s wrongdoing. SCO’s breach of its fiduciary duty to fully inform Novell concerning the royalties it collected from Sun and Microsoft, when requested, can be no defense to Novell’s request for preliminary relief."

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MySQL changes license to avoid GPLv3 (Business Review Online)

Business Review Online covers plans by MySQL AB to delay the move to the GPLv3 license. "Here’s an announcement that almost got drowned out by festive cheer: MySQL has changed the license it uses for its open source database management system to avoid being forced to move to the forthcoming GPL v3. Kaj Arno, MySQL VP of community relations, revealed the license change on his blog, on December 22, noting that the license for MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 had changed from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv2 only". As he explained, this was “in order to make it an option, not an obligation for the company to move to GPLv3”." (Thanks to Francesco P. Lovergine.)

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Indian IT Services Organisation Inclining Towards Linux (SDA India)

SDA India reports on plans for a large deployment of Linux systems in Chennai, India. "In line with many A one European cities moving towards open source technology like Amsterdam, the southern India city of Chennai is also moving towards Linux. The state of Tamil Nadu, is deploying 32,600 Linux desktop systems and training 30,000 government officials. Forty-three open source-based servers are also on the way to support key Government applications."

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People Behind KDE: Eike Hein (KDE.News)

KDE.News has announced the latest interview in the People Behind KDE series. "In a brand new series of People Behind KDE we meet a coder from the KDE heartland, Germany who enables us to communicate with the global developer community through Konversation. Someone who is not satisfied with a static terminal window, tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Eike Hein."

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Blogging From Ubuntu Using Drivel (Ubuntu Geek)

Ubuntu Geek presents a tutorial on using Drivel under the Ubuntu distribution. "Drivel is a GNOME client for working with online journals, also known as weblogs or simply blogs. It retains a simple and elegant design while providing many powerful features."

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Fingerprinting the World's Mail Servers (O'Reilly)

Ken Simpson and Stas Bekman discuss a survey of the most popular mail server programs on the net, open-source software dominates the arena. "This summer, the sales staff at MailChannels came to the dev team with an urgent request: "Can you tell us which companies are running Sendmail? If we could know that, it would be so much easier to sell our Sendmail-compatible product." For those of us who understand the SMTP protocol, the answer was, of course, a resounding "Yes." Most mail servers announce their identity when you connect to them on TCP port 25. The dev team decided that this was a summer science project they just had to get on top of. We even gave the science project a name: PingedIn, and we hope to provide more dynamic content on our skeletal website."

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Delve into UNIX process creation (IBM developerWorks)

Sean Walberg explores UNIX process creation in an IBM developerWorks article. "Examine the life cycle of a process so that you can relate what you see happening on your system to what's going on within the kernel. System administrators must know how processes are created and destroyed within the UNIX® environment in order to understand how the system fits together and how to manage misbehaving processes. Similarly, developers must understand the UNIX processes model in order to write solid applications that run unattended and won't cause problems for system administrators."

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How to get a Windows tax refund (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at the process of getting some money back after buying a new computer with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. "If you buy a computer, you often pay for Microsoft Windows even if you didn't ask for it and aren't going to use it. This article shows you how to return your unused Windows license and get your money back, freeing yourself from the Windows tax. I recently purchased a new laptop computer from Dell. As a GNU/Linux user and believer in Free Software, I knew from the start that I wasn't going to run Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately, Dell didn't offer this laptop with Ubuntu or a no-OS option, so I tried getting my Windows refund from Dell after the purchase."

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Review: Exaile Media Player (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews the Exaile music player application. "Exaile is similar to Amarok, but it's based on GTK+ (the GIMP Toolkit), the same GUI toolkit GNOME uses, and thus it loads almost instantly on GNOME and integrates nicely with it. The first impression the program makes is that it's a clone of Amarok, at least from an interface point of view; if you're an Amarok user, you'll feel right at home."

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NuFW: Single sign-on meets firewall (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at NuFW. "Where NuFW steers away from commonplace firewalls is by bringing the notion of user identity to the firewall's security rules. With most firewalls, the rules on what network ports are enabled or disabled is determined by the computer's network address... With NuFW, the firewall permissions follow an authenticated user instead of a PC's address."

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Consolidate your radio streams with streamtuner (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Streamtuner. "Streamtuner is a point-and-click GUI browser for the thousands of Internet radio streams available today. It lets you play streams and manage your favorites in a single window -- like a Linux tuner for Internet radio. Streamtuner has a GTK 2.0 interface and is published under the revised BSD license. It lets you use plugins to browse and search popular portals including SHOUTcast and Icecast."

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Text email clients revisited (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews a number of text-based email clients in a Linux.com article. "Lately, I've been pining for the simplicity of a text email client. Though Sylpheed has been a reliable workhorse, I decided to survey today's text email clients to see if I should go back to reading email in an xterm. I tested Pine, Cone, Mutt, and nmh to see if any of them were up to the task. For my use, Mutt came out on top, but Pine is also a reasonable alternative if you don't mind the licensing. In compiling my list of test candidates, I tried to be as complete as possible while including packages that are still maintained and require less than heroic efforts to obtain and use."

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