Patrick E. Bennett, Jr., Computer Consultant ... computing support for small business

Sometimes, a utility or an application that you want to install is impossible to find in the format of your distribution. Alien is a utility that can convert one package type into another. It can get you out of a fix when you can't find a package for your distribution, and it is also useful for package maintainers who want to distribute packages for distributions that they don't run. It can work with Slackware, Debian and RPM packages as input and output types.

Samsung may begin building televisions with the Android operating system built in, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Yoon Boo Keun, head of Samsung's TV business line, reportedly said the company is reviewing whether to use Android, an OS more commonly found in various smartphones, in a new line of TV sets. Samsung is working on an operating system that can be used for both mobile phones and television, Yoon apparently revealed. The Korean electronics could be stepping into a confusing market -- it has its own Bada mobile phone OS and also makes Android smartphones.

Phoronix: "Yep, it's only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack."

In the beginning, there were a few different distributions. From a handful came hundreds. We are currently living with several hundreds. Many say that this is a bad thing. Many claim that the myriad offerings confuse people. Many claim that these distributions are often redundant. What's the deal? I have often talked about the lack of innovation in many distributions. The fact that people respin someone else's stuff and call it their own is somewhat unavoidable. It's going to happen. That aside, plurality is good.

Intel Software Network: "There are plenty of interesting application, notably you can do lots of outside-in scenarios with you access your home computers from a cellphone anywhere in the world"

Linux Planet: "Both Linux and FreeBSD are built on strong networking stacks, and both make first-rate firewalls and routers. Many commercial products are based on these. Eric Geier rounds up four firewall/router projects for our perusal."

Organizations in Asia are not as ready to go open source for key business applications, experts in the region say. Over in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a different story with inclination growing, a survey has shown. An Accenture study of 300 large public- and private-sector organizations in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S. found that over one-third of respondents plan to migrate mission-critical software to open source within a year. The findings, released last month, also indicated that cost is no longer viewed as the key benefit of open source deployment. Instead, quality, reliability and better bug fixing are top drivers.

Martin's Blog: "KDE is currently blamed for errors in external components: the graphic drivers. I am lately reading quite some crap (e.g. on it news today) that we KWin devs knew about problems in the drivers and shipped 4.5 nevertheless with changes enabled which trigger the driver bugs. That is of course not true."

Netrecon 1.78 has been released. New in this version is experimental passive scanning, arpsniff and now a integrated front end to all of netrecons programs. A lot of the syntax has been changed up. This should be the last of the major changes as 1.80 (the hopefully gold) release is approached. I also dropped the second n on the name. Lets see how long it takes before the lawyers call....

Harald Welte's blog: "In recent days and weeks, I'm doing a bit more work on the gpl-violations.org project than during the last months and years. I wouldn't say that I'm happy about that, but well, somebody has to do it :/"

Judged on its own merits, the Ubuntu 10.10 beta is a solid and consumer-friendly release. Looking at it in the light of the 10.04 Long Term Service (LTS) release from the Spring, it seems a very modest update…

Scott Photographics: "If you don't have a zoom lens or you'd like to manipulate a certain image in this style then this tutorial for GIMP should help you achieve a similar effect!"

ZDNet: "An Oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion. How can that particular definition be applied to Oracle the company?"

Fedora: "Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on systemd, the new initialization system being introduced in Fedora 14."

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 10.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

Datamation: "In a tight economy, it's more important than ever to make sure every dollar spent is providing maximum return. And for a growing number of small businesses, this means reexamining plans for upgrading existing servers and workstations."

Hubpages: "Maybe you'll think: "Oh, I, Windows, I have not paid, they gave me with the computer." Are you absolutely certain? If your computer had Windows, then you paid, even if the dealer did not told you, or you installed a copy of "pirate"."

Howtoforge: "This article explains how you can use the DNS Templates in ISPConfig3 to allow layman to enter domain data without any previous knowledge on the subject."

Bradley M. Kuhn: "I'm sorry that I was right about this, but we should now finally learn the lesson: languages like Java and C# are dangerous."

Last month I participated in the third annual CONSEGI conference in Brasília, Brazil. The first CONSEGI conference was organized in 2008, and though it was organized by and for the Brazilian government, it speaks loudly and clearly with an authentic open source voice. In that first meeting, the CONSEGI declaration stated their disappointment in the appeals by several of their ISO/IEC national bodies being dismissed by the ISO and IEC technical management boards in the Standardization of Office Open XML, and criticized the ISO/IEC for "inability to follow its own rules". The declaration called into question credibility of ISO/IEC, with the signers asserting that they will no longer consider ISO standards to be automatically valid for government use. In 2009, CONSEGI hosted the 3rd International ODF Workshop and established the Brasilia Protocol, which commits its signatories to use ODF internally, with each other, and ultimately in their electronic interaction with third parties and the public. (I was a signatory to that protocol representing Red Hat.) And so I was very excited to see what CONSEGI 2010 would set as its agenda.

The "Project Description" of CONSEGI 2010 contained this paragraph which really highlights the answer to the question "why open source?" in Brazil (or in any other Democratic government):

The citizenship vision that goes under CIT (Communication and Information Technology, aka ICT) public politics of the Federal Government has as reference the collective rights and not only the sum of the citizen individual rights.

Think about that for a moment or two...

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