| Anatomy of the Linux Networking Stack Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 @ 5:47 PM by mayhem |
 Anonymous writes "Explore the structure of the Linux networking stack from the perspective of its layers and also examines some of its major structures. Its interfaces range from the protocol agnostics, such as the common sockets layer interface or the device layer, to the specific interfaces of the individual networking protocols. " |
| GPLv3 Released Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 @ 12:35 PM by mayhem |
 "The GPL v3 has just been released. Among other things, the released version grandfathers in the Novell deal so that Microsoft's SLES coupons will undermine their patent threats, replaces references to the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act with more specific language, and clarifies that using BitTorrent to convey a GPLed work is not a breach of the license (it might be one, technically, in GPLv2). The GPL FAQ has been updated to cover the new changes." (Source: Slashdot) |
| The Distro Jungle Posted Friday, June 29, 2007 @ 6:41 PM by mayhem |
| LinucksGirl writes "People new to Linux are often confused by the large number of distributions there are to choose from. The good news is that you can safely ignore most of them. This article helps you cut through the confusion of choosing a Linux Distribution your exploration—and helps you understand just what it is you've chosen." |
| Develop an End-to-End Ajax Web Application Posted Saturday, June 16, 2007 @ 3:29 PM by mayhem |
| LinucksGirl writes "This article is the first of a three-part series about developing an end-to-end Ajax application using an open source middleware stack. If you're a novice Web developer who can read and understand the code written in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL, this article is for you. After you're done, you will have a good understanding of the basic concepts of Ajax and its potential in the context of a three-tier Web application scenario." |
| Top Tuning Tips to Make Your MySQL Fly Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007 @ 6:50 PM by mayhem |
 LinucksGirl writes "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. This third article, the last in a series of three, focuses on tuning the database layer for maximum efficiency. The first article covers the basics of LAMP, while the second article focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP. " |
| AsteriskNOW - Beta 5 Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 8:58 PM by mayhem |
 Asterisk® in minutes. AsteriskNOW is an open source Software Appliance; a customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk (the most popular open source IP PBX in software), the AsteriskGUI™, and all other software needed for an Asterisk system. AsteriskNOW is easy to install, and offers flexibility, functionality and features not available in advanced, high-cost proprietary business systems.Get Started | GUI Screenshots | About |
| Asterisk 1.4.4 Released Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 8:40 PM by mayhem |
| The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.4. A good number of significant bugs have been fixed in the past few days, so a new release was made to get these fixes to the community as soon as possible. Some of the fixes include: - Fix a crash in chan_zap - Fix some cases where IAX2 calls would get dropped - Merge a re-write of channel group counting support that fixes a lot of issues - Fix some DTMF issues related to the use of chan_agent - Fix a crash that occurs when using dialplan functions to set global variables As always, a ChangeLog is available that provides a full list of changes. The releases are available for download from ftp.digium.com. Thank you for your support of Asterisk.org! |
| Alan Cox on Patent Law and GPLv3 Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 5:39 PM by mayhem |
 "Linux kernel guru Alan Cox talks about kernel features, cooperation with hardware vendors, and software patents. From the interview: 'I don't think [Microsoft's patent threats] are the biggest danger. As Microsoft has been finding out recently it is the patent trolls, and organisations with buried patents in interesting areas that are the biggest threat in the USA. The real answer to that problem, however, is to pull the USA back into line with the majority of the world which simply does not recognize patents on software but respects them as literary works subject to copyright law.'" (Source: Slashdot) |
| Anatomy of the Linux Kernel Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 @ 1:58 AM by mayhem |
 "The Linux kernel is the core of a large and complex operating system, and while it's huge, it is well organized in terms of subsystems and layers. In this article, the reader explores the general structure of the Linux kernel and gets to know its major subsystems and core interfaces. 'When discussing architecture of a large and complex system, you can view the system from many perspectives. One goal of an architectural decomposition is to provide a way to better understand the source, and that's what we'll do here. The Linux kernel implements a number of important architectural attributes. At a high level, and at lower levels, the kernel is layered into a number of distinct subsystems. Linux can also be considered monolithic because it lumps all of the basic services into the kernel. This differs from a microkernel architecture where the kernel provides basic services such as communication, I/O, and memory and process management, and more specific services are plugged in to the microkernel layer.'" (Source: Slashdot) |
| New Asterisk Appliance with AsteriskGUI Posted Thursday, June 7, 2007 @ 8:35 AM by mayhem |
| Featuring the first Digium® developed AsteriskGUI™, the Asterisk Appliance™ brings small to medium sized businesses a feature-rich, cost-effective, reliable telephony solution. TC400B - Voice Processing - Asterisk® in software and with Digium® G.729a licensing, is capable of transforming the G.729a codec into other codecs for the purpose of call origination or termination, bridging disparate calls or VoIP to TDM connectivity. Find out more. |
| Squid In 5 Minutes Posted Wednesday, June 6, 2007 @ 6:50 PM by mayhem |
| Why Squid? Why only five minutes? There are many great tools that Squid has to offer, but when I need to redirect http traffic to a caching server for performance increases or security, Squid’s my pick. Squid has built in proxy and caching tools that are simple, yet effective. Read more here. |
| Risk Report: Two Years Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Posted Wednesday, June 6, 2007 @ 6:45 PM by mayhem |
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first two years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimize the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped.Read more here. |
| GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait Posted Tuesday, June 5, 2007 @ 8:59 PM by mayhem |
| "After keeping users waiting for nearly six years, Emacs 22 has been released and includes a bunch of updates and some new modes as well. In addition to support for GTK+ and a graphical interface to the GNU Debugger, 'this release includes build support for Linux on AMD64, S/390, and Tensilica Xtensa machines, FreeBSD/Alpha, Cygwin, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9 with Carbon support. The Leim package is now part of GNU Emacs, so users will be able to get input support for Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and other languages without downloading a separate package. New translations of the Emacs tutorial are also available in Brasilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Italian, French, and Russian.'" (Source: Slashdot) |
| Linus on GIT and SCM Posted Sunday, June 3, 2007 @ 4:23 PM by mayhem |
| "An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting (with the YouTube video embedded) about Linus Torvalds' talk at Google a few weeks back. Linus talked about developing GIT, the source control system used by the Linux kernel developers, and exhibited his characteristic strong opinions on subjects around SCM, by which he means "Source Code Management." SCM is a subject that coders are either passionate about or bored by. Linus appears to be in the former camp. Here is his take on Subversion: "Subversion has been the most pointless project ever started... Subversion used to say, 'CVS done right.' With that slogan there is nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right." (Source: Slashdot) |
| Intel Shows Off 80-core Processor Posted Saturday, June 2, 2007 @ 10:50 AM by mayhem |
 "Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it on your desktop any time soon. The company's CTO, Justin Rattner, held a demonstration of the chip for a group of reports last week. Intel will be presenting a paper on the project at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week. 'The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago. Intel first disclosed it had built a prototype 80-core processor during last fall's Intel Developer Forum, when CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver the chip within five years.'" (Source: Slashdot) |
| A Look at BSD Rootkits Posted Friday, June 1, 2007 @ 12:23 PM by mayhem |
 "Windows has a reputation for being easily exploited by rootkits, but just because you're using Linux or BSD doesn't mean you're safe from infection. In an interview on O'Reilly's ONLamp site, Joseph Kong (author of Designing BSD Rootkits), talks about how to build and defend against Rootkits under BSD. 'I know a lot of people who refer to rootkits and rootkit-detectors as being in a big game of cat and mouse. However, it's really more like follow the leader — with rootkit authors always being the leader. Kind of grim, but that's really how it is. Until someone reveals how a specific (or certain class of) rootkit works, nobody thinks about protecting that part of the system. And when they do, the rootkit authors just find a way around it. This is what I meant earlier when I said rootkit hunting is hard — as you really have to validate the integrity of the entire system.'" (Source: Slashdot) |
| Germany Declares Hacking Tools Illegal Posted Friday, June 1, 2007 @ 12:22 PM by mayhem |
 "Germany has updated their computer crime law to declare 'hacking tools' illegal. This will place most of the professionals in the network admin and computer security fields in a sort of legal grey area. 'The new rules tighten up the existing sanctions and prohibit any unauthorized user from disabling or circumventing computer security measures to access secure data (see the law, sections 200 and following [in German]). Manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that can circumvent security measures is verboten, which means that some security scanning tools might become illegal.' We discussed a similar measure in January when Australia considered the same kind of legislation. How will this affect Linux distribution in Germany, as most standard Linux distributions come with these kind of 'hacking tools' installed by default?" (Source: Slashdot) |
| Fedora 7 Released Posted Friday, June 1, 2007 @ 12:18 PM by mayhem |
 "Fedora 7 has been released. With Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel Fedora 7 comes with all the latest and greatest open source desktop software. Fedora 7 drops the traditional 'Core' nomenclature, since it includes both what used to be termed the Core and Extra components by default. Fedora 7 is also the first release to be constructed with Fedora's revolutionary new build system, which is designed to improve the ease of developing derivatives and Fedora-based software appliances. As usual, extensive documentation and release notes are available. Torrents are also available and ISO images can be downloaded from mirrors around the world." (Source: Slashdot) |