Slashdot Mirror

comforteagle writes "There are suspicions coming to the surface this morning that Twitter may be censoring WikiLeaks-related tweets from forming a trending topic. Why is still unclear at this point, as during Iranian protests a short while ago Twitter appeared to be in the fray of helping to spread the word. As of this morning it appears that Twitter may have some explaining to do. One of Twitter's engineers has chimed in over the weekend, but some aren't convinced."

linuxbeta writes "DistroWatch reports that the development process for Slackware Linux 11.0 is almost over. OSDir has some sweet shots of Slackware 11.0 RC1 in the Slackware 11.0 RC1 Screenshot Tour." From the article: "'There are still a few changes yet to happen, but let's call this Slackware 11.0 release candidate 1.' Other recent changes include upgrade to stable kernel 2.4.33; upgrade to udev 097, and rebuild of glibc 2.3.6 for both 2.4.33 and 2.6.16.27 kernels. The new release will ship with X.Org 6.9.0 and KDE 3.5.4, and will provide SeaMonkey instead of Mozilla."

linuxbeta writes to tell us DistroWatch is reporting that PC-BSD has released version 1.1 which updates the core OS to FreeBSD 6.1, adds better driver support to the kernel and improves the overall speed on many systems. OSDir also has a screenshot tour available for general consumption.

An anonymous reader writes "Distrowatch reports - Following some eight months of testing, the openSUSE project has finally released the long-delayed and much-awaited SUSE Linux 10.1: 'After lot of work and several delays, we proudly announce the availability of SUSE Linux 10.1. As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. We want to give special mention to Xgl for 3D acceleration on the desktop, NetworkManager for getting painless WiFi access everywhere, the completely open source AppArmor 2.0, and the full integration of Xen 3 in YaST.' OSDir has some great screenshots of the fresh SUSE Linux in the SUSE Linux 10.1 Screenshot Tour."

anadgouda writes "Mozilla Firefox 2.0 alpha is released. The links for download were not available directly on Mozilla.com website. Being Alpha, all features might not work and most of the plugins might not be compatible." Reading thru the comments, it appears there's some disparity as to whether or not this is actually just a naming scheme that they use; but let me reiterate that there has been no official announcement from Mozilla, so take with a giant grain of salt. Some good screenshots at OSdir.

linuxbeta writes "Hot on the heels of Gentoo's announcement of their 2006.0 release, OSDir has published a Gentoo 2006.0 Screenshot Tour which give us a walk-through of installing Gentoo with the first ever Gentoo Linux LiveCD."

comforteagle writes "OSDir has published an interview with Mark Spencer of Asterisk and Gaim about why and how he got started coding up the software platform PBX system and how it has become much more than -just- another phone system. He also shares his insights for the opportunities within the telecom industry for open source."

linuxbeta writes "Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) daily builds have hit the Ubuntu servers. Dapper's goals: Substantial polish and integration, software discovery and installation, make network-wide enterprise updates easy to manage, consider LSB and related certification standards and support for deployment of Dapper on mission-critical servers. Screenshots have already surfaced."

sunBoy asks: "A number of OpenSolaris-based Operating Systems are popping up on the map. BeleniX (screenshots), SchilliX and Nexenta (screenshots) are a few OSes which have hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks. Some say OpenSolaris has a leg up on Linux - 'For Linux, we're trying to push many distributions through to compress them into a standard. With OpenSolaris, we are already at the small end of standardization. What will follow is more OpenSolaris distributions spreading out from that core.' Is OpenSolaris really a threat to Linux?" Less of a threat and more of an alternative. Would more Unix-based alternatives on the market really be a bad thing?

sunBoy asks: "A number of OpenSolaris-based Operating Systems are popping up on the map. BeleniX (screenshots), SchilliX and Nexenta (screenshots) are a few OSes which have hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks. Some say OpenSolaris has a leg up on Linux - 'For Linux, we're trying to push many distributions through to compress them into a standard. With OpenSolaris, we are already at the small end of standardization. What will follow is more OpenSolaris distributions spreading out from that core.' Is OpenSolaris really a threat to Linux?" Less of a threat and more of an alternative. Would more Unix-based alternatives on the market really be a bad thing?

comforteagle writes "Scott Moschella, from Attack of the Show!, set out to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience.' As more Windows/Mac users discover powerful open source applications are they bound (slashdot disc.) to make more discoveries of this kind?" Update: 09/16 18:48 GMT by Z : Some users have pointed out this is basically an update to a previous discussion we've had. Link added for the sake of completeness.

comforteagle writes "Scott Moschella, from Attack of the Show!, set out to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience.' As more Windows/Mac users discover powerful open source applications are they bound (slashdot disc.) to make more discoveries of this kind?" Update: 09/16 18:48 GMT by Z : Some users have pointed out this is basically an update to a previous discussion we've had. Link added for the sake of completeness.

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

Mike Shaver's talk on writing Firefox extensions was packed to the walls. If you've been wanting to try it, Firefox 1.5 makes development easier, and should be out soon, so now's a good time. This talk and the tutorial on Ajax persuaded me to start using the DOM Inspector and debugging some JavaScript to get a better understanding of webpage manipulation.

Aaron Boodman's talk on his extension Greasemonkey was a walkthrough of writing a simple GM user script, a discussion of what's coming up, and some Q&A. Greasemonkey 0.5 ("Now With Security!") is in beta: there are multiple security changes that suggest someone really has sat down and thought the whole model through. GM works with Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, and Windows MSIE (but not, oh please somebody correct this oversight, Safari).

Ruby on Rails is hot; if you want to develop a web app quickly you can't ignore it. It stresses "convention over configuration" with reasonable defaults. The tutorial went from installation to the "hello world" of the web, a blog (!), in a few hours. Anyone have a real-world example of Rails scaling to a large project and lots of traffic?

DarwinBuild is an open-source project from Apple that aids in building the open-source components of Darwin/Mac OS X. Given a build number of Mac OS X, it will fetch and build the software for that version, allowing you to modify the source as needed, making it easy for any developer to modify everything from the kernel to various utilities (just remember to reapply the modifications after running Software Update, if necessary). You can read more about it from, in addition to the web site, the presentation slides.

Google and O'Reilly gave out the 2005 open source awards, with $5000 attached to each. Congratulations to the winners.

Tony Baxter's Shtoom is a cross-platform VoIP client and software framework, written in Python, for writing your own phone applications.

Novell is still moving its employees from Windows to Linux, which we first heard at last year's OSCON. The migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice is complete, and the big step, from Windows to Linux, is 50% complete, projected to be 80% by November. Miguel de Icaza gave flashy demos of some Linux desktop applications that didn't impress this cynical observer very much.

PlaceSite is an open-source project looking to bring physical proximity awareness to Internet access at coffeeshops and other meetingplaces: think "local-only Friendster" and you're not far off. They got feedback from a monthlong trial earlier this year and are working on a new version that will be easy to deploy. Could be neat.

In a great 2-hour session on Wednesday, we got to hear from representatives of four leading open source databases about what they've been working on lately. Here are the summaries...

Ingres r3 has an impressive list of big features. Ingres was just open-sourced by Computer Associates this summer, and it's gotten a lot of attention for being a full-featured enterprise database. Ingres supports table partitioning that can be either range-based or hash-based, which can greatly improve performance in many cases. Its optimizer can now come up with parallel execution plans, which can be useful even on single-CPU machines and non-partitioned tables. There's also federated data storage (one can access data stored in another RDBMS through Ingres) and replication. And they're working on a concurrent access cluster, to allow data to be manipulated not just by multiple threads on one machine, but multiple machines.

A side note: Computer Associates was invited by O'Reilly to talk about its recently open-sourcing Ingres. Its representative, while confessing that introducing a new license was "probably the wrong thing to do," said that other licenses wouldn't have worked for them (the GPL "was seen as viral"). The one question that the audience had time to ask was "is Ingres a dump" -- is CA making it open-source to transfer the responsibility of support from the company to the community? The three-part "no" answer was that there are more CA developers working on Ingres now, that Ingres is at the core of their new releases, and that they've sponsored a "million-dollar challenge" to foster community interest. Time will tell I guess.

Firebird 2.0 has been in alpha since January and a beta is expected soon. Since 2000 much of their development has been aimed at making the product easy to install, and making the code easy for a distributed group of developers to work on. This year they're building features on that groundwork. Their design includes 2-phase commits (since the beginning), cooperative garbage collection (as a transaction encounters unneeded data, it removes it) and self-balancing indexes. Backup has been improved. When 2.0 gets to beta, I'm going to check this out, it sounds like very interesting technology (and apparently it will install with four clicks!).

MySQL 5.0 is in beta, and has been feature-frozen since April. Back in 4.1, its abstracted table-type has been put to advantage with odd engines like Archive (only insert, no update); Blackhole for fast replication; and an improvement to MyISAM for logging (allowing concurrent selects with inserts-at-table-end). Their Connector/MXJ lets you run a native MySQL server embedded inside a Java application. In 5.0 we're seeing stored procedures per the SQL:2003 standard, triggers, updatable views, XA (distribution transaction), SAP R/3 compatible server side cursors, fast precision math, a federated storage engine, a greedy optimizer for better handling of many-table joins, and an optional "strict mode" to turn some of MySQL's friendly nonstandard warnings into compliant errors. And they're working on partitioning, ODBC, and letting MySQL Cluster's non-indexed columns to be stored on disk.

PostgreSQL 8.1 is expected to be released in November or December, after a feature-freeze in July -- and it's an impressive list of new features. Their optimizer will make use of multiple indexes when appropriate, which is pretty darn exciting. The recommendation will be that in most cases it will be most efficient to have only single-column indexes and let the optimizer figure out which combination to use. They're implementing a 2-phase commit, they're bringing the automatic vacuum into the core code, and they removed a global shared buffer lock so they're now getting "almost linear" SMP performance scaling. I've never felt the need for Postgres, but I'm definitely going to look at 8.1.

linuxbeta writes "DesktopBSD is the latest easy to install BSD aimed squarely at the desktop. Installation screen shots. From their site: 'DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install.' DesktopBSD joins the ranks of PC-BSD and FreeSBIE."

linuxbeta writes "Distrowatch is reporting that 'The beta testing process for Mandriva Linux 2006 is now officially underway. All the new features, which are not yet all included in this first beta version, will appear in the next test versions. You will see changes in the network management, especially WiFi, in security, on the desktop with the new versions of KDE, GNOME, new version of the kernel, GCC....'. Screenshots are available."

An anonymous reader writes "Elive, the ultra-slick Debian based Enlightenment (16.7 and 17) liveCD project has released version 0.1 for download. See the package and features list for more information. A screenshot tour is also available."

linuxbeta writes "redhat.com says the new Fedora 'has just turned 4' and it 'purrs', 'hums', and 'mesmerizes'. Has Steve Jobs taken over Fedora's marketing dept. or is this release something to really get excited about? OSDir has put together a quick tour of this fresh release in KDE and GNOME desktop flavors. Release Overview. You be the judge."

linuxbeta writes "redhat.com says the new Fedora 'has just turned 4' and it 'purrs', 'hums', and 'mesmerizes'. Has Steve Jobs taken over Fedora's marketing dept. or is this release something to really get excited about? OSDir has put together a quick tour of this fresh release in KDE and GNOME desktop flavors. Release Overview. You be the judge."

linuxbeta writes "At OSDir there's a tour of the fixed Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (r0a) release. After 3 years we finally get to have a look at the new Debian, including their new installer. Release notes. Only occasionally does this new release differ from Ubuntu."

linuxbeta writes "At OSDir there's a tour of the fixed Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (r0a) release. After 3 years we finally get to have a look at the new Debian, including their new installer. Release notes. Only occasionally does this new release differ from Ubuntu."

linuxbeta writes "At OSDir there's a tour of the fixed Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (r0a) release. After 3 years we finally get to have a look at the new Debian, including their new installer. Release notes. Only occasionally does this new release differ from Ubuntu."

linuxbeta writes "The first development release of Ubuntu Linux 5.10, code name "Breezy Badger", is now available for testing. Colony CD 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Breezy development cycle, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Breezy. Screenshots are available. If you're interested in following changes as we further develop Breezy, have a look at the breezy-changes list. Bug reports should go here." (This comes in, of course, as I'm installing Hoary on my iBook.)

linuxbeta writes "PC-BSD 0.5a beta has now been released! You can download the 670Mb ISO file from our download page. This version fixes some minor bugs, and now has fully automatic network support. Screenshots available." So what's it all about? From the PC-BSD FAQ: "This OS has as its goals to be user-friendly, especially in the area of software installation and management, something that many of the *nix based distros have not yet mastered."

linuxbeta writes "With the recent SUSE LINUX 9.3 Live DVD ISO released, we get a sneak peek. (screenshots) of this much anticipated OS update. Cool updates in 9.3 includes Firefox 1.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Gimp 2.2, Beagle. Xen, VoIP client, and more." And while Debian's Sarge isn't here yet (give Branden Robinson a chance to find his plush new office!), wrochal points out that the fifth update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 ("Woody" ) has arrived. 3.0 (r5) "mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems." Also, four packages were removed, three for license violations.

jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's senior editor James Turner reports this month on what he calls The State of Laptop Linux in 2005 and says it's a lot better than it was in 2004, but adds - after conducting his own new test to see if any Linux distro is yet really laptop-ready: "What's needed to make things better? Well, the Linux community needs to address the device driver crisis." Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along." Overall though he concludes that widespread laptop Linux is much closer now."

Simon (S2) writes "Ubuntu Linux 5.04, code name 'Hoary Hedgehog', is now available. It offers the following new features: Simple and fast Installation, live CD's for Intel x86, AMD64 and PPC, GNOME 2.10.1, Firefox 1.0.2, first class productivity software, and X.org 6.8.2. Read the announcement and the complete release notes. Quick download links for the i386 architecture: ubuntu-5.04-install-i386.iso.torrent (587MB) and ubuntu-5.04-live-i386.iso.torrent (625MB). Install CD and live CD images for AMD64 and PowerPC computers are also available." Kubuntu is out in a new release as well. Screenshots available of the Kubuntu release. Update: 04/08 14:21 GMT by Z : Made the direct ISO links torrents.

linuxbeta writes "A preview of WBEL4 (White Box Enterprise Linux) is currently available via BitTorrent. White Box nicely fills the niche between Fedora and RHEL. WBEL Sreenshots. WBEL FAQ. With this latest White Box Enterprise Linux release, is it time to walk away from RHEL?" Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.

Anil Kandangath writes "BeOS, the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X, but almost died, instead has returned as Zeta OS -- which is supposed to be fast, stable, media centric and boot within 15 seconds. Zeta is being released by yellowTAB of Germany and has applications such as an office suite and the Firefox browser bundled with it. Most BeOS applications will also run as-is. Screenshots are available." According to the NewsForge story linked there, the release could be as soon as next month.

glengineer writes "A deep bow and an "I'm not worthy" to Kent Simon, at the University of Kentucky, Ed Lyons in London, and Chris McArthur in Canada who have made the dream come true for GTA fanatics like me - GTA3 and Vice City online multiplayer! Now I can streetrace and play Liberty City Survivor with real people, not just use the "crazy pedestrians" cheat. Rockstar would be nuts not to hire these guys. So, anyone up for a deathmatch? Meet me at the Malibu Club in Vice, or the construction site on Staunton Island."

comforteagle writes "This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to del.icio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I'm sure it won't take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that's the gist of it. More details here and here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has conducted an interview with Daniel Quinlan of SpamAssassin. In it he explores what keeps Daniel motivated in the face of the unrelenting torrent of spam and new spamming techniques, as well as, what is working - what is not, and what he predicts spammers have up their sleeves next for defeating spam detection." From the interview: "If you don't mind deleting spam manually, that's your prerogative, but don't complain about it. If your ISP doesn't do a good job fighting spam, then switch ISPs or install your own anti-spam software. There are a lot of choices out there."

comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has conducted an interview with Daniel Quinlan of SpamAssassin. In it he explores what keeps Daniel motivated in the face of the unrelenting torrent of spam and new spamming techniques, as well as, what is working - what is not, and what he predicts spammers have up their sleeves next for defeating spam detection." From the interview: "If you don't mind deleting spam manually, that's your prerogative, but don't complain about it. If your ISP doesn't do a good job fighting spam, then switch ISPs or install your own anti-spam software. There are a lot of choices out there."

twener writes "The KDE project has announced the first release candidate of KDE 3.4 which brings many new features targeted for release at 16th March. Sources (requirements list, build script), an i486 GNU/Linux Live-CD (375MB) and SUSE 9.2 binary packages are available currently. OSdir.com and tuxmachines.org have screenshots of this release. Source Code and a Live CD are available."

comforteagle writes "I've published Part II of W. McDonald Buck's essay on Linux TCO. In it he looks at the scenario of a company having already moved to Linux in the server room and also to open source software on Windows desktops, but "...now wants to know, how much extra can be saved by the final step of changing the operating system itself? And, what are the other costs, risks and benefits of doing that. To keep the scenario simple, we're assuming too that this will be done at a time when the desktop equipment is also being replaced. The news is good, but not as good as we like to believe." Part I was discussed previously on Slashdot."

comforteagle writes "I've published Part II of W. McDonald Buck's essay on Linux TCO. In it he looks at the scenario of a company having already moved to Linux in the server room and also to open source software on Windows desktops, but "...now wants to know, how much extra can be saved by the final step of changing the operating system itself? And, what are the other costs, risks and benefits of doing that. To keep the scenario simple, we're assuming too that this will be done at a time when the desktop equipment is also being replaced. The news is good, but not as good as we like to believe." Part I was discussed previously on Slashdot."

comforteagle writes "I've published Part II of W. McDonald Buck's essay on Linux TCO. In it he looks at the scenario of a company having already moved to Linux in the server room and also to open source software on Windows desktops, but "...now wants to know, how much extra can be saved by the final step of changing the operating system itself? And, what are the other costs, risks and benefits of doing that. To keep the scenario simple, we're assuming too that this will be done at a time when the desktop equipment is also being replaced. The news is good, but not as good as we like to believe." Part I was discussed previously on Slashdot."

linuxbeta writes "GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 has just been released. There is a nice screenshot demo here. Also known as 2.9.90, GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release in March. It is packed full of tasty GNOME goodness. This release is a feature frozen snapshot primarily intended for wide public scrutiny before the final GNOME 2.10 release in March. Like the good old days of Linux kernel development, GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status. Please check the 2.9 start page for more info. - gnomedesktop.org/node/2138"

linuxbeta writes "GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 has just been released. There is a nice screenshot demo here. Also known as 2.9.90, GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release in March. It is packed full of tasty GNOME goodness. This release is a feature frozen snapshot primarily intended for wide public scrutiny before the final GNOME 2.10 release in March. Like the good old days of Linux kernel development, GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status. Please check the 2.9 start page for more info. - gnomedesktop.org/node/2138"

comforteagle writes "W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction."

comforteagle writes "W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction."

comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has interviewed 'FutureProof' of the JHymn project, a DRM removal application for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say, to prevent filesharing. FutureProof tells us how Apple's DRM works, how to rip it out using JHymn, how they build on the work of 'DVD' Jon Johansen, and how to upgrade to that brand new iShuffle safely."

comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has interviewed 'FutureProof' of the JHymn project, a DRM removal application for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say, to prevent filesharing. FutureProof tells us how Apple's DRM works, how to rip it out using JHymn, how they build on the work of 'DVD' Jon Johansen, and how to upgrade to that brand new iShuffle safely."

Anonymous Coward writes "The first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 has been released. New package versions and features include some changes to the installation program, kernel 2.6.10, glibc 2.3.4 and gcc 3.4.3. You also get KDE 3.3.2, Gnome, 2.8.1, and GTK 2.6.1. Mozilla-firefox replaces Mozilla, and you will also find gimp 2.2, cdrecord 2.01.01a21 with DVD+R Dual Layers support, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Postgresql 8.0, and MySQL 4.1.9. Improvements are also seen in the Mandrakelinux Control Center ergonomy, to ease the network configuration with a better integration of the firewall tool. OSDir tours Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta 1 with GNOME and KDE in their Screenshot Tours."

Anonymous Coward writes "The first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 has been released. New package versions and features include some changes to the installation program, kernel 2.6.10, glibc 2.3.4 and gcc 3.4.3. You also get KDE 3.3.2, Gnome, 2.8.1, and GTK 2.6.1. Mozilla-firefox replaces Mozilla, and you will also find gimp 2.2, cdrecord 2.01.01a21 with DVD+R Dual Layers support, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Postgresql 8.0, and MySQL 4.1.9. Improvements are also seen in the Mandrakelinux Control Center ergonomy, to ease the network configuration with a better integration of the firewall tool. OSDir tours Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta 1 with GNOME and KDE in their Screenshot Tours."