Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Tag: open source

  • Slackware current issues

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    I’ve been running Slackware-current ( the development version of Slackware ) for probably close to 5 years now. For the most part, it’s a pretty uneventful stream of upgrades however, every once in a while things get interesting. The March 1 update is massive, has taken a month to release and includes around 465 updated…

  • Privacy and freedom: World Gone Mad Part 2

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The US Copyright Lobby has indicated that using FOSS equates to the undermining of intellectual property rights. Yes you read that correctly. They want the US Trade Representative to place countries like Brazil, India, and Indonesia on the Special 301 list, which is a list of countries that do not, according to mostly the Pharmaceutical…

  • Adventures in Linux distro land

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    The number of articles lately concerning the overwhelming amount of Linux distributions available is quite interesting; why now? Perhaps because Linux on the desktop is becoming a little more mainstream. Or perhaps because of the miriad number of embedded devices that use Linux ( think home automation, signage boards, NAS storage, netbooks, phones, radios, media…

  • Firefox 3.6 released

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    The Mozilla Foundation is releasing the latest and greatest version of its Web browser, Firefox 3.6.

  • Open Source in 2009

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    2009 has been a very big year for FOSS with a number of high-profile occurrences and products being released this year. Let’s  take a short look at some of these: the release of Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 as well as Red Hat’s KVM-orientated RHEL 5.4 the submission of code twice by Microsoft into the open source…

  • SCO’s Darl McBride terminated

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    Finally it seems that they’ve had enough of poor old Darl at SCO. Took them long enough but they’ve filed some paperwork with the SEC in the USA indicating as much.

  • Microsoft hijacks Firefox Part 2

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So there was a call for Mozilla to blacklist the MS plugins. And that is exactly what they have done! The Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation were added, for reasons of their vulnerability to remote code execution. All versions for all applications have been blocked. Apparently the Framework Assistant has now been…

  • Microsoft hijacks Firefox

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    Microsoft was quite upset with Google recently with the latter’s attempt to install a plugin ( Google Frame ) for IE; it seems though that it’s fine for Microsoft to install a plugin for Firefox – and it’s come back to haunt them with a security hole in the plugin that they silently installed! Earlier…

  • Tweetdeck on Slackware64 13.0

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    I recently came across this application ( thanks Nic ) so only natural that I try it out ( especially as I have an issue with the plasma twitter widget in KDE 4.2.4 ). Couple of issues though: requires Adobe AIR only 32-bit packaged only for deb and rpm I did some searching and with…

  • Microsoft and its GPL Hyper-V drivers

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    Considering the lack of general attention this has received in the media, Nick asked me to blog on this topic and set a time-line. So here goes: Microsoft first announced they were releasing the Hyper-V drivers as GPL code on the 20th of July 2009. Note this is an announcement and not the actual release.…

  • The Slackware 13.0 Interview

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    It’s been a while since my last ‘Interview’ with Slackware and we’ve just had the new 13.0 release ( 26th August ), so time to brush up on Slackware as one of the premier distributions in the Linux landscape. I wasn’t quite sure where to start with this article as all the goodness of previous…

  • Thunderbird 3 update

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    Thunderbird 3 is currently at b3 and even so is still in quite a state of flux if you read the development notes. There are a lot of changes from TB2 and quite a few differences in usage as well which may catch some out. This is a short article to mention some of these…

  • Bind security issues

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    This time the security issue is with BIND 9 specifically and not DNS in general as Dan Kaminsky’s fabled cache poisoning issue from last year. Receipt of a specially-crafted dynamic update message to a zone for which the server is the master may cause BIND 9 servers to exit. Slaves are unaffected however. Patches are…

  • Microsoft, Hyper-V drivers for Linux and the GPL

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    Microsoft released some drivers for Linux running on Hyper-V this week, with a lot of bell ringing and fanfare. Most people don’t know that behind the scenes, a protracted battle has been fought due to the fact that Microsoft have had these drivers for some time but they weren’t GPL-compliant. Microsoft have now been forced…

  • Cluster and distributed filesystems

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    This is a surprisingly large ecosystem for an area of OS’s that would on the face of it seem very specialised. I think there are a few  facts that are bringing these features to the mainstream: 1. we’re looking at new IT innovations like cloud computing 2. management interfaces to provide these features are being…