Media

MPAA Sends Linux Australia Dubious Takedown Notice 520

L1TH10N writes "News.com has a story on how the MPAA sent a takedown notice to Linux Australia for the movies 'Twisted' and "Grind.' What was actually hosted with Linux Australia is Twisted (being a Python framework) and Valgrind (being a tool for finding memory management problems in programs). An interesting question that the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."
Linux Business

Iran: Even If Windows Is Free, Linux Is Preferred 106

gpwiki.org writes "Iran, a country which does not abide by international copyright law, is reportedly moving toward Linux. 'All the software in Iran is copied. There is no copyright law, so everybody uses Microsoft software freely,' said the secretary of Iran's High Informatics Council. 'But we cannot continue like this much longer.' The article suggests that a desire to enter the WTO, and Windows security issues are prime motivating factors. 'Microsoft is a national security concern.'"
AMD

AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout 227

CrzyP writes "AnandTech puts the latest and greatest AMD and Intel CPUs, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions, to the test in their first ever "Linux Desktop CPU Roundup" to see which performs the best in various Linux applications including database, compiling, rendering, encryption, and more. They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance". Very informative!"
Red Hat Software

Fedora Core 3 Test 2 Available 30

p0 writes "Fedora Core 3 Test 2 is now available for downloading. The official .torrent tracker is here. It is also interesting that the Fedora Steering Committee has transferred Fedora Core 1 into the Fedora Legacy Project. If you would like to know the proposed development and release schedule for Fedora Core 3, you will find it here."
IBM

The OS Community Embraces IBM 305

Joel Dutt writes "IBM... 'the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.' Newsweek has an interesting article in its latest issue, discussing the relationship between the open-source community and the corporate giant."
The Internet

Replace NAT Box with Commercial Broadband Router? 118

hjf asks: "Three years ago, when I got DSL, I set up a 486 box, with 8 megs and a floppy drive to run FloppyFW. It has been through a couple hardware upgrades: 16Mb RAM for running the 2.4 kernel and a 100MBit PCI NIC for the internal network. It has a little UPS which lasts for over 60 minutes. The only downtime it has is when there's a thunderstorm and I unplug it. Besides that, it has been running flawlessly since I set it up. Lately I have been kind of seduced with this product from 3Com, and other similar to it. I know it says it can handle 253 simultaneous users and all that. My home network has 4 users, but most of us run eMule and other P2P, and as many of you know, those P2P programs can beat the crap out of your router."
Operating Systems

Gentoo Linux 2004.2: What You See Is What You Get 78

editingwhiz writes "Jem Matzan has a cogent analysis of the new Gentoo Linux 2004.2 on Linux.com: "Gentoo Linux is the BSD of GNU/Linux distributions; it's elegant and customizable and you know exactly what you're getting when you install it. No mystery programs, no packages that you have to deinstall because you'll never use, no clutter, and everything is customized to your needs. If you do it right, Gentoo is also faster than your average GNU/Linux distro because everything can be compiled with higher compiler optimizations." (Linux.com is part of the OSTG network.)" Jem also has some criticism of the current version of Gentoo's AMD64 version.
Businesses

Succeeding With Open Source 68

Alex Moskalyuk writes "'Open source is great, but where do we start?' This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions in the corporate world when CIOs are faced with the need to choose between open and proprietary solutions. How do you figure out when it's feasible to implement an open source solution? Are there any support or training options if the solution does get approved, or if the project chosen was an alpha version developed by some student, who's away for the summer? Bernard Golden from NavicaSoft has probably heard the same questions too often, and then decided to write the book." Read on for prostoalex's review.
Microsoft

Microsoft's Chief Linux Strategist Interviewed 369

sl0wp0is0n writes "Computerworld has published an interview with Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor. It's interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the dominant Linux distribution they'll have to compete against. The interview also has Taylor talking about indemnification, IBM and his realization that customers generally adopt Linux to get a better TCO than Unix, not Windows."
Security

GdkPixbuf Suffers Image Decoding Vulnerabilities 291

DNAspark99 writes "It seems Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in GdkPixbuf, which can be exploited by malicious people to DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system. Personally, I wasn't concerned about this until I ran 'ldd firefox-bin | grep libgdk_pixbuf'" There's no official patch yet, but the article notes several Linux vendors have issued updates. Worth keeping an eye for those who use libgdk_pixbuf under other Unix-style operating systems as well.
Novell

Novell to Help Port Applications to Linux 610

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that: "Novell announced the program at its European BrainShare 2004 tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain." "Under the initiative, leading software and hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Scali Inc. will work with Novell help their software partners deploy their platforms and solutions on SUSE Linux, according to Novell Inc."
Mandriva

Mandrake 10.1 Community Released 209

MohammedSameer writes "Mandrakesoft released MandrakeLinux 10.1 Community, As usual it's only available first to the club members The new release features Kernel 2.6.8.1, Xorg-X11 6.7, KDE 3.2.3 with 3.3 as an install option,"
Announcements

Ubuntu Linux Preview Released 271

psykelus writes "Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based distro (formerly flying the flag of 'no-name-yet.com') annouced a preview of their first release (Warty Warthog) earlier today. Ubuntu is the most shiny Debian-based distrobution ever, sporting Gnome 2.8 and an extremely streamlined, mostly automatic installation & configuration process." For a limited time, they're also sending out free disks on request.
GNOME

GNOME 2.8 Released 506

damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others. Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!" jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."
Operating Systems

Quick Reviews Of The Latest From Crux, Knoppix 19

A semi-anonymous reader writes "lakerdonald has written a review of Knoppix 3.6, the latest release version of the popular Linux Live CD. Knoppix currently ranks #3 in the distrowatch chart, and is certainly a distro to keep your eyes on!" (Apparently, German readers can also get Knoppix 3.7 on the cover of a Germany computer magazine.) Another anonymous reader writes "The Crux Linux ppc port is growing really fast and well! These guys reviewed the release candidate #3 for the 2.0 version of this light-weight distribution."

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