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There has been a lot of talk in the past month over the looming doom of Windows XP. Microsoft will be pulling the life support plug on XP on April 8th this year. There are plenty of folks a bit jittery about this and those jitters are justifiable. Microsoft Windows XP has undoubtedly been the longest running Windows operating system to date. Microsoft has extended the deadline for killing XP a couple of times. Now it appears there will be no stay of execution for the aging OS. Even with all the publicity and news about the demise of XP,...

According to some reports you'd think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source "secure" communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone's favorite open-source security library of choice. Red Hat discovered the latest in a long-series of GnuTLS bugs .Latest? Yes, latest.You see, GnuTLS has long been regarded as being a poor SSL/TLS security library. A 2008 message on the OpenLDAP mailing list had "GnuTLS considered harmful" as its subject — which summed it up nicely. In it, Howard...

For much of the Linux operating system's history, patching a kernel has been a process that has typically involved downtime. In 2014, that's no longer the case as there are now at least three distinct efforts that offer the promise of zero-downtime kernel patching to Linux servers.The most recent entrant into the zero-downtime patching parade is Red Hat with the kpatch effort. Red Hat first revealed its efforts on Feburary 26th in a blog post detailing how kpatch works. Red Hat was unable to directly comment about any aspect of kpatch to ServerWatch for this article.Red Hat is a relative...

A source code mistake in the GnuTLS library – an open-source software building block used in a large number of different Linux distributions to handle secure Internet connections – could prove a serious threat to the privacy of Linux users, as developers rush to patch the vulnerability. Nikos Mavrogiannopolous, the developer of GnuTLS, announced Monday in a mailing list message that he had implemented a fix to the source code that closes the loophole. The flaw would have enabled an attacker to spoof GnuTLS’ system for verifying certificates, exposing supposedly secure connections to stealthy eavesdropping. By creating a specific type...

The Linux Foundation and tech recruitment firm Dice pair up each year to produce the Linux Jobs Report, where around 1,000 corporate hiring managers and 4,000 Linux professionals are surveyed to learn what's been going on in the Linux job market.The 2014 edition of the report makes clear that Linux is not only an in-demand job skill for IT, but one that commands better pay and more job perks than other jobs in the same field.The first and most striking claim in the report is how the search for Linux talent has intensified, with both recruiters and Linux pros reporting...

Microsoft sold more than 200 million Windows 8 and 8.1 licenses during the controversial OS's first 15 months, Tami Reller, the company's executive VP of marketing, revealed Thursday at a Goldman Sachs technology conference.Sounds impressive, right? Not exactly.Sure, 200 million is a big number -- that's about one license for every 35 people on the planet, a level of ubiquity most companies would kill for. But Microsoft isn't most companies. Put into historical or aspirational context, Windows 8 and 8.1 have underwhelmed.Not convinced? Here are five reasons not to be impressed.1. Windows 8 sales can't keep pace with Windows 7's precedent.In...

Introduction The “Everyday Linux User” website is dedicated to the average, ordinary, everyday, computer user who has a basic working knowledge of computers and who uses their computer for common tasks such as listening to music, playing games, watching videos, writing documents and editing photos and video clips. Quite a common question asked at sites such as Reddit and Yahoo answers is “Which distro should I use?” and it is usually followed up by a brief set of requirements and the names of distributions that the user has heard of. Users are confused when they first come to Linux about...

The Windows XP death clock is ticking away. While Microsoft has extended support for malware protection, do not be fooled -- XP will be officially unsupported on April 8. If Microsoft has its druthers, these XP users will upgrade to Windows 8 and maybe even buy a new computer. However, there is a problem with this -- the Windows 8 UI is radically different from XP and people do not like change (especially people clinging to an operating system from 2001). Also, they may not need to buy a new computer, because their existing is probably fast enough... for...

Most of the time when I write articles on this blog I will have planned them out and worked out when and how I will publish them. (I know some of you might be thinking "Really?"). Occasionally though a nugget drops straight into your inbox and you really don't need to put much thought into it at all. Today is one of those days. Earlier this week I received an email containing a link to a very interesting video, from Steve Barth, who produces videos for CBT Nuggets. The video linked below is split into two main sections. In the...

This is in the "If the subject should ever come up" category... One of the biggest problems which comes up for people trying to get a look at one of the newer Linux distributions is what to do about WIFI. Particularly in the case of laptops and particularly in the case of laptops with Broadcom wifi radios, those radios act as if they'd gone dead. LINUX does not come with drivers for such (the drivers are Windows only and proprietary) ; information exists on websites for setting up wrappers to allow the Windows drivers to think they're running under Windows...

Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system's SVCHOST.EXE processes. Windows XP users affected by this problem typically found that the operating system was using up system resources for 15 minutes to an hour after startup, making it difficult to use the machine during that period. The Microsoft Update team had vowed last month to spend the holiday break tackling the issue, which has plagued some users for years. The fix involved stopping the system from perpetually checking Internet Explorer updates. Microsoft indicated that the fix was rolled out on Tuesday....

Image by opensource.com I can see the brightness of curiosity in my six year old niece Shuchi's eyes when she explores a mobile phone or manipulates the idiot box with its remote control or becomes creatively destructive with any other electronic device. She, like a lot of kids her age, love experimenting.This curiosity reaches its peak when she sits in front of my laptop or her father's laptop. A lot of times, however, I observe that she is lost in complicated applications that are suitable only to adults. An operating system that an adult uses and the system running it...

Regardless of how stalled Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSFT +0.69% business seems to Wall Street analysts, the fact of the matter is that this company powers 90.73 percent of the Desktops and Notebooks around the world. Its nearest competitor at second place is Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) AAPL +0.14% Mac operating system which has only 7.54 percent market share. Microsoft released its latest upgrade to the much discussed Windows 8 operating system, Windows 8.1, in October of 2013. Last month, during December, devices running the Windows 8 and 8.1 crossed over 10 percent market share for the first time. A month earlier, in...

I came into work today and fired up Google Chrome, like on any other day. My Google home page usually displays the eight most frequently visited websites in icon/link form. The icon and link for Free Republic has always occupied the number one or two spot, depending on my frequency of visits. But today Chrome looked different. It wasn't just the new seasonal header image but that some of my frequently visited icon images have been replaced by some infrequently visited icon/links. I clicked on 'Do Not Show on This Page' option for these newbies and it replaced them with...

One of most widely respected repositories of embedded and mobile Linux news and information has returned to the web as an archive hosted here at LinuxGizmos.com. QuinStreet acquired LinuxDevices.com in Feb. 2012 through its purchase of a group of websites from publisher Ziff Davis Enterprise. After the acquisition, LinuxDevices remained frozen in time for about a year before vanishing in May, shortly after I launched LinuxGizmos.com. Following a constructive discussion about possibilities for bringing the LinuxDevices content back online, QuinStreet generously offered to license LinuxGizmos to host the LinuxDevices Archive on our site, as a “holiday present to the Linux...

The Free Software Foundation today has come out for "the first time we've ever been able to encourage people to buy and use a laptop as-is." The Free Software Foundation now backs one laptop model as respecting the customer's freedoms, but are the hardware specs any good? The Free Software Foundation publicly announced today the "Respects Your Freedom" certification for the Gluglug X60 laptops, which come down to refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad X60s... These refurbished laptops come from an Internet retailer in the UK that replaces the proprietary ThinkPad BIOS with Coreboot. The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished...

Is it time for you to dump Windows XP, or maybe to abandon Windows altogether? Windows 8 has improved significantly with the 8.1 upgrade. Nevertheless, for many users, Windows 8’s ...major changes like Live Tiles and the removal of the Start menu—remains an object of scorn. And security has always been a bigger headache for Windows... If you’re still running Windows XP, making the switch to Windows 8.1—or to Windows 7, if you can find it—will probably involve replacing more than just the operating system. Your...hardware may not be able to handle a newer Windows OS; and even if it...

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Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...