Free Republic

July 24th, 2016.Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim milk and mocha is already waiting for him, thanks to his new Korean-made LG RoboCafe, which brews and extracts a perfect crema every time using pre-portioned, mess-free nitrogen-sealed pods imported from Brazil. He considers nudging his wife, Mindy, to get up and make him breakfast,...

Back in May 2006, a few programmers working on an open-source security project made a whopper of a mistake. Last week, the full impact of that mistake was just beginning to dawn on security professionals around the world. In technical terms, a programming error reduced the amount of entropy used to create the cryptographic keys in a piece of code called the OpenSSL library, which is used by programs like the Apache Web server, the SSH remote access program, the IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN), secure e-mail programs, some software used for anonymously accessing the Internet, and so on. The...

I really, really need some help here. Long story short, I've lost two old computers in the last few months and now have a box that is running on Linux with Ubuntu and Firefox. As far as I can tell, Firefox does not allow me to just copy and paste the LOLCat pictures... There goes my entertainment! I have no connectivity problems, but I think I'm showing my age. I 'grew up' with DOS based apps and I can't find anything! I have printer software that I need to install, and can't find the right way to do it. Cry...

I keep getting asked how I download and convert youtube and other videos, so I offer you this tutorial. You will need Ubuntu 6.06 or higher (this was done on 7.10), as I haven't attempted this with anything lower. I refer to Mozilla, but any Mozilla derivative, such as FireFox, will work. All Terminal COMMANDS will be in red. You will need to have ffmpeg installed. Open up your Synaptic Package Manager... Type in your password to access the Manager... Type in ffmpeg... Click on the box, and mark it for installation... Click Accept, to confirm installation... Good. Now close...

Dell has shipped close to 40,000 systems pre-installed with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, according to multiple sources. By most accounts, that's a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system.

About two weeks ago, Wal-Mart began selling $200 Linux-based PC.  The initial run was around 10,000 units.  Now Wal-Mart is sold out.  Has Linux now found a niche?The system sold by Wal-Mart was an Everex’s TC2502 gPC and is the first mass-market $200 desktop PC.  The spec of the system is very low - 1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU embedded onto a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB Maybe a more relevant question is not whether Linux has found a niche, but whether Windows has outgrown the average user?hard drive - but this doesn’t matter because the system...

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices. But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.” That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price:...

This column is written for mainstream, nontechie users of digital technology. These folks aren’t necessarily novices, and they aren’t afraid of computers. They also aren’t stupid. They simply want their digital products to operate as promised, with as little maintenance and hassle as possible. So, I have steered away from recommending Linux, the free computer operating system that is the darling of many techies and IT managers, and a challenger to Microsoft’s dominant Windows and Apple’s resurgent Macintosh operating system, OS X. Linux, which runs on the same hardware as Windows, has always required much more technical expertise and a...

Rave: Two months with Ubuntu Linux and loving it by RickGeek posted on August 22, 2007 2:45 pm In late June of this year, I made a type of executive decision. I have been a software developer by trade throughout my entire professional career. I began programming commercially in 1987 and have followed the progression from MS-DOS 3.31 through 6.22, then Windows 3.x, 95 and up. I’ve moved from the library of custom-developed tools in C and assembly during my MS-DOS days to the GUI + libraries present in Windows OSes. Still, even today, I continue to code for Windows...

I was looking for the latest releases for Ubuntu, and I found they have re-done their website, forums, and available software pages, too. As well, the available software page now boasts no less than 13 application software providers...from Alacos and IBM, to ruffdogs and Real...all guaranteed to "just work". BTW, Opera for Linux is now part of the standard Ubuntu distro package, and available for download.

Community Hosted Servers Compromised This last week, 5 of the 8 servers that are loco hosted but Canonical sponsored, had to be shut down due to reports that they were actively attacking other machines. These servers were found to [WWW] have a variety of problems including, but not limited to, missing security patches, FTP (not sftp, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, and no upgrades past breezy due to problems with the network cards and later kernels. Loco teams will be given a choice to: a. migrate to the Canonical data center, or b. stay on the...

Companies like his privately held Canonical Inc, Red Hat Inc (RHT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Novell Inc (NOVL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) make money by selling standardized versions of Linux programs and support contracts to service them.

It's tough to challenge conventional wisdom, especially when that challenge raises doubts about the wildly popular version of Linux called Ubuntu. But doubts are exactly what I had after finishing my Ubuntu "safari", in which I worked through numerous glitches to get laptop and desktop installs up and running. I'm now mystified as to why Ubuntu has become so widely accepted as the version of Linux for newbies to try. Anyone who doesn't want to become their own one-person support shop would be far better off spending $50 for a commercially supported release like Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10,...

In a joint statement released today, Dell Inc. and Canonical Ltd. announced that Dell will now offer laptops and desktop computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. The computers will be sold via Dell's web site, said Canonical's director of operations Jane Silber. "We have worked with Dell to get Ubuntu fully supported and fully certified on Dell hardware," she said. "Ubuntu has the full endorsement of Dell."

Other tech sites will bore you with in-depth "technical details" and performance specs in their product analysis.  At BBspot we pull back from the boring benchmarks to compare the superficialities, and we do it all on a single page. For years many have predicted the death of Windows at the hands of Linux. The latest challenge to Windows comes from Ubuntu. Since everyone has long made up their minds in which operating system to use, we compare these two operating systems on the features that don't matter. Read on to find out if your favorite wins... Names Ubuntu - It's...

For people wanting simplicity from their Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) may well be the best release ever from any Linux company. While using Feisty Fawn from the late beta stage and right on up to upgrading to the final version, I kept thinking “Feisty is so easy, my mom could use this!” Not to say you can’t get more obtuse with command line syntaxes in Feisty, but for the folks that wants their Linux distro to work with a minimal amount of fuss, Feisty Fawn is a smashing success. The installation is really as easy as 1-2-3 and...

As far as the old guard are concerned, however, Ubuntu is no longer real Linux. For traditional Ubuntu users of course, such talk is anathema because Ubuntu like all the other distros is built around the Linux kernel. Thus, the argument rages between the Linux elitists, who couldn't give a damn whether the year of the Linux desktop ever arrives, and the Linux evangelists who would like to see Linux distros like Ubuntu and Suse replace Windows as the desktop system of choice. Related stories * Samsung latest to buy Linux patent protection from Microsoft * Microsoft aims to double...

What operating system do the heads of Fortune 500 companies run on their personal laptops? In the case of Michael S. Dell, president and CEO of Dell, it's Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

Dell Inc. began polling customers about their software preferences on Tuesday as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows. Dell posted the survey on a company blog, asking PC users to choose between Linux flavors such as Fedora and Ubuntu, and to pick more general choices such as notebooks versus desktops, high-end models versus value models and telephone-based support versus community-based support.

Apparently, lot of people are thrilled with the whole idea of Canonical and Linspire's technology partnership announced yesterday, citing source code consolidation, non-redundant development efforts, and just good karma about the whole deal. I, for one, am not one of those people. Initially, my big problem was worry for the Debian Project. Under the terms of the new partnership (which, for the purposes of this article I will deem "Linbutu" because I am getting lazy in my middle age), the Linspire and Freespire distributions will be based on Ubuntu, not Debian GNU/Linux. Ubuntu, in turn, gets supported access to Linspire's...

Windows Vista vs. Windows XP vs. Ubuntu Linux: There's a new OS in town, but can it compare to our comfy slippers, or even the diamond in the rough?While the Operating System of choice is still Microsoft, even Microsoft currently has a choice. MS Vista, the new kid on the block, has some promising features and definite sex appeal. What we at VL want to find out, does it have performance to match, or is it just a prettier more laden version of Windows XP? While MS is the majority, there has been a small revolution of sorts. Never before...

When Bill Clinton made his speech to the Labour Party conference, he bamboozled a few by finishing with the word "Ubuntu".

All you need is ubuntu You and me, me and you, lots and lots, for us to do By Sean Coughlan BBC News Magazine Bill Clinton told the Labour conference to get into ubuntu. Eh? Ubuntu. That was what Bill Clinton told the Labour party conference it needed to remember this week. "Society is important because of Ubuntu." But what is it? Left-leaning sudoku? U2's latest album? Fish-friendly sushi? No, it's a word describing an African worldview, which translates as "I am because you are," and which means that individuals need other people to be fulfilled. The former president, husky-voiced...

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." The Ubuntu Linux distribution is based on Debian. The operating system currently provides only a desktop version that has a strong following among software developers. A first server system is scheduled for release on 1 June. The distribution is sponsored by...

Let me address the inevitable "Ubuntu vs. OS X" comparison. The thing that surprised me most about using the PowerMac was not that OS X's UI was better than Ubuntu's, which I have known for quite some time having used both regularly, but how small that difference really was. As I said, OS X's UI is a step up from GNOME's. However, I wouldn't say it is in a completely different league. In terms of the fundamental UI elements, GNOME is extremely competitive.

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) will remain fully supported for an extended period of time, and continue to produce new releases of the distribution. As a first step, the Foundation announces that Ubuntu version 6.04, due for release in April 2006, will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server. The Foundation was established on July...