First Desktop Motherboard Supported by LinuxBIOS

"The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 is the first-ever desktop motherboard supported by a Free & Open Source BIOS, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai Lu who released GPL-licensed code last month. This state-of-the-art motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's latest Socket AM2." I am not exactly a Free Software evangelist, but I am a strong proponent of open BIOS, for various reasons. Good thing, this.

IE, Firefox Share Vulnerability

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 share a logic flaw. The issue is actually more severe, as the two versions of the Microsoft and Mozilla browsers are not the only ones affected. In this regard, the vulnerability impacts Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 but also Firefox 1.5.0.9. Microsoft has stressed the fact that IE7 on Windows Vista is not affected in any manner.

‘Why Isn’t WPA2 an Automatic Update?’

WPA2, the wireless security thing, is not available on Windows XP x64, and for the 32bit version, it is not a mandatory download. "We know Microsoft is serious about security and they don't appreciate the lack of it on Windows any more than we do, but it's things like this that make people wonder. How hard would it be to label this as a recommended download via Windows Update for all x86 users - and to roll out a version with x64 support before Windows XP x64 SP2 comes out, years from now?"

The Perfect Desktop – Part 2: Mandriva Free 2007

"With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Mandriva Free 2007 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

RISC OS 5.13 Available for Download

Castle released RISC OS 5.13 this weekend, its first free update since the paid-for release of 5.12. The ROM image can be fetched from Castle's iyonix.com website. The new version of their 32bit stream of the operating system is the result of a bug fixing exercise: its 'key features' are two updates for the Filer, two updates for the Pinboard, a fix for the Display Manager, an update for the Repeat command, a fix within the Shared C Library module, an update for the BASIC assembler, and a fix for the EtherK network driver.

‘Please Feel Free to Stop Using DDE’

Can you ignore DDE as a programmer on Windows? "While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically, the reliance on broadcasts to establish the initial DDE conversation means that unresponsive programs can jam up the entire DDE initiation process. The last shell interface to employ DDE was the communication with Program Manager to create program groups and items inside those groups. This was replaced with Explorer and the Start menu back in Windows 95. DDE has been dead as a shell interface for over ten years."

Asus W5Fe Windows Vista Laptop

"Asus has produced the first laptop in the world that makes use of Windows Vista SideShow to support a secondary screen in the lid. This is a 2.8in screen with a QVGA resolution of 320x240, just like any number of mobile phones that are on the market. The lid of the Asus also holds 1GB of flash memory which stores a cut-down Operating System that powers SideShow and which also links to the main Vista Operating System."

Review: Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone, SDK

LinuxLookup reviews the Qtopia Greenphone, and concludes: Trolltech is attempting to 'ride on the shoulders' of such a community, hoping that their new platform will take off. Some of the steps they are taking are very good, such as providing a downloadable Community SDK (with licensing limitation), so that a budding software developer can write and test code without having to invest the whopping USD 700 for the hardware. In my opinion, the platform definitely has potential, but as far as being a truly hacker friendly device, I think the above license agreement says it all." Elsewhere, Penang is readying a Linux-based dual-mode WiFi GSM/GPRS phone.

KDE, Krita, Webkit, Nepomuk-KDE News

Boudewijn Rempt writes about the KDE image manipulation program Krita. He writes about Flake support and various features regarding image rendering quality like a new fast scaler. Zack Rusin writes about the ongoing effort to port WebKit to Qt4 for possible inclusion in KDE 4. A new issue of the KDE Commit-Digest has also been released, telling us about various topics like NetworkManager support in KDE 4 or the installment of techbase.kde.org. In addition, this document presents what has been accomplished in the Nepomuk-KDE project so far.

Review: Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

"The thought of an internet tablet is, at least at first, a confusing one. It's not a notebook, or a PDA, or smartphone, but rather an oddity that takes aspects of each and mashes them into a single device. On the surface it is hard to pin down just what the device is. It is not a phone, but it's made by Nokia and it can be used for making and receiving calls. Similarly, it's not a notebook, but it is a portable computer than runs Linux. While this may all seem odd at first, the internet tablet is just the product a lot of people have been waiting for, whether or not they know it."

Microsoft’s List Of 800 Vista-Compatible Apps Excludes IBM, Adobe

Microsoft has released a list of 800 applications that should run properly on its new Windows Vista operating system. As expected, virtually all of Microsoft's own offerings are on the list - including the latest Office 2007 products. Also included are a host of business and security applications from vendors ranging from Intuit to Trend Micro. And desktop applications from Google, which ramped up its rivalry with Microsoft earlier this week with the introduction of online business applications, made the cut. However, noticeable by their absence are applications from a number of the world's biggest software companies, including Adobe Systems, IBM, and Symantec.

Apple Developer Interviews

"At Macworld 2007, the Apple Developer Connection hosted 48 developers in the ADC Developer Pavilion. Located just next to the Apple booth, these developers were able to present their products at the biggest Mac customer event of the year. Thousands of attendees flowed through the ADC Developer Pavilion, talked with the developers, and test drove the products. To find out more about the developers in the pavilion, we interviewed nine of them." There's also a set of pictures. In one of the pictures, the banner uses Comic Sans.

How-to Implement SPF in Postfix

"This tutorial shows how to implement SPF in a Postfix 2.x installation. The Sender Policy Framework is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. There are lots of SPF extensions and patches available for Postfix, but most require that you recompile Postfix. Therefore we will install the postfix-policyd-spf-perl package from openspf.org which is a Perl package and can be implemented in existing Postfix installations (no Postfix compilation required)."