Open Source Pixels

“After several Web sites today claimed to having seen a possibly inadvertent notice from Microsoft claiming June as the release month for its forthcoming Office 2010 (we looked hard and couldn’t find it ourselves), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that June is indeed the ship month.”

Yesterday (today if you’re in the US), Sun released the latest version of its virtualisation solution, VirtualBox 3.1. Among speed improvements and other smaller features, the biggest news is that Virtualox 3.1 introduces something called teleportation: you can move running VMs between machines – servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn’t matter to VirtualBox. Coincidentally, this reminded me of an idea I once had about moving running applications between machines.

Sadly, video Skype on Linux has been problematic since its introduction. Everything has finally came together with Karmic Koala 9.10. Video Skype indeed lives on Linux.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated
with the project’s ill-advised decision to allow any local user
to install packages without the root password. That mistake is
now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than
this particular problem. In this article, your editor looks at the quality
of the Fedora 12 release and ponders what Fedora 13 may bring.

Opsview is an enterprise network, server, and application monitoring tool designed for scalability, flexibility, and ease of use. It is a fully integrated monitoring tool that incorporates popular software including Nagios Core, Nagvis, Net-SNMP, and RRDtool. The Catalyst Web framework provides an extensible monitoring and configuration user interface. The server software runs on Linux and Solaris 10. It will monitor all common operating systems including Linux, AIX, Solaris, and Windows.

Changes: This release features a redesigned Web UI and incorporates a new Javascript graphing framework.

Release Tags: Nagios, Monitoring Tools, snmp, Feature Enhancements

Tags: Nagios, Network, Monitoring, performance, MRTG, RPE, nagvis, Network Monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring

Licenses: GPLv2

Light Blue Touchpaper previews a paper [PDF] describing the Open Vote Network protocol that would allow anonymous voting under a system of total communications surveillance. “In the Open Vote Network protocol, all communication data is open, and publicly verifiable. The protocol provides the maximum protection of the voter’s privacy; only a full collusion can break the privacy. In addition, the protocol is exceptionally efficient. It compares favorably to past solutions in terms of the round efficiency, computation load and bandwidth usage, and has been close to the best possible in each of these aspects.“

c-ares is a C library that resolves names
asynchronously.

Changes: This release adds ares_library_init(), ares_library_cleanup(), ares_parse_srv_reply(), ares_parse_txt_reply(), and ares_free_data(). It has a range of improvements and fixes a number of bugs.

Tags: Internet, DNS, Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: MIT/X

m0n0wall is an all-in-one firewall software
package that is based on FreeBSD. It is geared
towards embedded PCs, but it also works on
standard PCs. It includes an easy-to-use Web
interface like commercial firewall boxes do. PHP
is used instead of shell scripts, and the entire
system configuration is stored in a single
XML-formatted file. There is support for VPN,
traffic shaping, captive portal, VLANs, and more.

Changes: This version wraps up the changes introduced in the various 1.3b releases: IPv6 support, new bridging code, IPsec improvements, a consolidated image for embedded platforms, countless bugfixes, and other improvements.

Tags: Networking, Firewalls

Licenses: BSD Revised

Sambascan2 allows you to search an entire network or a number of hosts for SMB shares. It will also list the contents of all public shares that it finds. The difference between sambascan2 and other SMB viewers and scanners is that it will scan everything using TCP/IP, and it will not send a lot of broadcast messages, so it can be used over LAN boundaries. It only uses Samba to scan the shares and their contents. It can also scan known hosts and search indexed files.

Changes: Scanning shares with spaces now works.

Release Tags: Minor bugfixes

Tags: Home Automation, Internet, Security, Utilities

Licenses: GPL

Cowtacular is designed to meet the needs of smaller IT departments, typically those managing fewer than a thousand users. It’s designed to be simple and efficient, requiring less time to set up and manage so you can spend more time helping your customers.

Changes: Improvements to search. Background maintenance can now be scheduled. Optionally checks for new versions on the Website.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Information Management, Issue Tracking

Licenses: Artistic