Open Source Pixels

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with OpenSUSE 11.2 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running OpenSUSE 11.2). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don’t have access to the host system’s hardware – USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

Ejecter is a little tool that makes it possible to unmount external devices and eject CD-ROMs without having to right-click on the device icon (either on the desktop or in Nautilus). It sits in the background and shows an icon in the system tray when one or more peripherals are connected to your PC: once clicked, a window appears with the list of the devices (volume name and device type, and much clearer than the similar thing available on Windows) and the related eject button. Being written in Vala, it is translated into C code and then compiled. This means that it’s lightweight and consumes little memory, does not require a full VM like Python, and has no strange requirements to run (just GLib/GTK).

Changes: Initial freshmeat announcement.

Tags: Hardware, external harddrive, eject, pendrive, USB, usb flash drive, usb-key, sd card

Licenses: GPLv3

The WWWOFFLE programs simplify World Wide Web
browsing from computers that use intermittent
(dialup) connections to the Internet. It is a
simple proxy server with special features for use
with dial-up Internet links. It makes it possible
to browse Web pages and read them without having
to remain connected. There are too many features
to mention, but they include privacy control,
cookie/advert blocking, efficient bandwidth usage
by specifying intervals between refreshes, options
to monitor pages regularly, recursive fetching,
HTML cleaning, highlighting of cached links,
indexes of cached pages, searching of cached
pages, and many more.

Changes: This release contains some new SSL features (faster but less secure key generation and longer certificate expiration times) and a number of minor bugfixes.

Release Tags: Minor

Tags: Internet, Web, Proxy Servers, Information Management, FTP, HTTP Servers

Licenses: GPL

mk-configure is a lightweight replacement for GNU autotools written in and for bmake (a portable version of NetBSD make). The main goal is to have only one top-level tool instead of aclocal+automake+autoconf+autoheader. Other goals are clean design, simplicity, and "no code generation".

Changes: Support for HP-UX, OSF1, DragonFlyBSD, and MirOS BSD has been added. The SHLIBMODE variable has been introduced, which specifies a shared libraries mode. The mkc.subdir.mk include file as well as the targets "uninstall" and "installdirs" take into account the MKINSTALL variable. Support for the DEC C compiler has been added. There are minor fixes and new regression tests.

Tags: autotools, NetBSD make, bmake, build automation, cross-platform development, NetBSD, BSD

Licenses: BSD Revised

zzuf is a transparent application input fuzzer.
Its purpose is to find bugs in applications by
corrupting their user-contributed data, which
frequently comes from untrusted sources on the
Internet. It works by intercepting file and
network operations and changing random bits in the
program’s input. zzuf’s behavior is deterministic,
making it easier to reproduce bugs.

Changes: Zzuf now supports OpenSolaris, and support for OS X and BSD was greatly improved. This release also adds network host filtering and a fully programmable debugging tool.

Tags: Software Development, Testing, Quality Assurance, Security

Licenses: WTFPL

No, really. As trollish and dumb as they may seem, you still get such reactions. And the problem is that they may damage Free Software more now than ten years ago, when almost nobody knew what Free Software is anyway, so here are a few recent facts. http://stop.zona-m.net/node/87

Do you have problems with viruses and malware? Do you like to test different Linux distribution on your PC? Do you like to have tools and utilities available to check your PC, to partition your hard disk or to rescue data? This is perhaps the best tool you have ever seen and the best stuff for your USB Stick. Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility (Sardu) is software that can produce an ISO or an IMA anti-virus bootable CD, comprehensive collections of utilities, the most popular distributions of Linux Lite, and the best known Windows PE. In this article we’ll describe how to install more the 20 Live Systems on your USB Stick in 4 steps.

ITWire talks
with Mark Shuttleworth about copyright assignment policies. “The
most common complaint I’ve heard is ‘why can’t a company accept my patches
to them under the same licence that they give me the original code?’ But
that suggests that the two contributions are equal, when they really are
not. One party contributes a whole working system, with a commitment to
continue to do maintenance on it, the other contributes a patch which is
(generally) of no value without the rest of the codebase.“

During much of the time I was running Ubuntu, I told myself that I’d be running Debian instead, if only I could get everything working. I have tried the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 build, and I still appreciate so many things working out of the box on my 2002-03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. Even the USB Headphone Set sound module I’ve been using was able to play system sounds and Flash audio in Ubuntu. However, I recently was able to get that sound module to work in Debian Lenny. All I had to do was plug it into a different USB port on the Toshiba, and now it’s working fine.

Document Manager is a Web document organizer with
fine rights management and mail alerts. Version
2.0 doesn’t need SQL, but version 3.0 needs an SQL
database and has a small search engine. It is easy
to install, and is available in French, English,
and Spanish.

Changes: Mostly bugfixes from 3.0. A column has been added to the file list showing the uploader name. A security issue regarding file rights has been fixed. The default stylesheets have been enhanced.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Utilities, Office/Business, groupware, Information Management, Document Repositories, Communications, File Sharing

Licenses: GPL