A stability and security update to SeaMonkey, the community-driven continuation of the all-in-one Mozilla Application Suite, has been released. As detailed in the SeaMonkey 1.1.7 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page, the upgrade includes the same security patches as Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.10, which was also made available this week.

In addition to the security fixes, SeaMonkey 1.1.7 also includes several other small bug fixes; interested users can consult the rough SeaMonkey 1.1.7 changelog for more details. Unlike Firefox 2.0.0.10, SeaMonkey 1.1.7 was released after the regression relating to the drawImage method of the canvas element (bug 405584) was reported and fixed, so there will be no need for an equivalent to the Firefox 2.0.0.11 release.

SeaMonkey 1.1.7 can be downloaded from SeaMonkey 1.1.7 section of the SeaMonkey Download & Releases page. More information about the update can be found in the SeaMonkey 1.1.7 Release Notes.

yesterday i came across a marketer whose sells nokia original mobiles for cheap rates.
nokia n95 for $390 ,nokia n73 for$250..etc.
i think it will be a great help for poor people.
if anybody wants to know more or buy from him just put a comment here.i will direct him to you
because if i put link to him on lockergnome,it will be = to spamming.

A promotion in which a customer buying a $188 computer in the U.S. and Canada automatically donates a second one to a child in a developing country was extended until year’s end, organizers said Thursday.

The “Give One, Get One” program will now run through Dec. 31, instead of ending on Nov. 26, according to the One Laptop Per Child Program, a nonprofit spinoff from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The program said customers in the U.S. and Canada will pay $399 for two laptops, with one going to the buyer and the other to a child in such countries as Rwanda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti and Mongolia.

“In the past 10 days, we’ve experienced an outpouring of support from the public that is truly gratifying and encouraging,” said Nicholas Negroponte, the program’s founder.

Negroponte said they decided to extend the program because “so many people have asked for more time to participate either individually or in order to organize local and national groups to which they belong.”

“We want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to act upon the giving spirit of the holiday season,” he said.

The laptop has a homegrown user interface designed for children, boasts built-in wireless networking, uses very little power and can be recharged by hand with a pulley or a crank.

Let me give a happy news for windows users,”Windows Live OneCare 2.0 released.” Microsoft’s all-in-one security solution has scrapped the beta tag and the final version of the product is available as of November 14. There have already been indications that the Redmond company was getting ready to release Windows Live OneCare 2.0, and the official launch only came to confirm this scenario. The beta for OneCare 2.0 went live in mid July bringing to the table enhanced integration with both the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista SKUs (but only with the 32-bit edition of Windows XP SP2), the x64 versions having been ignored until that point. With the final OneCare 2.0 Microsoft promised that Vista users will continue to experience the benefits associated with the security product.

“Customers have told us they want an all-in-one solution for PC care that is simple and easy to use across all the PCs in their home,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of Windows Live OneCare at Microsoft. “Windows Live OneCare helps address this need by providing a comprehensive set of security and performance tools while adding new features, including multi-PC management, printer sharing support and centralized backup options.”

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 is designed to deliver both security and maintenance capabilities to up to three computers. The security solution is available for $49.95, covering a whole year’s worth of subscription and licenses for three PCs. The move to version 2.0 is positioned as a major update of OneCare bringing to the table centralized Home Network Management, performance boosts and improvements to back-up and restore functionality. The bottom line is that Microsoft built Windows Live OneCare 2.0 with multi-machine environments in mind, be them in the household or a small business environment.

“A lot of these customers run PCs without basic anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, and even fewer perform performance-enhancing tasks such as disk defragmentation and regular system back-ups. Furthermore, the plethora of digital photos stored on PCs means that more and more people are trusting their systems to archive digital memories, but given the general consumer’s lack of understanding of archival software, doing so becomes a risky proposition indeed. And, when you factor in the prevalence of wireless networks in use in homes and small-businesses, you quickly get the picture that there is a lot of data at risk out there and customers are ill-prepared to take the necessary precautions to ensure it,” revealed Nick White, Microsoft Product Manager.

Nokia Siemens Networks is now member of the Linux Foundation. It seems that Nokia Siemens Neworks is interested in collaborating with the Linux Foundation, and the other member companies, in order to provide better support and to improve the Carrier Grade Linux.

Nokia Siemens Networks officials claimed that the membership with the Linux Foundation implies, apart from the financial support, also technical contribution to the Linux community. The communication services company said that it will continue using Linux for its commercial products and that they are aware of the fact that Linux has represented a step forward towards many quite successful stories in the telecom world.

Stephan Scholz, chief technology officer with Nokia Siemens Networks, stated regarding the collaboration between the company he is with and the Linux Foundation:

“Nokia Siemens Networks will play an active role as a Linux Foundation member by contributing both financial and technical resources to the Linux ecosystem to make sure it remains state of the art. In Linux, the most important things for us are certified carrier grade interfaces as well as the interoperability between various Linux distributions. We look forward to working with the Linux Foundation and continue to use Linux in our commercially available products.”

In their turn, the Linux Foundation officials expressed their opinion through Jim Zemlin, executive director:

“Linux has become a very natural fit for telecom network and device manufacturers who are looking for an operating system from which they can easily and cost-effectively build differentiated services and value.There is no question that the massive success of Linux in telecom is key in today’s new stage of Linux growth. Nokia Siemens Networks will add another level of expertise as we transition into this stage of increasing open development, and we welcome their participation.”

The two sides claim they will be working together especially in the development of the Linux-based technologies for use in the User Plane and Control Plane Network Elements and also of the embedded applications. This collaboration is also aimed to increase the integration level for the mobile and carrier grade Linux specification with the Linux Standard Base.

The U.S. Department of Defense will be holding the third Department of Defense Open IT Conference from 11th to 12th December in Washington, D.C. This demonstrates how widespread the adoption of open source software is and points out how to get the best results using this type of software.

The main goal of the conference is to show the advantages and issues surrounding the deployment of open technology development.

Brigadier General Nickolas G. Justice, a key person of the conference, notes: “Open source software is part of the integrated network fabric which connects and enables our command and control system to work effectively, as people’s lives depend on it. When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source.”

Bill Vass, President and COO at Sun Microsystems Federal and Sun Microsystems Inc. will also attend the conference. Sun is one of the companies which helped government organizations solve their issues through military grade built-in security products like the Trusted Solaris operating system, identity management software, Sun Fire systems and StorageTek Solutions.

The first day of the conference will be split in four sessions, while the second will be made of only three. Here are some details on what will be discussed through the conference:

- Day 1

Session 1: Open Technology 101 - Open Standards

This will be an overview of open standards and the process of selecting and implementing within an organization and details on how to use them as a medium for interoperability. Also, a comparison between the open source, free software and public domain concepts will be made.

Session 2: Best Practices in The Use of Open Source in Government

Case studies and examples of actual implementations, with methodologies for employing open technology within Government organization, systems and processes.

Session 3: Open Technology 101 - Open Standards

Although it has the same name as the first session, this will be different, covering aspects like the basics of open source licenses and the open source business model, explaining licensing issues for open source software and more.

Session 4: Best Practices in the Use of Open Source in Government

This session will continue the second one, with the same subjects.

- Day 2

Session 1: Security and Open Systems

The first session will have subjects such as working within the security community to assimilate new tools, which allows the entire community to benefit from the results. Another subject will be the relationship between FLOSS and software assurance/security.

Session 2: Open Tools

The center of attention will be the examples of converting software created for a Department of Defense Intelligence Community customer to open source and the open source movement, focusing the technology, saving opportunities and legal issues for the Government.

Session 3: Open Technology Development for Defense Contractors

The way open source is applied by the DoD will be the subject of the last session. Technologies like chatting and VoIP communication have been used for warfighters. Another good example is the OSS Army WebPff project, with a lot of features that were never implemented in a browser-based system.

The Conference could be one of the most important events of this year in the Open Source world, so don’t miss it if you’re interested in Open Source and military uses of it.

Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. Says Google, “This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future…we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!” Meanwhile, some publishers report waiting a month for their API usage to be approved. I take Google at its word for now but worry that small developers could be increasingly squeezed out of the mashup space if this were to become a trend.

Intel has released an online tool called Mash Maker with the intent of allowing anyone to create mashups. They offer some training on how to use it, but the tool is fairly easy to use out of the gate. I see it more as a rudimentary semantic browser. From the article: ‘Mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn’t know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it … With Mash Maker, mashups are part of the normal browsing experience. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar displays buttons representing mashups that Mash Maker thinks you might want to apply to your current page.

Before reading the post firstly a question? which linux distribution boot faster?if you dont know the answer check it out!!

Linux device designers looking for faster boot/reset times should consider alternative BIOSes, suggests Peter Seebach in a technical introduction to open BIOSes published on IBM’s DeveloperWorks website. Among other benefits, open BIOSes can save the time wasted by proprietary BIOS legacy support for MS-DOS and other unnecessary functions, Seebach notes.

According to Seebach, the proprietary BIOSes typically found in off-the-shelf PCs and boards often account for more than half of total boot time. And, much of this time is spent loading drivers and compiling information useful to legacy OSes such as DOS, but largely useless and redundant when using a modern OS such as Linux, which tends to do its own hardware probing, and load its own hardware drivers.

The solution, according to Seebach, is to replace proprietary BIOSes with open BIOSes. Open implementations can be configured or customized to perform only those initiatialization tasks that really are required, before bootstrapping the OS.

Seebach begins with an overview of Open Firmware, which he says provides a much more hacker-friendly alternative to proprietary BIOSes. Although developed by Sun and Apple for PowerPC, Open Firmware also has a lot to offer other architectures, including x86, writes Seebach.

Another interesting approach involves using Linux itself to initialize the hardware. The LinuxBIOS takes the approach of loading a small Linux kernel directly into the boot ROM. This approach is increasingly practical now that boards have 1-2MB of flash ROM onboard, according to Seebach.

Seebach notes that reflashing a board’s BIOS carries risk, because if the new BIOS fails to bring the board up, there will be no way to further reflash the BIOS without expensive, specialized equipment.

To read more about open alternative BIOS projects, read Seebach’s introductory article, here.

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Top 11 reasons to use Google Apps

Novell Thursday updated OpenSUSE to version 10.3, adding the latest and greatest the open source community has to offer. Perhaps just as importantly, it’s now also faster to get to all the latest and greatest, with what Novell claims is the shortest boot time yet for its community Linux distribution.

The openSUSE 10.3 release includes the 2.6.22.5 Linux kernel OpenOffice 2.3 and the latest GNOME 2.20 and KDE 3.5.7 desktop GUIs among the myriad of updated packages.

Though openSUSE 10.3 adds in a lot of updated programs, the project’s contributors took a stab at also making the operating system more efficient. Of particular focus in this release were boot-time enhancements.

“There are now some incredibly impressive speed-ups, with desktops booting in around 24 seconds, or laptops booting in 27 seconds, compared to a 55 second wait in openSUSE 10.2,” developer Francis Giannaros wrote on the openSUSE blog.

Novell has also improved the way that openSUSE users get their packages. openSUSE 10.3 includes new and redesigned modules for their YaST (Yet another Setup Tool installer) including a revamped network module.

The new release will also make it simpler for users to build customized distributions, with a YaST front-end for KIWI, openSUSE’s application for creating custom system images. KIWI first debuted in January, at the same time Novell announced AutoBuild, which also figures prominently in this release. As one might guess, AutoBuild enabling developers to automatically build packages for openSUSE.

Another notable enhancement to the 10.3 release is openSUSE’s “1 click install” feature, which takes advantage of the build service.

“1 click install works directly from your Web browser, without any need to invoke YaST or any other package management tool first, with a single click,” Gerald Pfeifer, director of product management for SUSE Linux told InternetNews.com. “Leveraging this, anyone can set up a Web page with a reference to a set of packages and users can install this very easily.”

The openSUSE 10.2 release emerged in early December 2006 and included the “pirate” 2.6.18.2 kernel. Pfeifer said today’s openSUSE 10.3 release, coming some 11 months after the prior release, appeared on schedule.