For the seventh time now, the Université Libre de Bruxelles [1] in Brussels, Belgium, is hosting FOSDEM [2].

The impact of meetings like these on the free software community as awhole is huge. Apart from the obvious attractions of the meeting, such asthe ability to go to different talks and learn about exciting newthings related tofree software or to see demos at different stands, FOSDEM also allowsyou to meet people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

By many people, sending and receiving faxes on GNU/Linux is considered to be equivalent to using HylaFAX. And while I agree that HylaFAX is a nice piece of software with a nice set of features, I found that sometimes it can be rather overwhelming to set up. If you need some of its more advanced features, such as its client-server protocol that’s used for Windows clients, then HylaFAX is a great choice. But if you don’t need all that, then I believe mgetty is a much wiser choice...

Background

Some people who advocate against free software claim that it's bad for the economy and not sustainable in the long term, because the lack of direct revenue on developing free software makes it harder to make money out of developing such software. If generating direct revenue out of software development is not possible, they claim, then less people will be inclined to write software professionally. In turn, this will mean that end-users will have less high-quality software available. Is that really true? Let's find out.

Revenue, and money as a motivator

MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, are fairly popular in the proprietary gaming world. Rather than playing a game all by yourself on a computer in your own dark room, you could be playing a game all by yourself on a computer in your own dark room---but against thousands of other people who play the same game on-line along with, or against, your character in the game, adding an intriguing social edge to the genre. Unfortunately, no such game currently exists in the free software world. Not yet, anyway.

Nevrax and Ryzom

Two weeks ago, I explained how to set up a Kerberos realm; and last week, I went on to describe how to actually do something useful with it by doing Kerberized NFS. But there’s so much more interesting stuff that can be done with Kerberos, and it would be a shame to ignore those.

GSSAPI, SASL, and negotiation

Usually, I get annoyed at having to authenticate myself to each and every service I set up; after all, my passwords are the same everywhere, since I make sure of that myself. On Windows, I wouldn’t have to do that; once I log in, Windows is able to communicate credentials to each and every service that asks for them. But something similar is impossible on GNU/Linux, right? Wrong.

Single sign-on