LWN featured content
[$] Open source and the Morevna project
[Front] Posted Mar 10, 2010 14:08 UTC (Wed) by jake
Konstatin Dmitriev's Morevna
Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation's Open
movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a
production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source
software, and license the source content and final product under free,
re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing,
feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while
raising awareness of the quality of the code. Subscribers can click below
for a look at the project from this week's edition.
Full Story (comments: 2)
[$] 4K-sector drives and Linux
[Kernel] Posted Mar 9, 2010 23:19 UTC (Tue) by corbet
Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector
drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB
physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density,
always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a
number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel
developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive,
worth-reading
summary stating that "4 KiB logical sector support is broken in
both the kernel and partitioners." As the subsequent discussion
revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that
we're not quite that badly prepared; click below (subscribers only) for details.
Full Story (comments: 24)
Apple's patent attack
[Front] Posted Mar 2, 2010 21:46 UTC (Tue) by corbet
Software patents have long been the source of a great deal of concern in
the free software community; patents are by far the biggest restraint on
our ability to program our own computers. Those who worry about these
things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from
software companies with fading prospects. Apple's lawsuit
against HTC shows that the real threat may come from a different
direction. Click below (subscribers only) for a look at Apple's attack on
Android and on Linux as a whole.
Full Story (comments: 64)
The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit
[Distributions] Posted Mar 2, 2010 17:04 UTC (Tue) by corbet
One of the features expected with the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release is the
Ubuntu One Music
Store (UOMS). The UOMS is a mechanism by which Ubuntu users can
purchase songs in the MP3 format, with some of the revenue going to support
Canonical. These songs are evidently compressed at a relatively high bit
rate and lack any sort of DRM or watermarks. Support for the UOMS has been
integrated into the Rhythmbox music player, with support for other players
expected in the future. Discussion of this new feature has been relatively
subdued thus far, but developers elsewhere are beginning to take notice and
ask some questions about the extent to which the UOMS should be supported.
Full Story (comments: 55)
SCALE 8x: Color management for everyone
[Front] Posted Mar 2, 2010 0:09 UTC (Tue) by jake
On Sunday at SCALE 8x, Inkscape developer Jon Cruz presented a talk
entitled "Why
Color Management matters to Open Source and to You," putting the need
for color management into real-world terms for the average Linux user,
outlining current development work on the subject at the application and
toolkit levels, and giving example color-managed workflows for print and
web production. Color management is sometimes unfairly characterized as a
topic of interest only to print shops and video editors, but as Cruz
explained at the top of his talk, anyone who shares digital content wants
it to look correct, and everyone who uses more than one device knows how
tricky that can be. Click below, subscribers only, for a look at the talk
from this week's edition.
Full Story (comments: 19)
SCALE 8x: Free software legal issues
[Front] Posted Feb 24, 2010 20:01 UTC (Wed) by jake
The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes
first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove
their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth. But in reality the
FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run
smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various
software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other
"intellectual property" law. Every once in a while, a good status check on
the legal dimension is healthy for the typical developer, and SCALE 8x offered just
that in a series of talks.
Click below (subscribers only) for the full
story from guest author Nathan Willis.
Full Story (comments: 1)
SCALE 8x: Moving the needle
[Front] Posted Feb 24, 2010 16:09 UTC (Wed) by jake
There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women
participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared
are few and far between.
Sarah Mei spoke at the Women
in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on
what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been
doing to bring more women into that community. Click below, subscribers
only, for a report on the talk from WIOS.
Full Story (comments: 22)
Google releases "Living Stories" code
[Development] Posted Feb 23, 2010 16:24 UTC (Tue) by jake
You are reading a standard-form news article, and when new information
comes to light,
the piece you're reading might just be referenced in a follow-up but
it won't be displayed in context or be easy to navigate. However, if
Google's Living Stories experiment takes off following the release of its code,
that won't always be the case. Subscribers can click below for a look at
Living Stories from
this week's edition.
Full Story (comments: 3)
2.6.32.9 Release notes
[Kernel] Posted Feb 21, 2010 19:04 UTC (Sun) by corbet
The 2.6.32.9 stable kernel update is in the
review process as of this writing. There have often been requests for
more information about stable updates, so, this time around, LWN decided to
make a one-time try at providing that information. In the process, we've
learned a few things - the task would have been easier if we'd not chosen a
93-patch update, for example. In any case, the job is done; click below
(subscribers only) to see what's coming with 2.6.32.9.
Full Story (comments: 95)
How old is our kernel?
[Kernel] Posted Feb 17, 2010 15:43 UTC (Wed) by corbet
We now have almost five years of kernel development history in the git
repository; this history can yield interesting information to those who
look.
In this article, your editor digs into the repository to look at our oldest
code - how much of the kernel remains from the initial git commit in 2005?
The answers can be surprising; click below (subscribers only) for the full
story.
Full Story (comments: 55)
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Current news
LinuxCon Japan Call for Participation
[Announcements] Posted Mar 12, 2010 23:01 UTC (Fri) by jake
LinuxCon Japan, formerly known as the Japan Linux Symposium, has announced its call for participation (CFP). This Linux Foundation sponsored conference will be held in Tokyo September 27-29. The CFP lists a number of topic areas that are of particular interest including desktop Linux, embedded and mobile Linux, Linux adoption, and so on; it closes on May 14. "LinuxCon Japan is the premiere Linux conference in Asia that brings together a unique blend of core developers, administrators, users, community managers and industry experts. It is designed not only to encourage collaboration but also to support future interaction between Japan and other Asia Pacific countries and the rest of the global Linux community. The conference includes presentations, tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, keynotes, sponsored mini-summits."
Comments (none posted)
Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit keynotes announced
[Announcements] Posted Mar 12, 2010 22:53 UTC (Fri) by jake
The Linux Foundation has announced the program for the Collaboration Summit to be held April 14-16 in San Francisco. This is an invitation-only event, though invitations can still be requested. Highlights include a full-day session on Meego, the Linux kernel roundtable, keynotes by Josh Berkus, Dr. Daniel Frye, Jim Zemlin, and others, a cloud computing roundtable, and more. "The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only event where a true cross-section of leaders from the Linux developer, industry and end user communities meet face-to-face to tackle today’s most pressing issues facing Linux, including technical development, legal topics, ISV porting and end user requirements."
Comments (none posted)
PyPy 1.2 released
[Development] Posted Mar 12, 2010 19:13 UTC (Fri) by corbet
Version 1.2 of PyPy - an alternative implementation of the Python
interpreter - has been released.
"This version 1.2 is a major
milestone and it is the first release to ship a Just-in-Time compiler that
is known to be faster than CPython (and unladen swallow) on some real-world
applications (or the best benchmarks we could get for them). The main theme
for the 1.2 release is speed." It's still not quite ready for
production use, but it appears to be getting a lot closer.
Comments (1 posted)
Security updates for Friday
[Security] Posted Mar 12, 2010 18:53 UTC (Fri) by jake
Debian has updated Egroupware
(multiple vulnerabilities) and MoinMoin
(multiple vulnerabilities).
Fedora has updated nss (F12: TLS
man-in-the-middle plaintext injection) and cups (fix for earlier denial of service fix).
Mandriva has updated ncpfs (multiple
vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated MoinMoin
(multiple vulnerabilities).
Comments (none posted)
Building an open source business (opensource.com)
[Announcements] Posted Mar 12, 2010 18:16 UTC (Fri) by jake
Over at opensource.com, OpenNMS's Tarus Balog looks at the process of starting an open source business. This article covers much of the same material as his recent SCALE 8x keynote. "You might think that I was motivated by some sort of idealistic love of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the time, I was still running a Windows desktop. I undertook the OpenNMS project because I believed one thing: in the area of network management, open source represents the best business solution."
Comments (2 posted)
Fedora's "stable release updates vision"
[Distributions] Posted Mar 12, 2010 14:59 UTC (Fri) by corbet
The Fedora board has, in response to ongoing discussions about updates to
its releases (as covered in the
March 11 Weekly Edition), adopted a
"vision statement" on how Fedora releases should be maintained.
"Stable releases should provide a consistent user experience
throughout the lifecycle, and only fix bugs and security issues. Stable
releases should not be used for tracking upstream version closely when this
is likely to change the user experience beyond fixing bugs and security
issues."
Full Story (comments: 12)
Google's RE2 regular expression library
[Development] Posted Mar 12, 2010 14:25 UTC (Fri) by corbet
Google has announced
the release of its RE2 library under a BSDish license. "At Google,
we use regular expressions as part of the interface to many external and
internal systems, including Code Search, Sawzall, and Bigtable. Those
systems process large amounts of data; exponential run time would be a
serious problem. On a more practical note, these are multithreaded C++
programs with fixed-size stacks: the unbounded stack usage in typical
regular expression implementations leads to stack overflows and server
crashes. To solve both problems, we've built a new regular expression
engine, called RE2, which is based on automata theory and guarantees that
searches complete in linear time with respect to the size of the input and
in a fixed amount of stack space." More information can be found on
the RE2 project page.
Comments (18 posted)
Simon Phipps elected as OSI director (The H)
[Announcements] Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:38 UTC (Thu) by ris
The H reports
that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps, formerly
Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, to the board of directors. "As a director, Phipps hopes to help the organisation change so that it becomes more member-oriented, more active in promoting open source in education, in policy development and possibly in organisational support for open source projects; "My goal as a Director will be to facilitate that change, a change that is already well under way following recent face to face discussions and the great work that Andrew Oliver and Danese Cooper have already put in"."
Comments (none posted)
Embedded Linux Conference 2010 Program is available
[Announcements] Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:33 UTC (Thu) by jake
This year's Embedded Linux Conference, which will be held in San Francisco April 12-14, has announced that its program is now available. The keynote speakers will be Greg Kroah-Hartman ("Android: a Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project") and Matt Asay ("Embedded in 2010: an End to
the Entropy?") along with a whole slate of over 50 presentations, tutorials, and BoFs.
"This is your chance to meet leading developers from the embedded
Linux community, and learn about the latest changes in Linux.
Also, you can talk to engineers working on real products at
some of the largest CE companies in the world, describing how
they solved real issues in their own development projects." Click below for the full announcement.
Full Story (comments: 3)
Linux Arpeggiators, Part 1 (Linux Journal)
[Development] Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:25 UTC (Thu) by ris
Dave Phillips looks
at arpeggiators for Linux. "An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator."
Comments (10 posted)
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