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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Where Is Real-Time Linux? (TechNewsWorld) TechNewsWorld compares real time implementations in Linux. "Hard real-time Linux has been around for ages, or it may never appear. It all depends on who you talk to. It also depends on your requirements. A two-second interrupt latency may be acceptable for some applications, and even many Linux implementations can easily handle interrupts within tens of milliseconds."
Linux lasting longer against Net attacks (News.com) News.com looks at a report from the Honeynet Project that shows improvements in the ability of stock Linux distributions to resist attacks. "The data, from a dozen networks, showed that the average Linux system lasts three months before being compromised, a significant increase from the 72 hours life span of a Linux system in 2001. Unpatched Windows systems continue to be compromised more quickly, sometimes within minutes, the Honeynet Project report stated."
Linux and Open Source: The 2005 Generation (eWeek) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts good things for free software in 2005 in eWeek. "I even see Microsoft Office, perhaps the most bloated software suite ever, finally losing ground. That's because Sun's open-source OpenOffice.org 2.0 is looking very, very good. Not only does it have excellent Office file format compatibility, it's finally become a fast application. I've used OpenOffice for ages, but I've never warmed up to it. It's always been too darn slow. With this last pre-beta, though... woo! Look out Microsoft Office, OpenOffice means business."
The SCO Problem SCO Must Pay DC's Costs and Attys Fees If It Refiles (Groklaw) Groklaw discovered some details on the SCO/Daimler Chrysler case that were not mentioned in the recent SCO teleconference. "..the Order says that if ever SCO refiles against DaimlerChrysler for breach of contract regarding an alleged failure to timely certify, it has to pay DC's costs and attorneys' fees going back to August 9th, the date of the judge's order denying in part and granting in part DC's Motion for Summary Disposition."
Code sleuths (Boston.com) Boston.com has posted an article on the dangers of open source code. "Similar scenes are playing out at software firms and other businesses across the country, as engineers frantically search their files for something they hope not to find: open-source components. Their improper use, in the worst case scenario, could subject companies to costly litigation from parties like the SCO Group of Lindon, Utah." It's a low-clue article, but, alas, it may well scare some people.
Companies HP unveils plans for digital home invasion (News.com) News.com reports on HP's Linux-based "home media hub." "In addition to unveiling new hardware, HP is beginning to lay the groundwork for strategic participation in developing DRM technology through its alliance with Philips. Creating digital locks that pass muster with major music labels and Hollywood studios is widely considered a crucial step in the evolution of digital media to ensure artists and publishers get paid, barring more radical experiments such as compulsory licensing or hardware taxes."
Novell Joins SuSE Linux, Netware in Public Beta (eWeek) eWeek covers the first beta release of Novell's Open Enterprise Server. "Novell Inc. gave its NetWare and Linux users a Christmas present by releasing the first public beta of Novell Open Enterprise Server over the holiday weekend. OES is Novell's dual operating system, NetWare services platform. It can run on top of either SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) 9.2 or the NetWare 7.0 kernel or both. "We're not dropping NetWare; we are adding Linux," explained Jack Messman, Novell's chairman and CEO."
Red Hat pulls out a profit (News.com) News.com covers the latest financial report from Red Hat. "Linux seller Red Hat reported on Wednesday that its third-quarter net income jumped 155 percent year-over-year to $10.8 million as its software business matured. That income meant the company earned 6 cents per share for the fiscal third quarter ended Nov. 30, matching the average expectations of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call. Red Hat also announced quarterly revenue of $50.9 million, an increase of 55 percent over the same period last year, but less than the $51.8 million analysts expected."
Business Open Source Wall Street The Decatur Jones Open Source Wall Street newsletter for January 3 is out; it's available in PDF format. "As Linux continues to gain market share, we expect to see Novell (NOVL: Outperform) and Red Hat (RHAT: Outperform) to stand out, Citrix (CTXS: Outperform) to grow steadily, and SCO Group (SCOX: Market perform) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW: Market perform) to stagnate or falter."
Linux Adoption Before the storm (O'ReillyNet) Jono Bacon begins a series of articles on open source advocacy, on O'ReillyNet. "In recent years, Open Source has become a relevant and strangely addictive force in IT. As the Internet age has dominated businesses and consumers with the same well oiled, yet clunky machine, Open Source has crept out of the dimly lit bedrooms occupied by toiling hackers and into the network rooms and 'enterprise centric strategies' of todays businesses. Open Source has not just become more acceptable, it has become more relevant."
Venezuela opts for Linux (ZDNet) ZDNet reports that the Venezuelan government will switch to Linux. "Over the next three months the Ministry of Science and Technology will prepare a plan of how all ministries will migrate to open source software, according to a report by online news service Venezuelanalysis.com. It reported that these plans will then be implemented over the following 24 months."
Legal Sprucing up open source's GPL foundation (ZDNet) ZDNet has posted a lengthy article speculating on future changes to the GPL. "The patent problems boil down to two issues. First, should the license explicitly require those who distribute GPL software to grant others unhindered use of whatever patented technology is involved in that software? And second, should there be some form of punishment for those who file lawsuits alleging that GPL software infringes their patents?"
Dutch govt ends exclusive MS upgrade talks (Register) The register covers a policy flip-flop by the Dutch government concerning software upgrades on its 260,000 Microsoft-based computers. "Despite a unanimous vote by the Dutch parliament in 2002 to adopt open standards and open source software, Microsoft recently opened exclusive negotiations with the Dutch government regarding a major software upgrade. After Dutch IT weekly newspaper Automatisering Gids leaked details about the €157m ($210m) deal, Dutch MPs demanded an explanation as to why there hadn't been a mandatory public bid."
Plugging the Knowledge Gaps on FOSS Licenses (Groklaw) Groklaw answers some recent attacks on free software licenses. "The bottom line is always the same: If you steal someone's code, there will be consequences. That's true for the GPL (if you distribute the code -- you are free always to use any GPL code in-house without any consequences at all), but it's not unique to it. If you steal Microsoft's code, there are consequences also. You do have to respect other people's intellectual property rights, as lawyers call them. That's true for all licensed code, including the GPL."
Interviews Freedom, Innovation, and Convenience: The RMS Interview (O'ReillyNet) O'ReillyNet has published a lengthy interview with Richard Stallman. "Porting free applications to nonfree operating systems is often useful. This allows users of those operating systems to try out using a few free programs and see that they can be good to use, that free software won't bite them. This can help people overcome worries about trying a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. Many users really do follow this path."
Interview with Richard Thieme (Linux Journal) Linux Journal interviews Richard Thieme. "In the field of information security, there are many useful occupations: firewall engineer, policy analyst, auditor and security architect all are popular choices. But what about information technology philosopher? There's plenty of value in describing the intersections between technology and the human experience, but I know of only one person who makes a living doing so--Richard Thieme."
Interview with PlaySMS project owner Anton Raharja (NewsForge) NewsForge looks at the PlaySMS Mobile Portal System project. "The PlaySMS Mobile Portal System project aims to have a major role in the mobile applications area. Anton Raharja, the Indonesian project owner of PlaySMS MPS, has linked up with open source developers in the Philippines, the "mobile messaging/SMS capital of the world." Over 10% of the total SMS messages processed in the world, averaging 200 million messages on any given day, come from the island nation. Many mobile applications are already in use in the Philippines before other countries start experimenting with them."
Understanding NetBSD 2.0's new technology (NewsForge) NewsForge talks with the NetBSD hackers about new features in the 2.0 release. "Scheduler activations are a mechanism invented by Thomas Anderson in a 1992 paper, which provides an interface between an operating system kernel and an application for maintaining a desired level of concurrency. In this system, the application informs the kernel how much concurrency it has, e.g. how many simultaneously computing threads it will use, and the kernel maintains a certain number of 'activations,' or scheduleable entities, on which the library layers application computation."
Resources An Invitation to SETL (Linux Journal) Linux Journal looks at SETL, a programming language modeled on set theory. "The aim of this article is not to offer a thorough discussion of SETL internals or a comparisons with other languages. Rather it intends to show the strong points of SETL by using elementary examples to convince you of how useful it can be in the right setting. For example, SETL appears to be one of the most suitable environments in which to make Set Theory calculations on a PC. As most problems may be formulated using the sets formalism, SETL is a good choice for all those times when compactness and elegance are more relevant than speed or memory consumption."
Clever Tricks with MythTV (O'ReillyNet) Here's an O'ReillyNet article on building a video recorder with MythTV. "The general advice is not to buy a TV card with its own remote. Apparently, this almost guarantees that you'll have difficulty making it work. The best way is to use an IRda keyboard and a programmable remote control that operates on a variety of frequencies. You train the remote from the keyboard, which will be useful also for web browsing or other activities you might consider later."
Cooking with Linux, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet) O'Reilly has published part two of the Cooking with Linux series. "In the second part of this two-part series, Carla Schroder, author of Linux Cookbook, offers two more recipes, including tips on running different window managers simultaneously with Xnest and hosting multiple domains with Apache."
Ten Tips for Building Your First High-Performance Cluster (O'ReillyNet) O'ReillyNet offers some advice to anybody considering building a Linux cluster. "Using the same hardware for each machine in the cluster will simplify installing and configuring your clusters, since you'll be able to use identical system images on each machine. It will simplify maintaining your cluster since, all of the systems have the same basic configuration. You'll need to stock fewer spare parts and will be able to swap systems in and out of your cluster as needed. But the really big savings will come when you program your cluster; you won't have to code for differences in performance among machines."
Migrating from x86 to PowerPC (developerWorks) developerWorks introduces a new series on embedded Linux systems on the PowerPC architecture. "In the process, I'll also provide sample implementations showing some general techniques of interest in networked embedded appliances. The end result will be that you'll turn a bare-bones networked storage appliance into something that could be the core of a simple autonomous vehicle controller, with basic actuator controls, sensors, and rudimentary machine vision capabilities. Because most people probably don't need to build robot submarines (as much as most of us would like to), this article also explains how to design and implement web-based administration interfaces and other topics of wider applicability."
Reviews FIC unveils Linux-based portable media player (LinuxDevices) LinuxDevices takes a look at a Linux-based portable media player from Taiwanese motherboard maker FIC. "The Vassili includes a built-in 20GB hard drive and large, 3.6-inch color LCD display. It also includes TV- and audio-out ports, a built-in speaker, a USB 2.0 device interface, a USB host interface, and a 10/100 Ethernet LAN port. An included docking station supports s-video."
Securing your workstation with Firestarter (NewsForge) Here's a NewsForge review of Firestarter. "Firestarter is a GPL-licensed graphical firewall configuration program for iptables, the powerful firewall included in Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Firestarter supports network address translation for sharing an Internet connection among multiple computers, and port forwarding for redirecting traffic to an internal workstation. Firestarter's clean and easy to use graphical user interface takes the time out of setting up a custom firewall."
Useful Things You Can Do with FVWM (Linux Journal) Linux Journal examines some features of FVWM. "FVWM is a window manager used with the X Window System, which is the standard GUI for UNIX. This article explains a few useful things you can do with FVWM, including how to take screenshots conveniently, how to easily change a window's title and how to reconfigure easily a running FVWM instance."
Introduction to Inkscape 0.4 (NewsForge) NewsForge reviews Inkscape 0.4. "Inkscape 0.4 is considerably faster than its predecessors, and it seems to be a bit less memory-intensive. So far, this version has been more stable than the previous version. In all the time I have spent with this Inkscape 0.4, it has crashed only once, and that was while creating a new layer. It is certainly stable enough for regular use in a production environment, but users should save often just in case."
Using the Gyration Media Center Remote with Linux (Technocrat.net) Bruce Perens tries out the Gyration Media Center Remote with Linux, on Technocrat.net. "The Gyration Media Center Remote is a radio keyboard and mouse with 100-foot range. The mouse uses an accelerometer rather than a mouse wheel, and thus has the unique feature that you can make mouse gestures in the air. The mouse should be perfect for a public speaker who wants to move around during a speech, without giving up control of his laptop. It would also make a nifty remote for a Linux PVR user, since it has VCR controls and channel and volume buttons. But does it work with Linux?"
Miscellaneous Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? (News.com) Microsoft Outlook may face some new competition from the Mozilla Lightning project, according to this article on News.com. "The new project, code-named Lightning, aims to integrate Mozilla's calendar application, Sunbird, with its recently released Thunderbird e-mail application. That integration is aimed right at the heart of Microsoft's widely used Outlook software."
The Linux Year (PCPro) PCPro takes a look at Linux in 2004 with a few predictions for 2005. " The year of the penguin, some people hailed 2004 at the turn of the year. And in many ways it was. Was it because the march on the server space continued at a relentless pace? Because there were big announcements around desktop installments? Because there was finally some realistic perspective about the threat from SCO, or the threat to Microsoft? However you look at it, the penguin's tux has never looked more pristine or ready for business. So here we'll take a stroll though the last 12 months that sharpened the creases and quickened the pace of the Linux-based platforms."
Looking back at 2004 (ars technica) The ars technica year-end edition looks back at a year of Linux, and offers various awards. "So much has been said about Ubuntu that it should be apparently that it's something special. By attempting to create a single distribution with a tweaked desktop, Project Utopia, and a multicultural approach, Ubuntu has come close to being the Holy Grail of Linux for many of us." LWN is their "online publication of the year." (Thanks to "TomS").
2005 outlook: Desktops to see Linux, search war and more spyware (Search Networking) SearchNetworking.com has a few predictions for 2005. "Two years ago, I said that Linux on the desktop was a nonstarter, but a lot has happened since then. The popular Firefox browser started the ball rolling in 2004. Now, in 2005, several vendors release desktop environments that mimic the Windows interface, establishing Linux as a low-cost alternative to Windows. The trend builds slowly, but the adoption of Linux as the desktop standard by a major U.S. government agency juices the trend. By year's end, Linux approaches 10% market share of new desktop operating system sales. Microsoft isn't exactly under siege, but the lights start burning late in Redmond."
Asian Linux distro is ahead of schedule (ZDNet UK) ZDNet UK reports that Asian software vendors are on track to release Asianux 2.0 by next July (originally not scheduled before September). "According to The Korea Herald, HaanSoft has said that by this summer it will have produced a distribution that is comparable to those of SuSE and Red Hat Linux. The newspaper also reported that the date of release was put forward because the Korean government is due to adopt a large high-school population database in the second half of 2005. This could be a "huge opportunity" to introduce open source, according to HaanSoft."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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