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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading The Prospect for 2005 (IT-Director) Robin Bloor looks forward to 2005 in this IT-Director article. "The successful growth of Open Source in any market puts price pressure on the dominant proprietary vendors and we expect this pressure to show in the database market in the coming year with customers adopting Open Source database products for some applications and using this as a lever to negotiate the price of Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server downwards. In our view few companies will think to migrate their mission critical applications to Open Source database products, but we are already hearing of some companies that intend to do just that."
Companies A Way to Hammer at Windows (Business Week) Business Week sees IBM's release of 500 patents as a move against Microsoft. "It's striking how different IBM's strategy is from Microsoft's. Microsoft, which declined to comment, is building a legal team to enforce intellectual-property claims. In so doing, it hopes to protect its monopoly: When makers sell PCs and servers loaded with Windows, Microsoft has the best shot at selling an array of applications. IBM has a different tack. In a strategy it calls 'collaborative innovation,' it shares some of its intellectual property, hoping to bolster open-source alternatives to Windows, such as Linux."
HP to rejuvenate OpenVMS on Monday (News.com) News.com reports that HP plans to release OpenVMS 8.2. "OpenVMS for Itanium will come with many of the abilities of the Alpha version--in particular a famed reliability feature called clustering that links separate machines into a tightly knit group. One machine in a cluster can fill in for another that's taken down for equipment failure or an upgrade, for example."
Red Hat tries again with Linux enthusiasts (ZDNet) ZDNet looks at the history and future plans for Red Hat's Fedora Core project. "Three versions of Fedora have been released so far, and the company is happy with how users have helped RHEL. But the community effort has fallen short at a time when students and open-source enthusiasts have plenty of other channels for their cooperative energies. "One of the mistakes we made early on when we made the split between RHEL and Fedora was we told everybody that Fedora was public, come help us out," said Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat's community relations manager. "We got lots of people responding," but Red Hat couldn't accept much beyond simple bug reports."
Sun license gets open-source nod (News.com) News.com reports that the Open Source Initiative has blessed Sun's new CDDL. "Sun won't comment on whether the CDDL will govern Solaris, but sources familiar with the situation say it will. Sun has said it will release Solaris under an OSI-approved open-source license by the end of January."
Linux Adoption Chilean schools welcome Linux (Silicon.com) Silicon.com reports that EduLinux will be used in 600 schools in Chile. "EduLinux was evaluated in 25 establishments during 2004, according to El Mercurio. This study concluded that Linux would let schools make the best use of old computers with limited processing power."
Interviews An Interview with the KDE Team (LinuxTimes) LinuxTimes interviews George Staikos, the KDE North American Representative.Q: "What is the one area of KDE that needs the most work, or, What is the first priority for the KDE project at the present moment?" A: "Actually due to the timing, KDE's priority at the moment is KDE 4 - porting to Qt 4 and fixing architectural issues in KDE. This will be the main focus for 2005, and it should make a huge difference for KDE overall. Qt4 promises much better performance and the ability to take advantage of more advanced technologies and cleaner designs. As a part of this, there will be a focus on sharing more specifications and interoperating with other desktop software (GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla), and an effort to choose and integrate with a new multimedia framework."
At the heart of the open-source revolution (News.com) News.com has published an interview with Mitch Kapor. "The great thing that's happened of late is to see the early, huge momentum of Firefox, attracting millions of users and beginning to grow its market share appreciably. That represents proof that a well-done, well-wrought open-source product can have global impact as an application--and I consider a Web browser to be one of those everyday products."
Resources More FreeBSD for Linux Users (O'Reilly) Dru Lavigne discusses the differences between FreeBSD and Linux in an O'Reilly article. "Today's article examines some of the common command differences a Linux user might encounter on a FreeBSD system. One of the minor irritations that comes with using another operating system is the change in the environment. Some of the first things many Linux users discover about a default FreeBSD installation are that it doesn't include bash and doesn't colorize the output of ls." Of course, several of your LWN editors de-colorize ls and vim at the earliest opportunity after installing a new version of Linux.
Free Software Magazine #1 A new publication entitled Free Software Magazine has launched the first issue, it is available for download. Here's a sample article: "Free software, not just Linux, is a major problem for Microsoft. It’s a big mistake thinking they don’t understand free software, or its mechanics. They understand it all too well, and they don’t like it - not one little bit! The problem Microsoft have with free software is that it benefits the customer directly, not the software IP holders."
Linux MIDI: A Brief Survey, Part 4 (Linux Journal) Here's a Linux Journal article looking at interesting MIDI software. "Improv controls real-time MIDI communication between a host computer and an external synthesizer. In a typical program, the computer receives MIDI input from the synthesizer, immediately alters that input in some preprogrammed manner and sends the altered data stream to the specified MIDI output port. Some Improv examples have the computer produce a MIDI output stream that can be altered by the external keyboard, creating interesting possibilities for a musical 'dialog' with the program."
Network Installation of Windows Printers from Samba (O'Reilly) Carla Schroder details the process of making cross-platform printing work on O'Reilly. "The combination of Samba and CUPS makes network printing on a mixed Linux/Windows LAN easier than ever. You can share Linux printers with Windows clients, and Windows printers with Linux clients. A Linux/Samba/CUPS printer server is reliable and reasonably simple to set up and maintain."
Reviews Site review: Snazzy zazzybob.com (NewsForge) NewsForge reviews the web site zazzybob.com. "What's a zazzybob? I don't know, but zazzybob.com is a Linux site that has a "particular lean" toward scripting, with a full repository of Linux and Unix scripts free for the taking under the terms of the GNU GPL. The scripts perform all sort of useful and automatic functions, like adding a user, clearing the screen, opening a bash xterm, or converting a decimal number to hex (or vice versa)."
KMail In Depth (Linux Planet) Linux Planet looks at KMail. "KMail has long been my Linux email client of choice for a number of reasons: nice clean interface, easily customizable and configurable, stable, and more features than you can shake a stick at. Today we'll dig into migrating from other email clients, encrypting messages and key signing, and configuring multiple accounts and identities." (Found on KDE.News)
Bitten By the aKregator (OSdir.com) O'Reilly's OSDir has an article by George Staikos about the new RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregator that is included in KDE 3.4 beta. "Recently a new addition was made to the code that will become KDE 3.4. The application known as aKregator was imported. aKregator is a feed reader for KDE that supports RSS/RDF and Atom feeds. Many news sites offer this technology as a means to access the headlines and brief story summaries without loading the full content of the pages."
Miscellaneous FeedBurner: Mozilla Firefox Third Most Popular RSS Reader (MozillaZine) MozillaZine covers a Netcraft report that finds Mozilla Firefox to be the third most popular RSS reader. "The data comes from RSS/Atom feed post-processing service FeedBurner, who analysed the readers accessing their 800 most popular feeds. Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature came in third behind the Web-based Bloglines and the Mac OS X client NetNewsWire. As the figures came from users of just one service and have a lot of potential caveats, we'd be careful about trusting them."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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