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Recommended Reading

Trust and Zeal in Open Source Advocacy (O'ReillyNet)

Jono Bacon discusses advocacy in this O'ReillyNet article. "The important difference between an evangelistic zealot and a consultant is the authenticity of the advice; a zealous evangelist may advise you to go the open source route irrespective of whether it is right for you, yet a consultant is far more likely to identify what your needs are and determine how--and if--open source can help you. The latter is most certainly the approach you should seek. It is the only path I try to advise."

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Nikon's photo encryption reported broken (News.com)

News.com reports that programmer Dave Coffin has successfully broken a proprietary encryption scheme that is used in some Nikon digital cameras. "Because Nikon scrambled a portion of the file, legal worries have kept third-party developers like Adobe Systems from supporting Nikon's uncompressed "raw" photos in their software. Nikon sells its Nikon Capture utility for $100. "It's an open format now," said programmer Dave Coffin, who posted the decryption code on his Web site this week. "I broke that encryption--I reverse-engineered it."" The application, dcdraw, is available for Linux.

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Linux on the desktop is not enough (LinuxWorld.au)

This LinuxWorld article looks at Linux on the laptop. "So how does Linux fare on your average laptop today? Actually, pretty well. Most distributions correctly identify laptop screens, pointing devices, and other peripherals. Support for wireless networking is functional for many chip sets. PCMCIA cards are well-supported. Even basic power-saving features are in place. Although these are all impressive achievements, they're not enough."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

LWCE Toronto: Day 3 (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers day 3 of LinuxWorld 2005. "The third and final day of Toronto's LinuxWorld 2005 had the meat I was looking for. First, I attended Mark S. A. Smith's presentation entitled "Linux in the Boardroom: An executive briefing". Next, I listened to David Senf of IDC discuss the top 10 CIO concerns with open source. And finally, I wrapped my attendance to this year's LinuxWorld Toronto with another session by the energetic Marcel Gagné in a presentation entitled "Linux Culture Shock""

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A Look at the Linux World Canada Show (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal has this report on the recent LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Canada. "Although a number of fee workshops and tutorials were offered, admission to the show floor and the keynote speeches was free. In my case, I was involved in setting up and supporting the Toronto Linux User Group booth at the show, so although the show did not cost me money, it did cost me some sweat equity."

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Reports from the European Common Lisp Meeting

Paolo Amoroso has assembled links to a number of reports from the recent European Common Lisp Meeting.

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Bosworth's Web of Data (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly covers Adam Bosworth's MySQL Users Conference 2005 keynote speech. "In his Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." Ten years ago, when he first started paying attention to the web, he was interested in the idea that he could zero install applications and that they could be accessed from anywhere at any time. He said that a personal computer to him is like a phone: it is a useful access point but it is not where he stores stuff."

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The State of the Dolphin at the MySQL Users Conference 2005 (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly covers the MySQL Users Conference 2005 State of the Dolphin talk. "In fact, squashing bugs is their theory on MySQL's success. There is a cycle. You need good bug reports to stabilize and improve your product. But the community needs to feel that the company is responding to the bug reports and fixing them in a reasonable time frame. This response leads to more bug reports, which, in turn, leads to a more valuable product. They make the analogy that open source is like a democracy. It's not perfect, but you can see what's wrong. Even in the free community edition, all the features are available."

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The SCO Problem

Order on Motion for Reconsideration (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports that Judge Wells has issued her Order regarding the IBM Motion for Reconsideration. "So, for now, IBM does not have to turn over the files of the 3,000 individuals who have contributed the most to AIX and Dynix. That is deferred. They have to turn over for 100 individuals in 90 days, and then SCO can ask for more details if they want to. It's a much more balanced order."

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Companies

AMD releases dual-core server chips (News.com)

News.com covers the release of dual-core processors by AMD. "Intel may have come out with dual-core processors a few days earlier, but Advanced Micro Devices says it is bringing out dual-core chips to the market where it counts. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker on Thursday released its first three dual-core Opteron processors for servers. It plans to follow that release with three more server chips and a desktop line during the next two months."

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Business

Open wallets for open-source software (News.com)

News.com is carrying a New York Times story on an upsurge in venture funding for open source companies. "Venture capitalists are again embracing open-source technology companies. JBoss, which offers a layer of software for controlling Web applications, was one of 20 such businesses that raised $149 million in venture money in 2004, according to estimates by research firm VentureOne. At least three open-source start-ups raised $20 million last month alone. But given some spectacular open-source failures in the late 1990s, a natural question may be whether some of these venture capitalists have perhaps lost their minds."

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Linux at Work

Desktop Adapted for Dad (The Linux Box)

Adam Trickett sets up a Debian/KDE system for his father, in this Linux Box article. "My father is in his late 60s, and has never used a computer before, though he has seen others use them. There are a lot of people that now fall into this so called "silver surfer" category. Like most people his age, his eyesight is less than perfect and he wears bi-focals. He has never used a mouse or keyboard, and his co-ordination is significantly less than that of an experience hacker."

Comments (4 posted)

Legal

Fortinet settles GPL violation suit (News.com)

News.com reports that Fortinet has settled its GPL violation suit. "Fortinet has agreed to provide the source code of the Linux kernel and other GPL-licensed components to any interested party. The code is available upon request, for the cost of distribution, from the Fortinet Web site. The company has also agreed to modify its licensing agreement to include the GPL licensing terms with all Fortinet shipments. The settlement agreement also states that no Fortinet partners are subject to legal action."

Comments (22 posted)

Interviews

UBL: Another Opportunity for FOSS in the Enterprise (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal talks with Jon Bosak and Lars Oppermann about UBL, the Universal Business Language. "E-business still lacks a universal, cheap and easy-to-implement standard language. At least, this was the case until a few months ago. Today, the Universal Business Language (UBL) is ready to fill this gap, and it looks to be solid offering rather than yet another bunch of buzzwords. UBL comes from OASIS), the same folks who standardized the OpenDocument format for office files, and UBL is equally as open."

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One year as president of a LUG (NewsForge)

Jim Westbrook reflects on a year as President of the Austin LUG, on NewsForge. "I readily admit that I enjoyed my term as President of the LUG. I also have to admit that I am looking forward to being "just a member" for a while. What I really learned is that the more you are involved in LUG activities, the more you learn about and enjoy using Linux."

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An Interview with Jack Kelliher of pcHDTV (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has published an interview with Jack Kelliher of the pcHDTV project. "When I was in college, I always felt that programming was artwork. When decisions came out that made it illegal to write code, or patents prevented me from writing code, I felt that my ability as an artist was infringed. Joining the Linux community made me very upset with the status quo. Contributing to Linux was a way to keep my rights. Did you know, open source isn't just software, either? FPGAs [programmable logic chips] are getting so cheap now that you can build custom hardware. It's the next step for open source."

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Resources

Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly)

Tim O'Reilly looks at technology trends as indicated by book sales statistics. "In terms of computer languages, PHP (up 16%) continues its strong growth. C# (up 2.5% over last year) was the only other programming language whose growth was in positive territory. By contrast, sales of books on Java (down 10%), Visual Basic (down 23%), C/C++ (down 4%), Perl (down 14%), Python (down 9%), and Javascript (down 12%) were all lower than they were in the same period a year ago."

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Hacking Firefox (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet presents an excerpt from Firefox Hacks. "So far, our example has concerned adding a menu item to the Firefox Tools menu, but there are other areas of the Firefox UI into which you can overlay. It's possible to overlay into any area of the visible UI, once you know the id of the widget to which you want to add. For example, the Download Manager Tweak extension (http://dmextension.mozdev.org) adds a button to the Downloads panel in Firefox's Options window."

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Designing a Course in Linux System Administration (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal has this report on how one professor designed a class on Linux system administration. "Assessment itself should be another learning experience. So instead of the traditional tests where students get to fill in the blanks, be creative! After class one day, go in and "break" the students machines. That way, when they all get to class the next day, they won't be able to log on. Give them 30 minutes to fix the problem, and at the end of the time, give them some hints or explain the problem. Troubleshooting can be fun unless, of course, it is your own machine. When Dr. Moorman and I last ran the class, it was only a matter of days before a student had his machine cracked from the outside. Luckily, we had planned a demonstration on security that day, so it worked out perfectly."

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An Overview of Linux USB (Linux Journal)

Rami Rosen explains USB in a Linux Journal article. "Learn some of the basics of the USB subsystem, including how URBs work and what kind of host controllers are available."

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The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin, Ch. 4 & 5 - by Peter H. Salus (Groklaw)

Here's the next installment of Peter H. Salus's history, The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin. "Interestingly, Bill Joy created vi in 1976 and Richard Stallman (together with Guy Steele and Dave Moon) created Emacs the same year. The original version was based on TECMAC and TMACS, two TECO editors. Stallman and Michael McMahon ported it to the Tenex [for the DEC-10] and TOPS-20 [for the DEC-20] operating systems. [James Gosling, the creator of Oak/Java, wrote the first Emacs for UNIX at Carnegie-Mellon in 1981. RMS began work on GNU EMACS in 1984.]"

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Porting Windows IPC apps to Linux (IBM developerWorks)

Srinivasan S. Muthuswamy and Kavitha Varadarajan show how to port Windows applications to Linux on IBM developerWorks. "The wave of migration to open source in business has the potential to cause a tremendous porting traffic jam as developers move the ever-pervasive Windows® application to the Linux™ platform. In this three-part series, get a mapping guide, complete with examples, to ease your transition from Windows to Linux. Part 1 introduces processes and threads."

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Reviews

KDevelop vs Microsoft VS.Net (NewsForge)

NewsForge has published a comparison of Windows and Linux Integrated Development Environments. "Over the past few years, Linux has been hitting Windows hard in different places and, blow by blow, won points against the OS behemoth. Good application software is an important selling point for any operating system, and good development tools are crucial to those writing application software. The leading desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows, has a strong integrated development environment (IDE) in Visual Studio .Net, while the upstart Linux platform's KDE environment has KDevelop. Let's pitch them against each other and see which ends up the last IDE standing."

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KDE Kiosk - Battening Down the Hatches (KDE.News)

KDE.News points to an article by Barry O'Donovan on KDE Kiosk. "The KDE Kiosk is a framework that has been built into the K Desktop Environment since version 3. It allows administrators to create a controlled environment for their users by customising and locking almost any aspect of the desktop which includes the benign such as setting and fixing the background wallpaper, the functional such as disabling user log outs and access to the print system and the more security conscientious such as disabling access to a command shell."

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Review: Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews Mandriva's transitional release. "Put an encrypted DVD into your DVD-ROM and the Kaffeine video player pops up a window that checks for the required libraries and codecs. If some are not found -- Win32 and libdvdcss are not installed with the distribution because of legal issues in some countries -- you're told where to go to get them. Click the provided links, download the RPMs, install them using Mandriva's software installer, and within five minutes you have DVD and Windows media file playback capabilities."

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A Brief Look at Mod_Python (Dev Shed)

Dev Shed reviews mod_python. "Python's Apache interpreter is available as an Apache module, mod_python. This module reduces the time it takes to deliver a given page to a client. It is also capable of a great deal more, including interacting with Apache itself in various powerful ways. This article gives you just a taste of what mod_python can do."

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Cross Platform PIM on a Stick (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at KDE-PIM. "Available for memory sticks on Windows or Linux, the new release KDE-PIM/Platform independent lets you carry around your favourite KDE applications and your personal data in the palm of your hand. This device independent software can import your data directly from Outlook and sync it with KDE-PIM running on other computers."

Comments (1 posted)

Detecting suspicious network traffic with psad (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at the Port Scan Attack Detector (psad). "psad is a valuable tool for those wanting to know who is probing their network and what they are looking for. It is lightweight, uses your existing firewall setup, and is customizable to your level of paranoia. Its integration with Dshield helps to make the Internet safer for everyone."

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Miscellaneous

Tridgell speaks out in BitKeeper war (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks into a somewhat exaggerated "war" between Andrew Tridgell and Linus Torvalds. "Andrew Tridgell has made his first public comments on the dispute between himself and Linux originator Linus Torvalds over source code management for the Linux kernel, describing much of the coverage and commentary on the issue as "trivial and crazy"."

Comments (33 posted)

Hai Ti Comic Teaches KDE (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers a Namibian education comic featuring KDE. "Named Hai Ti ("Listen up!" in the Oshiwambo language), the comic features the super-hero like SchoolNet project showing student and teachers their KDE desktop. SchoolNet is a Namibian organisation whose aim is to bring computers and the Internet to all schools in the country."

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