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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Court yanks down FCC's broadcast flag (News.com)News.com reports that a Federal appeals court has tossed out the broadcast flag regulations. "'The broadcast flag regulations exceed the agency's delegated authority under the statute,' a three-judge panel unanimously concluded. 'The FCC has no authority to regulate consumer electronic devices that can be used for receipt of wire or radio communication when those devices are not engaged in the process of radio or wire transmission.'" The full ruling is online in PDF format.
Why Free Software Really Matters (Groklaw)Groklaw has an essay on why free software matters. "Everyone talks about how Free software is important because of its benefits to business. It can mean lower operating costs, happier IT departments, better interoperability, improved security, and lots of community goodwill. Everyone talks about how Free software is important legally. It is the vanguard of the revolution in intellectual property, both in courtrooms and in the minds of people around the world. A lot of people talk about how Free software is important because it will liberate end-users everywhere from the tyrrany of commercial software and end the problem of worms, viruses, and trojans forever. What almost no one talks about is Free software being important because of its educational potential."
Trade Shows and Conferences PyCon 2005 Coverage (Linux Gazette)Mike Orr has put together some coverage of the PyCon 2005 conference that was held recently in Washington, DC. "It's hard to decide what the highlight was: Guido's new beard, the success of the Open Space sessions, the number of attendees (just shy of 450), the international scope (I saw several delegates from Germany, and a few from Japan and Italy), the surprise sleeper hit (WSGI and integrating the web application frameworks was the most discussed topic), the Python CPAN (integrated with PyPI), the keynote from Python's most prominent user (Google), David Goodger's name ("pronounced like Badger but GOOD!"), or Guido's plans for static typing. ("Don't worry," he says about the latter, "it's just a bad dream.")"
Wine Weekly NewsletterThe May 5, 2005 edition of the Wine Weekly Newsletter is online with coverage of the WineConf 2005 event. "Some of you might be looking for the short summary version, so it's worth recapping some major highlights. First, Alexandre has imposed some deadlines for Wine. Second, having some of the core Samba team members show up was great and it may be possible to work together on some common items. Finally, the event itself was quite large with about 50 people attending from over a dozen countries meeting at the University of Stuttgart."
Companies IBM buys start-up to advance open source (News.com)News.com covers IBM's acquisition of Gluecode Software. "As part of the acquisition, IBM said it will contribute to the Apache Geronimo project, a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server that forms the basis of Gluecode's product line. The 18 Gluecode employees will be part of IBM's software group; IBM said it will devote dozens of people to the Joe product."
Microsoft Relaxes Open Stance (eWeek)eWeek reports on a possible position shift from Microsoft, concerning open-source software. "At a recent conference in Cambridge, Md., sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, called for cooperation among Microsoft, its competitors and the open-source community. "I think that in the world of software development today, there is a broad panoply of software development models," Smith said. "I think we're going to have to figure out how to build some bridges between the various parts of our industry.""
Linux Adoption Ditching Microsoft can save millions (TES)The TES (a British education newspaper) previews a UK governmental study on software costs in schools. "The association analysed costs at 33 schools which use paid-for software, and compared them with 15 which have pioneered the use of free programs, known as open source, and the pared-down hardware to run them. Average costs, including software, hardware and support costs, were 24 per cent less per computer in secondaries using open source."
The Aloha state's commerce and consumer officials turn to open source (eWeek)eWeek presents a case study on Hawaii's switch to open source for its bookkeeping needs. "In 2002, exasperated state officials turned to the Linux operating system to change that. They wanted all budget and expenditure data in one data mart, with a front-end application that lets users download data to their PCs and crunch numbers as they see fit."
Interviews Interview with OpenOffice.org staff (NewsForge)NewsForge talks with OOo developers about OpenOffice.org 2.0. "OpenOffice.org is the most comprehensive open source office productivity suite available. Into its fifth year of existence, the project is set to release its next version, OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a major overhaul. The latest release, 1.9 (also popularly known as 2.0-beta), came out in March this year and was met with mixed reviews. While many were happy with the progress, many people criticized it for its use of Java. In this interview with Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager; and Martin Hollmichel, Release Manager of OpenOffice.org, they talk about what makes 2.0 different from the previous releases."
LinuxMedNews.com--Just What the Doctor Ordered (Linux Planet)Linux Planet interviews Dr. Ignacio Valdes, creator and editor of LinuxMedNews.com. "Valdes said that when he started the LinuxMedNews site it was a tight knit community with a crystal clear idea that FOSS (free and open source software) was the way to go in medicine. "The idea has become more accepted and may not be revolutionary anymore but it still has skeptics," he said. "Like everything, having the idea takes 10 minutes and implementing that idea takes years. The major changes are that there is gathering scientific evidence for what the FOSS community is doing and the number of and quality of real-world implementations has grown tremendously," he remarked."
Resources The Daemon, the GNU, and the Penguin - Ch. 7 (Groklaw)Groklaw has published chapter 7 of the online book "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter H. Salus. Read about the origins of BSD and the Computer Systems Research Group.
Book Excerpt: Firefox and Thunderbird Garage (Linux Journal)Linux Journal presents a book excerpt from the book "Firefox & Thunderbird Garage. "The following is an excerpt from Firefox & Thunderbird Garage, a new book written by Chris Hofmann, Marcia Knous and John Hedtke and published by Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference. The excerpt is taken from Chapter 10, "Setting Up Your Mail, RSS, and Newsgroup Accounts Using Mozilla Thunderbird"."
Mad Mac mini multimedia machine, Part 1 (developerWorks)developerWorks begins a series of articles on using a Mac Mini system as a Linux-based multimedia server. The first article covers (Yellow Dog) Linux installation, with an aside on intellectual property issues. "However, if you start selling a device that uses one of these open source player programs to play DVDs (even if you ignore the thorny issues surrounding DVD encryption and only support unprotected disks), you'll soon be receiving letters demanding license fees for each unit sold. An interesting data point I read recently is that the US$39.95 DVD players you commonly see at chain stores contain almost US$20 of patent license fees."
Simplify Network Programming with libCURL (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at curl and the back-end library libCURL. "curl's inner workings use the libCURL client library. So can your programs, to make them URL aware. libCURL-enabled tools can perform downloads, replace fragile FTP scripts, and otherwise take advantage of networking without any (explicit) socket programming. The possibilities are endless, especially with libCURL using a MIT/X-style license agreement."
Reviews Review: CentOS 4 (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews CentOS 4.0. "Some applications may refuse to install when they detect that you aren't running RHEL. None of the open source tools that I tried had this problem, but some commercial software does. The workaround is simple: Add a line in the /etc/redhat-release file."
Advanced image editing from the command line with ImageMagick (NewsForge)NewsForge has published part two of a review of ImageMagick. "ImageMagick (IM) is a command-line graphics creation and editing application. In a previous article we used it to add text and frames to images, and for other basic image manipulation. In this article we'll use the ImageMagick suite of commands to create a multi-image mosaic, draw some basic shapes, and create 3D logos."
Fun with Knoppix (Ars Technica)Ars Technica reviews Knoppix Hacks, by Kyle Rankin. "Knoppix Hacks, just like Knoppix, is targetted at a wide audience ranging from System Administrators to the family "computer guy" called on to fix his cousin's PC. There is a common misconception among people who have heard of Knoppix that it is only for Linux users. This perception couldn't be further from the truth. Knoppix, as demonstrated by the author, is an extremely useful tool regardless of your preferred operating system. This book is for anyone who has had to fix the computer of friends or family; the system administrator who has ever had to resuscitate a lifeless machine; even the average home user who's curious to try something new without replacing what they already have." (Thanks to Dale Quigg)
Linux Desktop Garage reviewed (Oceania)Oceania reviews the book Linux Desktop Garage and the live CD that comes with it. "Unlike the other books in the Garage series, this book contained a CD. Usually, CDs that accompany books are usually lost or never even used but this one was different. After looking over the disc's contents, I quickly discovered that the CD was bootable and it even contained some of the most popular Linux programs such as GIMP ( image editing program) and OpenOffice (office suite). Put it in my CD drive and it booted right up to a Linux desktop. No installation, no reformat. Very cool idea!"
Tellico: The Cook's Collection (Cooking with Linux)Marcel Gagné looks at Tellico, a KDE application for organizing collections. "Robby Stephenson's Tellico is billed as a collection manager though I like to think of it as a very versatile personal library system. It's a great tool for keeping track of your many cookbooks as well as Linux books, science fiction books, mysteries, and so on."
Miscellaneous Free Software Foundation Latin America lays groundwork (NewsForge)NewsForge covers the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA). "The organizing committee has been working since November 2004 to lay the groundwork for FSFLA. The committee currently consists of six members. All have backgrounds in free software, often combined with social or political activism."
Application of the Month: KPDF (KDE.News)KDE.News names KPDF as the April application of the month. "It might be late but that is because April's application of the month covers one of the finest additions to KDE 3.4: KPDF. The application overview takes us through the powerful features in KPDF: thumbnails, contents, scrolling, zooming and searching. We also have an interview with one of the creators of KPDF, Albert Astals Cid."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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