LWN Weekly Edition
Front pageSecurity
Kernel development
Distributions
Development
Linux in the news
Announcements
->One big page
This page
Previous weekFollowing week
| |||||||||||||
Linux in the newsRecommended Reading What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)OS Views is running Kurt Pfeifle's opinion of what the Linux desktop needs. "I have mentioned it before, and I will repeat it here again: any commercial software vendor pondering to sell his product or service on the Linux platform is horrified by the complications he has to deal with."
Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption (News.com)According to this News.com story, a Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of PGP on a suspect's computer can be considered evidence of illegal intent. "[Judge] Randall favorably cited testimony given by retired police officer Brooke Schaub, who prepared a computer forensics report--called an EnCase Report--for the prosecution. Schaub testified that PGP 'can basically encrypt any file' and 'other than the National Security Agency,' nobody could break it."
Companies Sun Seizes Tarantella (IT-Director)IT-Director examines Sun Microsystems' recent agreement to acquire Tarantella Inc. "Tarantella is one of those companies that has been around for a long time and has managed to achieve a degree of brand recognition without really becoming entirely mainstream. At heart, the company's software is designed to enable organisations to access data and applications wherever they are hosted using just a Web browser. The connection between this technology and Sun's excellent thin client solution, Sun Ray, is very clear to see."
Linux Adoption Free CDs bring open source to India (News.com)News.com reports on an Indian governmental program to increase open source adoption. "The government has started distributing CDs containing Tamil-language versions of various open-source applications, including the Firefox browser, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Columba e-mail client. It plans to freely distribute 3.5 million copies of the CD to Tamil speakers worldwide..."
Interviews Interview With KDE-PIM Hacker Till Adam (KDE.News)KDE.News features an interview with KDE-PIM developer Till Adam. "Till Adam only started hacking on the KDE mail client, KMail, because he wanted some features implemented from the command-line client Mutt. Now he is one of the main developers of the KDE-PIM project, which KMail is part of. KDE Dot News caught up with Till to talk about e-mail protocols, groupware and implementing them in KDE."
OpenBSD 3.7: The Wizard of OS (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet interviews OpenBSD developers. "Today the OpenBSD project announced the new 3.7 release. This is the first release to support newer wireless chipsets, especially for 802.11g, thanks to a big activism campaign lead by project leader Theo de Raadt. It's now possible to create a portable access point with a tiny PDA using the Zaurus port, too. As usual, there are a lot of other big and small changes, such as the import of Xorg, the jump towards gcc3, and a feature to update your installed packages automagically. Discover the details behind the scenes in this interview that Federico Biancuzzi had with several OpenBSD developers."
Interview with Will Stephenson (KDE.News)KDE.News interviews Will Stephenson about his work on Kopete. "Will Stephenson is one of the attendees at the KDE PIM Event. 4 years ago he started with contributing to Kopete, the instant messaging client for KDE. His recent contributions made it possible to let Kopete communicate with Kontact. In this interview, he will tell you about Kopete and his exciting plans for the upcoming meeting."
Resources New Audio Libre ArticlesTwo new Audio Libre Articles (PDF) are available from linuxaudio.org. The new titles include: "Not only, but ALSA" and "Xiph.org - The foundation for free audio".
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - Excursus: Hardware and Ch. 9 (Groklaw)Groklaw presents "Excursus: Hardware" and Chapter 9 from the online book "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter H. Salus. First generation home computers and Minix are discussed.
Three tools to help you configure iptables (NewsForge)NewsForge takes a look at firewalling with FireHOL, GuardDog, and the Easy Firewall Generator for iptables. "Every user whose client connects to the Internet should configure his firewall immediately after installation. Some Linux distributions include firewall configuration as a part of installation, often offering a set of defaults configurations to choose from. However, to ensure that your machine presents the minimum "attack surface" (a measure of the number of vulnerable ports, user accounts, and sockets exposed to attack) to the predatory inhabitants of the Internet, you may need to do some manual configuration of your firewall. Here are three tools that can help."
Free Software Magazine #3The April issue of Free Software Magazine is now available on the net; it includes articles on licensing issues, XML document authoring, LDAP, disaster recovery, and more.
Open Source Fun With Inkscape and SVG (GlitchNYC.com)GlitchNYC.com presents a tutorial about vector drawing under Inkscape. "For those that don't know, Inkscape is a free and open source vector image editor, much like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Vector editors differ from photo editors in that your drawings always remain a bunch of parts that get rendered, rather than being saved as pixels. For example, if you draw a circle, the file will contain information about the position and radius of the circle, as well as its color and outline rather than thousands of little dots representing the image."
Book Excerpt: Linux Programming by Example (Linux Journal)Linux Journal covers the V7 Unix ls command in this two part excerpt from Linux Programming by Example. Here's part 1 and part 2.
Linux, outside the (x86) box (IBM developerWorks)Peter Seebach examines the popularity of Linux on non-x86 architecture hardware. "Some people tend to dismiss non-x86 Linux as an idle amusement (it isn't; it's actually a lot of fun). Linux development for other-than-x86 hardware has led to improvements in the quality of the Linux kernel, even for x86 users. Today, the main Linux kernel has code for 22 architectures, although not all of them are equally well supported or mature."
Postfix performance tuning (NewsForge)NewsForge is running an excerpt from "The Book of Postfix" by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter. "Postfix is fast out of the box, but like other packages, you can usually tune it to work even faster. Furthermore, there are situations where Postfix may not perform as well as you expected, whether because of hardware or software limitations on the server system or other adverse conditions, such as a big influx of spam or undeliverable mail. This article shows you how to find and analyze the most common performance problems."
Build a Wireless Gateway with Perl (O'Reilly)Alptekin Cakircali builds a wireless gateway machine on O'Reilly. "This article introduces an open source project called AWLP (Alptekin's Wireless Linux Project), which turns a PC with an appropriate wireless LAN card (Prism2/2.5/3) into a full-featured, web-managed wireless access gateway. That old Pentium 120 machine in your basement might march back up the stairs shortly."
Linux in Government: Optimizing Desktop Performance, Part II (Linux Journal)Linux Journal optimizes the Linux desktop by enabling Direct Memory Access (DMA). "Simply turning on using_dma enables a 16-bit mode, so I switched to 32-bit mode and found that my read time improved slightly. My buffered disk reads went from 46.50MB per second to 46.52MB, not much of an improvement. I also looked at turning on multiple sector I/O. This is a feature of modern IDE hard drives that permits the transfer of multiple sectors per I/O interrupt rather than the usual one sector per interrupt. When this feature is enabled, it typically reduces operating system overhead for disk I/O by 30-50%. On many systems, it also provides increased data throughput of anywhere from 5% to 50%."
Reviews A Whole New World with The G System (KDE.News)KDE.News takes a look at the G System. "The G System is a free and open source simulation framework and virtual reality, using Qt and KDE. The recent 0.5 release adds multi-user capability, an important milestone in the history of this project. Using the G System many users can now join in the same virtual universe."
Moodle: An open source learning management system (NewsForge)NewsForge covers Moodle. "Distance education is becoming more important in today's connected world. Universities and schools are supplementing traditional classroom-based learning with electronic learning management systems (LMS) -- software designed to deliver on-line education. You may know such software by other names, such as managed learning environments, virtual learning environments, or course management systems. Moodle is the definitive open source learning management system. Like most LMSes, it make extensive use of the Internet, with features such as discussion forums, chats, journals, automated testing and grading tools, and student tracking. Because it's open source, it's also broadly extensible by its large user community."
Outlook vs Evolution vs Kontact: an e-mail client comparison (opensourceversus)opensourceversus.com is running part two of a visual comparison of Outlook, Evolution, and Kontact. "We've put together a series of side-by-side screen shots of Outlook 2003, Evolution 2.2.1.1 and Kontact 1.1 as a visual comparison of these three groupware rivals. A couple of excellent open source Outlook alternatives are available which provide similar and additional features, such as Novell Evolution and KDE Kontact. If you're afraid you won't have Outlook to keep you organized in a Linux environment, you need not fear."
Picture Perfect and in Tune (PC World)PC World plays with muine and f-spot. "After installing F-Spot, I pointed it at my images folder and it took that whole mess, along with the smaller set of images somewhat-organized into subfolders, and displayed them all, thumbnail-style, along with a bar-graph/timeline sort of widget that is so darned useful, I can't understand why I haven't seen a similar treatment in other apps.... With one glance, I can see that I took more pictures in June 2004 than any other month since I started shooting digital. With a click on the timeline, I can zoom to the pictures I took that month. I can scroll backward and forward in time with ease. If I need a shot I took of my grandmother around Christmas in 2003, I know exactly how to get to it. All the guesswork is gone."
Miscellaneous A Setback For Linux (Forbes)We can't resist, sorry: Daniel Lyons just heard about the BitKeeper fiasco. "In 2003, BitKeeper detected a 'back door' that a hacker had tried to plant into the operating system. Without BitKeeper, Linux now may be more vulnerable to such breaches, [Larry] McVoy says. The loss of BitKeeper could even cause some developers to abandon Linux because their work will be harder to do, McVoy says."
Open Source: Paper Tiger, Hidden Problems? (TechNewsWorld)As licensing FUD goes, this TechNewsWorld article is at the bizarre end of the scale. "Accordingly, if a programmer simply clicks on a button to download even the smallest packet of code and thereby agrees to the GPL, then the GPL may require the entire software program, which incorporates the GPL-code, to be made available as open source under the GPL. This is true regardless of whether the programmer or employer ever intended others to be able to see, read, view and modify their software. Thus, a single click of the mouse may render otherwise proprietary software available to all."Update: this article appears to have been pulled.
Linux lab lays off programmers (News.com)News.com reports on the layoffs at OSDL. "The organization, which calls itself the 'center of gravity' of the Linux movement, made the cuts as part of a plan to rebalance its work force. New priorities include the establishment of a European office and an expansion of Asian operations into China and Korea from today's base in Japan, said Nelson Pratt, director of marketing."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
|||||||||||||