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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Thoughts on Debian's future Ian Murdock has posted some thoughts on Debian's future. "Now what? If you ask me (and you didn't, but I'm going to tell you anyway), Debian should have two overarching priorities for the next release: 1. putting a timed release cycle in place, so what happened with sarge never happens again; and 2. keeping the growing family of Debian derivatives united around a common core--namely, Debian itself. What's at stake? Bottom line: If we don't do something about both of these problems, actual and potential, Debian will be irrelevant by the time etch is out."
Power.Org on the Road to Open Hardware (IT-Director) IT-Director looks at Power.Org, calling its creation a "seminal" event. "IBM hopes that the creation of Power.Org could lead to the building of an Open Hardware community that will be capable of emulating the feats of Open Software. Indeed, this novel approach to encouraging the cooperative development of the Power microprocessor could deliver a wide range of new solutions to address every day needs along with highly specialised requirements."
Trade Shows and Conferences LinuxWorld Summit New York City: A Wrap-Up Report (Linux Journal) Linux Journal reports on the LinuxWorld Summit held last month in New York. "Designed to attract attendees from corporate managerial strata (read: big time suits) rather than function as a general penguin fest, the LinuxWorld Summit opened with daily keynote panels before featuring a three-track conference: "The Business of Linux and Open Source", "Data Center and Virtualization" and "Security: Inside and Out.""
The SCO Problem Followups on Novell's New Litigator and Apple (Groklaw) Groklaw predicts a legal battle between Novell and SCO. "You will enjoy reading Lamlaw's entry for June 10, ("Novell Hires Another Lawyer for the Team - Guess What He's Good At? (Groklaw)"), because he believes that Novell may be getting ready to sue SCO for slander of title. He agrees with my guess that they didn't hire a litigator now just to watch the judge finish off the current litigation. Novell has, he believes, the necessary pieces to turn around and sue SCO for slander of title, if they first bring an action to clear the Unix title and then, after winning that, sue for slander of title and get their special damages paid by SCO, for all the annoyance SCO brought them."
Companies Former Linux Architect Moves to Microsoft (eWeek) eWeek notes that Gentoo Founder and former chief architect Daniel Robbins has accepted a position at Microsoft Corp. "Microsoft confirmed that Robbins began work at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., on May 23. Sources at Microsoft said Robbins is working with Bill Hilf. Hilf is Microsoft's lead program manager for its Platform Strategy organization. There, he leads Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software technology group. Before coming to Microsoft, Hilf drove IBM's Linux technical strategy for its emerging and competitive markets organization. Robbins' title is program manager for the Platform Strategy team."
Plumtree to Make Linux Shift (eWeek) eWeek reports on a shift toward Linux by Plumtree Software Inc. "Plumtree Software Inc. is preparing to release its first vertical applications for the retail and pharmaceutical industries while porting its portal, content management and application development platform to Linux. The company is attempting to capitalize on the growing demand for composite applications, which combine traditional business application functionality with collaborative processes that are often specific to particular industries."
Interviews Interview with Google's Chris DiBona on Summer of Code (Groklaw) Groklaw has an interview with Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, at Google Inc. " As soon as Google's Summer of Code project was announced, Groklaw member Marko Djukic suggested to me that we do an interview with Chris DiBona, who is now Open Source Programs Manager, at Google Inc., about the project, and Chris was gracious enough to say yes. Djukic is Core Developer for the Horde Project, a Summer of Code mentor."
Linus compares Linux and BSDs (NewsForge) NewsForge talks to Linus Torvalds about the differences between Linux and BSD. "NF: BSD is still considered by some to be more "technically correct" than the Linux kernel. Do you think the BSDs are better technically than the Linux kernel? Torvalds: Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses. The BSDs tend to be focused in specific areas, while I have always personally felt that any particular focus on any particular use is a bad thing. Which one is "better"? To me, Linux is much better, since to me, the important thing for an OS is how well it performs under different patterns, be they embedded, server, or desktop, or just some totally crazy person in a basement trying something new."
BSD cognoscenti on Linux (NewsForge) NewsForge talks with a couple of BSD developers (Theo de Raadt and Christos Zoulas) to get their impressions of Linux. "Linux's code is much newer and it keeps constantly being re-factored. This has the nice side effect of keeping the code simple and readable (at the base system layers such as VM and FS), but stability is suffering. While 2.4.x was a monotonic climb to stability, the road of 2.6.x has been very bumpy."
Project Orange: Toward the first open source movie (NewsForge) NewsForge interviews the people behind Project Orange. "The idea behind the project is to show the power of open source software applications in a production environment. Several open source applications are already commonly used for video production, such as Blender, Yafray, Python, Verse, the GIMP, and Cinepaint."
Interview: Jack Valenti (Darknet) Darknet interviews Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA. "Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever. No enterprise in the world gives you a backup copy of anything. You go buy a suit of clothes and you tear it and you come back and the guy says I'll try to sew it up for you, but he doesn't give you a backup pair of trousers. If you need a backup copy of a DVD you can go out and buy another one."
Jaromil of Rastasoft interviewed (linuxaudio.org) A new Audio Libre series article is available on linuxaudio.org. This one is called Hack down Babylon, and features an interview of Jaromil of Rastasoft about the dyne:bolic multimedia distribution.
Interview with KHTML Developers Ivor Hewitt and Allan Sandfeld Jensen Matt Harrison presents an interview of Ivor Hewitt and Allan Sandfeld Jensen on his blog site. "I just conducted an interview with Ivor Hewitt and Allan (carewolf), the developers who merged in Apple's recent ACID2 changes into Konqueror. Read on to get their "inside" feel for the situation between KDE and Apple. Thanks Ivor and Allan for your excellent work and for responding!" (Found on KDE.News.)
Resources An Introduction to Open Source Geospatial Tools (O'ReillyNet) Tyler Mitchell presents an overview of open-source Geospatial tools on O'Reilly. "The development of open source geospatial software is an exciting part of the new geospatial landscape. Open source project offerings cover the spectrum of tools: command-line data conversion, spatially aware enterprise databases, internet mapping applications, desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) applications, geoprocessing libraries, and more."
High-Performance Commodity Computing Hits The Mainstream (developerWorks) IBM developerWorks covers grid computing in the world of financial services. "Take a look at the financial services space and you'll find that grid has gone mainstream into some of the world's largest enterprises, thanks to commodity Linux® servers, open source tools like Globus, and the growing adoption of service-oriented architectures. Our correspondent at the LinuxWorld New York Summit listened in as technology leaders discussed the burgeoning use of grid in the financial vertical."
Building a Linux virtual server (NewsForge) NewsForge looks at the Linux Virtual Server Project. "The main advantage of using LVS is that unlike Microsoft network load-balancing clusters, the LVS allows you to add a node running any operating system that supports TCP/IP to the cluster."
The Eighth Commandment of system administration (NewsForge) NewsForge looks at system logging issues in a series on system administration. "A system log is one of the most effective ways to monitor a server's health and underlying problems. Often before a major hardware or application crash takes place there are indicators of impending disaster within the syslog. As a good and attentive administrator, you should be reviewing your logs on a regular basis, but oftentimes these logs are forgotten due to other duties or important data is lost within pages of white noise telling about normal events."
How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux (Linux Journal) Colin Park saves a corrupted USB drive using SUSE and fsck, in this Linux Journal article. "My friend's brother had a 512MB Lexar Media Jumpdrive Pro USB drive that became corrupted after using it with Windows 2000. His IT department was able to get back some but not all of the file contents, but without any file names. On his own, he tried some recovery utilities, but all failed. Using a typical Linux distro--in this case SuSE 8.0--however, it wasn't hard to recover almost all of the data from the drive along with the filenames and to burn a CD-ROM of the contents."
Reviews Linux a PS3 option? (LinuxDevices) Linux Devices takes a look at Sony's PlayStation 3. "The PS3 will not come stock with a hard drive, but will have an expansion bay supporting removable 2.5-inch drives, Gamespot suggests. Sony will sell drives pre-packaged with Linux operating systems of various kinds, such as video editing and photo studio environments."
At the Sounding Edge: Using QSynth and QJackCtl (Linux Journal) Dave Phillips looks at two GUIs for fluidsynth and JACK in this Linux Journal article. "QSynth and QJackCtl are GUI front-ends for other software. QSynth provides a friendly user interface for the fluidsynth soundfont-based synthesizer. QJackCtl supplies a similar interface for the JACK audio server/transport control system. Both applications use a recent version of the Qt graphics toolkit and up-to-date versions of their other required components."
Miscellaneous Consolidation Proposal: ClearHealth, FreeMED and OpenEMR (LinuxMedNews) LinuxMedNews covers a proposal for consolidation and collaboration between several free software projects for the health care industry. "Why should there be a consolidation? To avoid duplication of effort. Because we are all developing very similar EMR systems using the same fundamental technologies. Each of the three projects is separately generating incompatible code to meet exactly the same requirements. If the three projects combined their efforts we would have a better EMR and Medical Practice Management System in far less time than we might working apart."
Spanish Lecturer Censored for defending P2P networks Jorge Cortell explains how giving a lecture on P2P networking led to his forced resignation from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). "The Director called me and first asked me to remove any link to the university from my website, and also to "hide" the fact that I was teaching there. Then he told me about the pressures and threats he and the Program received (to be subjected to software licenses inspection, copyright violations inspections, or anything that may damage them). Obviously I had to resign to save his job (and everybody else's at the Masters Program). So I did." Thanks to Peter Moulder.
Xen getting multiprocessor support (News.com) News.com reports that multiprocessor support will be added to the Xen hypervisor project. "Xen, software that lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, will become significantly more powerful with an upcoming version that introduces multiprocessor support."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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