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Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Boot Fedora Linux Faster (Improved Source)
Here's an article that shows how one person modified a Fedora Core 4 system to make it boot faster. "As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. I have tested on my machine 4 Linux distributions: Linspire, Fedora 3 & 4, Suse 9.2 & 9.3, and Debian. And on average between all these distributions Linux needs around a minute to 1 and half minutes to go from boot loader to graphical login screen. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds (just above 24 seconds on average). Below I have documented what I did, and what you can use to potentially reduce your boot up time for Linux."
Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required (O'ReillyNet)
Here's an O'ReillyNet article calling for more usability in Linux audio applications. "Don't get me wrong, there are certainly efforts going in to this area and applications such as Ardour, Wired and Rosegarden, but these tools face a number of uphill battles in winning me over. The interesting point is that the challenge is not focused so much on features but on usability and integration."
Linux vendors cosy up to Debian to push into enterprise (Techworld)
Techworld has an update on the Debian Core Consortium, which is set to be formally announced at LinuxWorld. "Debian's technology is highly regarded, and it is already widely used for tasks such as web hosting, but its diffuse nature has made it difficult for software and hardware vendors to put support plans into place. The DCC aims to give Debian a more predictable release cycle, and to give software and hardware vendors a single point of contact."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Ottawa Linux Symposium2005: first day (O'Reilly)
Andy Oram covers the first day of the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium on O'Reilly. "One advantage of the close examination that a conference like this one gives to its subject matter is that you see the unsavory underside. Marcel Holtmann zipped expertly through a comprehensive assessment of the state of Bluetooth on Linux (the BlueZ project) and how far each protocol had come. Martin J. Bligh reported the frustrations of making memory management robust on Linux. Even though millions of sites are comfortably and reliably running Linux, the basic operating system task of memory management has a way to go."
The SCO Problem
SCO Added to "New Russell Microcap Index" (Groklaw)
Groklaw does some digging into SCO's recent addition to the New Russell Microcap Index. ""If you're a busy person and don't want to play around with your investments, Russell offers opportunities to get the type of solid investment program that some of the world's largest, most sophisticated investors use. We bring together some of the world's best money managers to meet our clients' needs. We do this through industry-leading money manager research used by corporate investors like AT&T, Boeing, United Airlines, and organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." Well, well. What do you know? Look who just showed up. Mr. Gates. Purely coincidentally, I'm sure."
Companies
IBM steps into open-source Java project (News.com)
News.com examines IBM's involvement in the Harmony project, an effort to make an open-source version of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. "In the past week, IBM has dedicated an employee to working with the proposed open-source project, which is being done at the Apache Software Foundation, said Rod Smith, vice president of advanced technology at IBM. At this point, IBM's participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company likely will contribute code to the project, Smith said. "I think you'll see some code down the road. I'm sure you will. But right now, it's getting involved in some of the ideas and design they're trying to put together," he said."
Microsoft Patents Emoticon (Groklaw)
Groklaw examines a recent patent application by Microsoft. "Microsoft has filed for a patent on the smiley face. No. Really. Literally, they have applied for this: "A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination.""
Linux Adoption
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider)
LinuxInsider discusses a reluctance in moving to Linux and open-source code by the health care industry. "Health-care organizations are not planning to replace their Unix or Microsoft operating systems with Linux, said Massimiliano Claps, senior research analyst at IDC Canada, adding if that's going to happen, it's going to happen first with Unix. Despite the much-touted advances open source is making in various government IT projects around the globe, it's not even on the radar when it comes to electronic health records, said panelists at the recent e-Health 2005 Conference." (Found on LinuxMedNews.)
Interviews
An Interview with John Markoff (O'ReillyNet)
O'Reilly has published an interview with John Markoff. "John Markoff is the author of What the Dormouse Said. In this interview, John expands on the idea he presents in his book that the counterculture shaped the evolution of the computer industry. He touches on all the players here: visionaries like Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI, John McCarthy and the people at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), activist Fred Moore, and roleplayers like Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey."
Information Security with Colin Percival (O'ReillyNet)
O'ReillyNet interviews Colin Percival, a FreeBSD security officer. "To the second question: you should listen to me because I have written a 12-page academic paper presenting and discussing a serious security vulnerability, and nobody has been able to refute my results. I believe that my work stands on its own; it doesn't need my name attached to give it credibility."
People Behind KDE: Thiago Macieira (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced a new People Behind KDE interview with Thiago Macieira. "Thiago is a Brazilian who spends his time reading the kde-bugs-dist mailing list. Somehow he also finds time to look after the networking code in kdelibs and his dog Kayla. He also tells us why he has two clocks and includes a Unix story in Old English."
Resources
Add vision to your robot submarine (developerWorks)
developerWorks continues with a series of articles on migrating from x86 to PowerPC. "In this episode of the ongoing Kuro Box project, learn how to add a USB camera to the machine. This article includes example Linux code to initialize and read from a USB camera through Video4Linux. Also find a brief introduction to edge detection techniques in captured images."
What Is Business Process Modeling? (O'ReillyNet)
Mike Havey introduces Business Process Modeling in an O'Reilly article. "Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a set of technologies and standards for the design, execution, administration, and monitoring of business processes. In this article, Mike Havey, author of Essential Business Process Modeling, briefly describes the state of BPM today and the BPM standards, then builds an ideal BPM architecture using the example of a retailer process."
Build a Wireless ISP on Linux (developerWorks)
developerWorks builds a wireless ISP (WISP). "Setting up a wireless Internet Service provider (WISP) for your office or neighborhood doesn't have to be a taxing or expensive ordeal. If you build your network from easy-to-buy equipment and use Linux, you can use the power of shell scripts to make network management easy. This article gives you the tips and scripts you need."
Linux in Government: You Can Use the Desktop on a Laptop Now (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal takes a look at running desktop Linux on a laptop. "I spent the better part of two days trying a variety of distributions. Before people start writing comments about how much better their distributions run than the one I chose, let me say I played no favorites. I wanted performance and I got it with Ubuntu. Contrary to what some of you might believe, it's not my favorite Linux distro. It simply performed the best in this case."
Best practices for portable patches (NewsForge)
NewsForge has an article on writing portable patches. "One of the things I usually take care of as a Gentoo packages maintainer is sending patches to upstream developers. If a patch is applied upstream, we can remove it from future versions of a package so we have less work to do to maintain the package. Unfortunately, it seems that other distributions and packagers don't always do the same. This is true not only for Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE, but also for maintainers of packages in places like FreeBSD's Ports, DarwinPorts or Fink. Here are some tips for developers on making things easier for yourself and everyone who has to touch your code."
Live Backups of MySQL Using Replication (O'ReillyNet)
Here's an O'ReillyNet tutorial on how to set up replication with MySQL. "Typically, replication is a system configuration whereby the MySQL server, known in this context as a master server, houses the data and handles client requests, while another MySQL server (a slave server) contains a complete copy of the data and duplicates all SQL statements in which data is changed on the master server right after it happens. There are several uses for replication (e.g., load balancing), but the concern of this article has to do with using replication for data backups."
Reviews
JLP's KDE 3.5 Previews - Part 1 (KDE.News)
Jure Repinc provides a preview of KDE 3.5. "Stability of this prebeta version is very good. I rarely encountered crashes or freezes. Speed is also about the same as with current stable version 3.4.1. The default font sizes have been reduced to 10 points, which makes a little bit more room on the screen." (Found on KDE.News)
Desktop Publishing With Scribus 1.3.0 (Linux Magazine)
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at Scribus, on Linux Magazine. "For the most part, Scribus should have all of the features most users need to create complex documents for publication. It's more than suitable for home users who might want to create nice-looking documents (expect this year's Christmas newsletters to look extra-nice), and should be able to handle a great deal of professional DTP work as well. It's apparently quite good at creating PDF forms for small businesses as well."
Miscellaneous
Second visit to Taiwan (RMS Blog)
Richard Stallman writes about a recent trip to Taiwan in a Blog posting. Many interesting culinary delights were sampled. "I took the opportunity presented by the visit to arrange speeches at a few other universities, and meet with hardware companies to ask them to cooperate with free software. We visited the campus of ASUS (which always made me think of Spanish "Jesús" without the J). There one person deigned to meet us, and his attitude was that the free software community was beneath their notice. On discovering this, I told him I was sorry to waste his time, and left. However, the people at VIA, Realtek, RALink and MSI showed an interest in cooperating. Some even offered to provide advance specs for free BIOS support." (Thanks to Keith Howanitz.)
LinuxFund names new director, schedules payouts (NewsForge)
NewsForge reports that the LinuxFund credit card program is getting back in business. "LinuxFund's new head, David Mandel, told NewsForge in an interview the funding -- $500 per month for a year to Debian, Freenode, and Wikipedia -- will be given to the projects quarterly and is part of an effort to get LinuxFund back on track. Mandel said that with help from LinuxFund's founder, Benjamin Cox, he was confident the project, and more importantly its payments to FOSS developers, would resume and possibly even grow."
The unity of Unix (ZDNet)
This ZDNet column tries to draw attention to the set of core ideas which characterize all Unix-derived systems. "People who categorize the Unix market as splintered or fractured are generally trying to compare it unfavorably to Microsoft's Windows. That's simply wrong: Windows is a brand, Unix a set of ideas. The Windows brand has been consistently handled, but there's essentially no continuity of ideas between the 3.0, 95, NT, and Longhorn Windows generations. The Unix hardware makers, in contrast, have tried hard to differentiate their products through branding when, in reality, all of their products have been part of the same family. Oddly enough, therefore, both beliefs: that Microsoft has been consistent and that Unix hasn't, are consequences of marketing fictions."
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