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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Patently Unaware (BTN)Bank Technology News has an article on the patent mess from the banking industry's point of view. It is interesting mostly as an indication of how awareness of the problem is spreading. "According to patent office commissioner John Doll, almost 30 percent of the 384,000 patent applications filed in 2005 were near duplicates of patent applications examined the year before. That underscores another problem outlined in Lemley's report: squeaky wheels get what they want. Incessant appeals and numerous continuation applications will tend to wear down examiners who tire of the same application arriving on their desk. Continuation applications, although a minority of total patents issued each year, wind up being the subject of 52 percent of patent litigation."
FSF supports average users with high-priority list (NewsForge)NewsForge takes a look at the Free Software Foundation's high-priority project list. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is frequently considered an organization for developers rather than end users, but Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, would disagree. "We don't just want freedom for software developers," Brown said in a telephone call interview last month. "We want freedom for all." One of the ways that the FSF promotes this goal is with its high-priority project list."
Trade Shows and Conferences Desktop Linux Summit finale (NewsForge)NewsForge reports from the last day of the Desktop Linux Summit. "Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony commented during the Q&A following [Rob] Enderle's talk that he agreed with 90% of what Enderle said. His only quibble was that he thought Linux could do the same things for OEMs that Microsoft does. That's when it really hit me -- these guys really don't get it."
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner)ComputerPartner covers the Linux Desktop Summit, and draws conclusions about Linux adoption by businesses. "CIOs, for ease of management, generally prefer that employees all use the same operating system. The rule of thumb Enderle subscribes to is that support costs increase by the square of the number of platforms. So if a company runs two operating systems, support costs increase by 4 times. If a company runs Windows, Mac and Linux, support costs increase 9 times. But whenever CIOs openly try to consolidate operating systems, they run into pockets of resistance from diehards who say "nasty things and threaten to quit." Faced with that, most CIOs will simply try to limit the growth of Mac and Linux desktop systems "to maintain some respect and decorum, as well as keep their own jobs.""
Laid back at Linuxfest Northwest (NewsForge)Bruce Byfield covers Linuxfest Northwest. "The event featured a crowded exhibition room, a raffle, and a salmon barbecue in the courtyard put on by culinary students from the technical college. However, the major attraction was the multi-track programming. Even with some cancellations, more than 45 presentations were offered over four 75 minute slots."
Wine, desktops, and standards at LinuxWorld Toronto (NewsForge)NewsForge covers LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, Toronto. "The final day of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Toronto was a busy one. Novell Canada CTO Ross Chevalier delivered a keynote address on why this year is the year of corporate Linux desktop adoption -- as opposed to all those previous years that were -- the Free Standards Group executive director Jim Zemlin explained the importance of the Linux Standard Base, and developer Ulrich Czekalla gave an excellent presentation on the state of Wine."
MySQL Announces MySQL Forge and Support for Ubuntu (NewsForge)NewsForge covers MySQL announcements at the MySQL Users Conference 2006. "MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today introduced MySQL Forge, a new Web site and community directory designed to encourage and support active MySQL-related open source development. Located at http://forge.mysql.com/ MySQL Forge is a central online resource for all MySQL users and developers to communicate, collaborate and share MySQL code and applications. MySQL also announced new support for Ubuntu, a version of the Linux operating system that is gaining popularity among open source developers."
Linux at Work U.K. government and IBM test a secure Linux (News.com)News.com reports that the U.K. Cabinet Office and IBM are working together on a secure open-source environment for public and private sector organizations. "The Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA) said this week that the initiative had been launched to assure public and private sectors that Linux could provide security in a complex environment. The design is based on Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and IBM Websphere, a mandatory access control (MAC) application, which gives "need to know" access to security."
UK Cabinet Office partners for Security Enhanced Linux (SC Magazine)SC Magazine reports that the UK Cabinet Office is working with IBM and others on a mandatory access control (MAC) environment based on Security Enhanced Linux and IBM WebSphere. "The government set out its vision for efficient, customer-centric public services in November 2005 in the document, "Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology." Given that many of these services would need to be delivered through complex information-supply chains, spanning central government, the wider public sector and private and voluntary sector organisations, the challenge lies in how it can be done securely."
Legal Microsoft: "Our software patents preclude (FSFE) interoperability"The Free Software Foundation Europe follows the situation involving Microsoft and the European Court. "Throughout the last two days in European Court, Microsoft tried to explain to the European Court and Commission its "Blue Bubble Theorem" about Active Directory Services (ADS) being surrounded by a Blue Bubble within which interoperability was impossible. Carlo Piana, Free Software Foundation Europe's lawyer on the case explains: "The interventions made perfectly clear that the Blue Bubble only existed in the lawyers' pleadings. Meanwhile, Microsoft left no doubt as to the legal nature of that Bubble: a conglomerate of 46 patents that it claims it holds on ADS, whose main effect is to prevent interoperability and, eventually, competition.""
VoIP products could face export crackdown (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at the effects of encryption technology export regulations on Voice over IP technology. "During a meeting convened by the U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday, industry members of a federal technical committee expressed concern that export regulations never intended to cover VoIP may complicate selling enterprise-grade network gear abroad. At issue is an awkwardly worded definition buried deep in section 740 of the export control regulations. It restricts the export of products that can support "concurrent encrypted data tunnels or channels exceeding 250" connections at once."
Interviews Interview with FSFE's President Georg Greve (Groklaw)Groklaw talks with Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. "Sean Daly of Groklaw, who is also a member of the FSFE, interviewed Free Software Foundation Europe President Georg Greve at the end of day four of the hearings before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg regarding Microsoft. Here is the interview as Ogg and here it is as MP3. He also provides a transcript. Greve explains some of the issues that have been raised during the hearings, such as interoperability, Microsoft's just-revealed patent claims, the documentation problem, and why reverse engineering is a game of perpetual catch-up, and gives his impression of how the hearings had been going to that point."
Resources Building Your Own Teleconference System with Asterisk and Gizmo (O'Reillynet)Here's an O'Reillynet article with a lot of information on setting up Asterisk. "Teleconferencing is a good surrogate for public gatherings. With it, you can host classes, lectures, meetings, and casual chats. Most people have used dial-in 'meet me' teleconferencing services where users call a toll-free number, enter an access code, and then are dropped into a party line. Here, I'll describe how to build your own conference bridge using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware paired with free Internet telephony software."
Convert any video file to DVD with open source tools (Linux.com)Manolis Tzanidakis shows how to use Linux tools to create DVDs in a Linux.com article. "You've just downloaded the new episode of your favorite video podcast, and you'd like to watch it on your big-screen TV. Unfortunately, the video is encoded in XviD or QuickTime format, which your DVD player doesn't support. Don't worry -- here's how you can convert any video file to DVD using dvdauthor and MPlayer."
Controlling your locale with environment variables (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at the locale environment variables. "People all over the world use Linux in dozens of languages. Since Linux's source code is free and open, speakers of minority languages can add support for their languages themselves, even though a large corporation might not consider them a worthwhile market. If you use more than one language, or a language other than English, you should know about Linux's use of locales to support different languages. Indeed, understanding locales can be useful even if you only use English."
Handheld Linux software index launches (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices covers the launch of the Handheld Linux Software Index. "The Index was announced in the OpenEmbedded discussion forums by Handheld-Linux.com founder Nikolaus Schaller. Schaller says the new index was patterned after the popular but neglected Zaurus Software Index. However, the applications listings have been updated after "lots of work," he says. Additionally, quite a few new features were added to make the index more useful and maintainable."
Syncing Websites to Your Palm for Offline Reading (HowtoForge)HowtoForge has published a tutorial on syncing a web site to a palm device for offline reading. "The websites are stored in Plucker format. You will need to install the Plucker viewer for palm which can be found at the Plucker website. The software you will use to grab the websites and convert them into Plucker format is called Sunrise. To transfer the Plucker files to a Palm you will need pilot-link."
Manipulating PDFs with the PDF Toolkit (Linux.com)Scott Nesbitt explores the PDF Toolkit (pdftk) in a Linux.com article. "Creating and reading PDF files in Linux is easy, but manipulating existing PDF files is a little trickier. Countless applications enable you to fiddle with PDFs, but it's hard to find a single application that does everything. The PDF Toolkit (pdftk) claims to be that all-in-one solution. It's the closest thing to Adobe Acrobat that I've found for Linux. Developer Sid Steward describes pdftk as the PDF equivalent of an "electronic staple remover, hole punch, binder, secret decoder ring, and X-ray glasses." That's a lot of functionality for a 4MB application, but the software delivers."
My sysadmin toolbox (NewsForge)In this edition of the toolbox, Kevin Millman looks at Nagios, CoWiki, Cacti, GNU RCS, apt-cacher, SSL Expire, the blq Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) checker, winbind and more. "We often have situations where the only differences between two machines are the hostname and IP address. It's pointless to go through the building, patching and tweaking to get each box built from scratch. Instead we boot with a good boot CD (Debian From Scratch works well because it supports pretty much everything we use), create the partitions on the new box, mount them, and RSYNC the source machine over."
Yellow Dog Linux Installs Neatly on an iPod (Linux Journal)Dave Taylor installs Yellow Dog Linux on an iPod. "I had a spare Apple iPod, a first-generation 5GB device that worked via the Firewire interface rather than the more modern USB connection, and I was assured by the folks at Yellow Dog that I could squeeze YDL into as small as 1GB. I have plenty of space on a 5GB device. Of course, I already had a gig of music and audio books I wanted to preserve, so the first test was to see if I could repartition the device to grab 3GB for Linux and keep 2GB for audio and iPod content. The perfect stealth Linux device, right?"
Reviews Managing Disk Space with LVM (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at LVM. "The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a mechanism for virtualizing disks. It can create "virtual" disk partitions out of one or more physical hard drives, allowing you to grow, shrink, or move those partitions from drive to drive as your needs change. It also allows you to create larger partitions than you could achieve with a single drive."
First look at Vim 7 (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at the upcoming release of Vim 7. "To test Vim, I compiled the 7.0f beta release on Ubuntu Breezy and used it for my day-to-day work for several days. I had been using Vim 6.3, so moving to Vim 7.0 wasn't too drastic. I was relieved to find that I didn't run into any show-stopper bugs or instability while I was working with Vim. It hasn't eaten any files, and none of the new features exhibit major bugs."
Xtra Fine Computing Environment: xfce4.4 beta 1 (Tux Machines)TuxMachines.org takes xfce4.4 beta1 for a test drive. "For those who don't know about xfce4, it's a wonderful graphical interface that I think of as falling somewhere in-between Fluxbox and KDE in ease-of-use and functionality. Many aspects of your xfce4 desktop can be configured by graphical tools with menus, drop down boxes, icons and all. However, many aspects are hard coded and aren't adjustable even through configuration files. But it's getting there and we can see a major step forward with xfce4.4." (Thanks to Kevin Fenzi)
Miscellaneous Apache Now the Leader in SSL Servers (Netcraft)Netcraft has announced that Apache just passed Microsoft's Internet Information Server as the most popular server for SSL sites. "Version 1 of Apache did not include SSL support: in the 1990s, US export controls, and the patent on the RSA algorithm in the US, meant that cryptographic support for open source projects had to be developed outside of the US, and were distributed separately. Several independent projects provided SSL support for Apache, including Apache-SSL and mod_ssl; but commercial spin-offs, like Stronghold by c2net (later bought by Red Hat), were more popular at that time. Now that mod_ssl is included as standard in version 2, Apache has become more popular for hosting secure websites." This announcement contrasts the Netcraft April 2006 Web Server Survey, covered on LWN, in which the statistics were skewed toward IIS by inactive domain parking activities.
Computing power: containing and managing future power requirements (IT-Director)Bob McDowall discusses computer power consumption issues on IT-Director.com. "Short-term efforts are focussed on energy saving with computer installations. At a simple housekeeping level, for example switching off computers overnight and at weekends, results in energy and cost savings of 70-80%. Equally, switching off your monitor when at lunch, or during periods of absence, can halve the energy consumption." For a broader look at the advantages of power reduction efforts, see Amory Lovins' paper The Negawatt Revolution.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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