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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading OpenOffice.org virus debunked by experts (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at claims that a macro virus could infect OpenOffice.org. "The next day, the OpenOffice.org home page posted an acknowledgement of the story, adding that the project was consulting with Kaspersky Lab about the virus. On June 2, OpenOffice.org issued a press release, downplaying the story. "This is a known risk with any capable macro language," the release explained, adding, "This 'proof of concept' virus is not new information, and does not require a software patch."" Here is the press release from OpenOffice.org.
The State of Linux 2006 (Tom's Hardware)Tom's Hardware has published a "state of Linux" article. It is lengthy, but still on the superficial side. "In days gone by, the personification of Linux might have conjured up the image of a hotshot college kid full of half-baked ideas and sharp edges. But that college kid has now graduated into the business world, and unleashed his furious entrepreneurial spirit. Today, Linux has a sharper, more refined edge than before, and has branched out into private, public, enterprise and governmental sectors. Linux also spans all manner of hardware platforms, and serves an incredibly wide variety of purposes."
Trade Shows and Conferences KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting exceeds expectations (NewsForge)NewsForge covers the KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting. "KDE members associated with the desktop environment's major multimedia components and marketing efforts met last weekend in Achtmaal, The Netherlands, at the KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting (K4M, previously known as K3M). Attendees discussed goals for their projects and wrote a fair amount of code that promises exciting improvements in KDE 4's multimedia components. K4M attendees hailed from 15 countries and four continents. While open source software is often developed by individuals separated by thousands of miles who communicate through email and IRC, airfare and lodging expenses may be justified for short bursts of fantastically productive meetings such as this."
Ploneability 06 Reportby Paul Everitt covers the 2006 Ploneability conference. "Romilly gave the talk of the day. She explained the motivation that led to the DCMS project and the way they approached the RFP and tender process. She then gave an insider's view of how the selection process worked, including a series of graphs showing the actual results of their grading criteria on various vendors and software packages. Romilly explained how open source was added to the list a bit late in the process and how it challenged the traditional ways to do a vendor selection. Romilly also described the features of "Enterprise Plone", the package that resulted from the Oxfam project. (Note: The Oxfam project can take some or all of the credit for CMFEditions, Kupu, LinguaPlone, CompositePack, and more.) This was a remarkable session. Very rarely do you get the honest scoop on the crucial details. The audience, I think, realized that they were getting wildly, wildly valuable information, and engaged in a serious discussion."
Red Hat goes all out for developers (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch reports on the Red Hat Summit, and looks at the newly launched 108 site. "If you were looking for new products at Red Hat Inc.'s second annual Red Hat Summit, you came to the wrong place. But, if you were interested in bigger and better development tools, you came to the right place. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik introduced the company's new open-source developer community Web site, "108," in the show's morning meetings. This new site is intended to help open source developers share resources; build and fetch code; find and meet other developers, interact with them; and collaborate with them."
Day 2 keynotes at the Red Hat Summit (NewsForge)NewsForge covers Eben Moglen's Red Hat Summit keynote address. "He began by bringing up some of the bogeymen falsely associated with free software by those whose business interests are threatened by it: politics and profits. Much of the rest of his talk skewered, refuted, or demolished those mythical memes. He mentioned the decor in the reception area at Red Hat, which he noticed during a visit there in 1999, not long after the company had gone public. He noted a plaque on the wall which read, "Every revolution begins as an idea in one man's mind.""
Red Hat Summit sessions educate, stimulate (NewsForge)Joe Barr reports on the Red Hat Summit. "My only real problem with this year's Red Hat Summit was trying to decide which talks to attend whenever I wasn't writing, eating, or partying. The problem wasn't finding sessions I was interested in, but deciding which one to attend when several appealing talks were happening at the same time. Here's a brief recap of what I learned in three of the 90 break-out sessions available to attendees."
Companies Lenovo backpedals on Linux (Linux-Watch)Lenovo is the company that bought IBM's ThinkPad line. Linux-Watch takes a look at the company's waffling stance on Linux. "Last week, the world's #3 computer vendor, Lenovo, was saying "We will not have models available for Linux, and we do not have custom order, either. What you see is what you get. And at this point, it's Windows." Whoops! Now, Lenovo is going back as fast as it can on its "no Linux here" stance."
Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)CentreDaily.com reports on a drop in Novell's stock price. "Novell Inc. stock plunged Thursday after the networking-software maker said second-quarter revenue from Linux products had slipped from the previous quarter. At midday, Novell shares dropped $1.35, or 17.5 percent, to $6.38 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The amount of the revenue decline was not specified in a conference call held Wednesday after the financial markets closed. ``We're signing a lot of longer-term contracts where the revenue recognition gets pushed out,'' Chairman and Chief Executive Jack Messman said."
SanDisk goes after the iPod iPuppets (CNet)Back in January, LWN predicted that manufacturers of digital audio players would eventually become interested in Rockbox. Now this CNet UK article suggests that the time has come. "SanDisk is reported to have quietly approached the open source developers behind Rockbox, a free operating system for MP3 players. The company is said to be interested in porting the Rockbox software to its e200 player.... Not only would a Rockbox port earn SanDisk credibility with grassroot geeks, but the software offers a number of appealing features, including support for nearly every codec going."
Red Hat completes JBoss acquisition (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch reports that Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss is final. "Starting immediately, JBoss has become a division of Red Hat. Customers will now have access to a single, "proven" global production support organization that can service both Red Hat and JBoss customers, in addition to procuring JBoss offerings through Red Hat's established global channels, according to Red Hat. [Red Hat Senior VP of Enterprise Solutions Timothy] Yeaton said that "JBoss will be an autonomous division. There will be no office closings and we're keeping the entire core JBoss team.""
Legal Death by DMCA (Spectrum)IEEE Spectrum has an article on the costs of the DMCA and related legislation. There will be few surprises here for most LWN readers, but it is a good, comprehensive summary. "Now, in an even more vexing situation, U.S. entertainment companies are successfully spreading the copyright code changes established by the DMCA around the world. Laws similar to the DMCA now exist in Japan, Australia, and much of Europe. At least nine additional countries, including Chile, Guatemala, and Singapore have also been pressured to enact DMCA-like laws as part of a devil's bargain with U.S. trade negotiators, who say the copyright change is necessary to secure free trade pacts with the United States that would govern all sorts of commerce. And in Europe, the body charged with defining the European digital television standards is mixing in content-protection obligations, responding yet again to pressure from major U.S. movie studios."
Denmark's Resolution on Open Standards (Groklaw)Groklaw looks at Denmark's resolution on open standards. "Groklaw member elhaard sends us a bit more detail about the Danish resolution that passed yesterday. We put the story in News Picks. The motion is called "B 103" and all material about it (even Parliament transcripts) can be found at the Parliament's home page. It's only in Danish, though. So he helps us out again, translating the last publicly shown version of the resolution."
Adobe yet to explain why no PDF in Microsoft Office (ITWire)Here's an ITWire article on the strange removal of PDF support from Microsoft's Office product. "Adobe has reportedly demanded that Microsoft charge users for the PDF facility in Office 2007. Microsoft has refused and intends to offer the PDF facility as a separate free download. Meanwhile the word on the street is that Adobe is preparing to mount an antitrust case against Microsoft in Europe, where the software giant is unpopular with regulators. The whole episode appears to border on the ludicrous, given that Microsoft Office is compatible with the open source look-alike Open Office.org 2.0, which enables documents to be saved as PDF files." That which hits Office today may hit OpenOffice.org tomorrow.
Interviews Gilles Caulier (People Behind KDE)The People Behind KDE talks with Gilles Caulier. "How and when did you get involved in KDE? My first KDE contributions were French GUI translations from 2001 to 2002. I have translated Konqueror, KMail, KDevelop and K3b. KDE was the first graphical environnement that I have used under Linux. Because I'm originally a win32 developer, I was immediately charmed by the KDE project's looks and goals." (Found on KDE.News)
Jon 'maddog' Hall on FOSS in the developing world (NewsForge)NewsForge interviews Jon 'maddog' Hall. "One way of getting the price of the OLPC down is through high-volume manufacturing. This is why Mr. Negroponte wants to have millions of these laptops committed. I would guess that most of these would be manufactured in Taiwan or China, not in South Africa. Therefore, millions of rand (dollars, dinar, yen) will flow into China, not stay in South Africa. On the other hand, there are lots of computers being upgraded by banks and companies. They will be "throwing out" good system boxes that would run Linux perfectly fine, and which could be donated to a local charity. By gathering these boxes up, pulling their components apart, reconfiguring them, installing Linux on them, and selling them for $100 -- or even $50 -- you could give a person a good job. "
Interview: Mark Shuttleworth (451 Group)The 451 Group (an analyst operation) has published part 2 of an interview with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. "Ubuntu is in my mind the emergence of a second generation of Linux platform or Linux distribution. [It's] built not on the idea that Linux should look like proprietary software, but that Linux should really deliver what free software can deliver. I should put that slightly differently: Ubuntu aims to deliver the real promise of free software, and that spans a number of different areas. First, we believe that the software should be highly functional and reliable, because we do believe that free software has a potential to be better quality software, that the processes that actually produce the software results in software that is better understood, better scrutinized, better tested, and so on. So we try to integrate all those processes into Ubuntu itself."
Daniel Silverstone (Behind Ubuntu)Behind Ubuntu interviews Canonical programmer Daniel Silverstone. "What are your plans for Edgy? I'll be back on the Launchpad team working on various features for Launchpad to make the developers of Ubuntu have an even better time of it. We have Personal Package Archives in the pipeline -- those will allow people to have their own small apt-get/synaptic compatible archives served by, and built by, Launchpad. And we have many and various other things to work on, including the much vaunted derivative distributions support. Life will be exciting for distro developers in the dapper+1 cycle. With a shortened development cycle the extra tools we can provide for them will be all the more important."
Resources GNU grep's new features (Linux.com)Michael Stutz investigates some new features added to the GNU grep utility. "If you haven't been paying attention to GNU grep recently, you should be happily surprised by some of the new features and options that have come about with the 2.5 series. They bring it functionality you can't get anywhere else -- including the ability to output only matched patterns (not lines), color output, and new file and directory options."
Manage Apache Download Speed And Traffic Limits With mod_cband (HowtoForge)Falko Timme shows how to throttle Apache2 bandwidth with mod_cband in a HowtoForge article. "In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_cband on an Apache2 web server. mod_cband is an Apache 2 module which provides bandwidth quota and throttling. It solves the problem of limiting users' and virtualhosts' bandwidth usage. The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."
Management Guidelines on Migrating to Open Source/OpenData Standards Software, by Carlo Daffara (Groklaw)Groklaw presents Guidelines on Migrating to Open Source/Open Data Standards Software by Carlo Daffara. "The main drive for a successful migration to Open Source and Open Data Standards software(OS/ODS) always starts with a clear assessment of the IT landscape, a clear vision of the needs and benefits of the transitions and continual support. The differences of OS development models and support may require a significant change in the way software and services are accounted for and procured, and in general a shift of responsibility from outside contractors to in-house personnel."
How to suspend and hibernate a laptop under Linux (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at suspend and hibernate on a Linux laptop. "Many people prefer working with laptops instead of desktops for the flexibility they offer. Some of them would also like to switch to a free and open source operating system like GNU/Linux and have their laptop do all the things that proprietary OSes offer, such as suspending their laptops. Several distributions try to make this work out of the box, but knowing what's under the hood always comes in handy, particularly when something goes wrong and needs fixing. Let's take a look at how to suspend and hibernate your laptop under Linux."
Reviews GNU Radio Opens an Unseen World (Wired)Wired looks at the GNU Radio project. "Building a general radio that can receive and transmit, and attaching it to a software system that can fill in the gaps of what we normally think of as radio, is kind of like the Enterprise's deflector dish: Give engineering 20 minutes and it can do anything the captain needs to move the plot along. "
Discovering your network with Netdisco (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at Netdisco. "Netdisco is built on open source packages such as Perl, various Perl modules, Net-SNMP, PostgreSQL, Mason, Apache, and mod_perl. One of its key components is the SNMP::Info Perl module, which Baker also wrote. See the project's requirements page for other modules Netdisco requires to run properly."
First look: Xara Xtreme LX (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Xara Xtreme LX. "In short, Xara LX's interface is highly contextual and sometimes unconventional. While few of its interface characteristics are unique, the combination of so many of them is. New users may find themselves scrambling at first, or resorting to the online help or company Web site more often than they are used to. But once they understand the basic logic -- and learn to pay attention to the status bar at the bottom of the window -- they will quickly find Xara LX's editing window both refreshingly uncluttered and outstandingly efficient."
Miscellaneous Consortium brings open source database projects together (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at the Open Source Database Consortium. "The OSDBC was formed at the first Open Source Database Conference (OpenDBCon) last year in Germany. According to Zak Greant, who was the lead organizer of OpenDBCon and who with Arjen Lenz of MySQL helped get the OSDBC off the ground, the idea behind the consortium is to share information between the various open source database projects that can help improve "the entire class of free software/open source database solutions.""
New additions to Jeremy Allison's Low Point ArchiveThree new articles have been added to the Samba project's collection of articles by Jeremy Allison. New titles include: "We are the champions...", "Unintelligent Design" and "Why we fight".
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