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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Taiwan mandates Linux-ready PCs (ZDNet Asia)ZDNet Asia reports on a directive from the Taiwanese government that requires Linux compatibility for new desktop PC purchases. "The Central Trust of China, Taiwan's government procurement agency, has commissioned the Taipei Computer Association (TCA) to ensure that bids from PC vendors include equipment that are compatible with Linux. So far, about 33 desktop PC models from Acer, Asustek, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, have been certified Linux-compatible by the TCA, reported Taiwan's Chinese language newspaper, Economic Times."
Widespread Linux GPL violations alleged (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch looks at the issue of GPL violations by small Linux distributions. "Woodford's error was that while he does provide MEPIS's modified Debian/Ubuntu kernel source code in a Debian source-package, he had not provided copies of the source code that was available somewhere, which he had not modified. So, for example, say I released Steven's Special Penguin Sauce Linux. In it, I'd have my own modifications to the kernel source code, and the usual Linux utilities like the vim screen-based text processor. I would have to provide my users with not only my kernel's code, but also with vim's source code as well, even though I hadn't done a thing to its code."
Trade Shows and Conferences KDE at LinuxWorld Expo Korea 2006 (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the recent Korean LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. "On June 5-7th the Korean version of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo series opened its doors for the first time in Seoul. The visitors could learn about various Asian distributions which use KDE including Haansoft. The Korean team of translators with its head Cho Sung-Jae ran a booth showing the current KDE as well as distributing the brand new Kubuntu Dapper CDs to people - which was a great success."
RailsConf 2006 is done, next up is the RailsConf Europe 2006 (Linux Journal)Pat Eyler points to the best blogs on the RailsConf. "Well, the biggest news in the Ruby world this last week has been RailsConf (and of course, all the news that broke there). I didn't get to go, so I've been trying to follow the various blogs about how it went. You know things were good when you see comment's like this one (by Curt Hibbs), "My notes for this talk are completely blank because it was so engrossing that I forgot to write anything down!"."
Companies Evolis opens up to Linux (CR80News)CR80News reports on the release of Linux card printer drivers from Evolis. "Evolis, the French manufacturer of solutions for plastic card customization, has announced the release of a Linux driver for its entire range of printers, thus making them available, affordable and suitable to a larger scope of users." The driver source code does not appear to be available.
Microsoft's Linux-basher leaves (Techworld.com)Techworld.com reports that Martin Taylor, leader of Microsoft's anti-Linux 'Get the Facts' campaign, is leaving the company. "Taylor's brisk departure comes at the same time as the surprise announcement that Microsoft is working with a major critic from the open source field, Lawrence Lessig, to facilitate Creative Commons licences within Office documents. Stanford law professor Lessig, last year bitterly criticised Microsoft for tactics such as Get the Facts, accusing it of carrying on "all out war" with open source, and Linux in particular."
Motorola joins Eclipse in mobile Linux push (ElectronicsWeekly.com)ElectronicsWeekly.com reports on Motorola's joining of the Eclipse IDE community. "Motorola has joined the Eclipse open source community which supports the adoption of open-source embedded software and tools including Linux. Motorola is working with the Eclipse Foundation to propose an Eclipse Tools for mobile Linux (TmL) project which will support development of C++ applications targeting mobile devices."
Novell changes leadership, stays Linux course (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch looks into Novell's recent board shakeup. "While Novell has embraced Linux and open-source with its acquisition of Ximian and SUSE, it has been unable to profit from these technologies as quickly as many of its investors would like. Messman, and his plans for Novell, had been criticized since last fall by major stock holders Blum Capital Partners LP investment firm and Credit Suisse First Boston on several fronts. Messman, analysts at both firms felt, had not been moving fast enough to cut the fat from Novell."
Business Linux Terminal Servers for Any Business (Linux Journal)Linux Journal looks at how businesses can use thin clients with Linux Terminal Server (LTS). "A Linux Terminal Server offers any business an elegant and cost-effective way to integrate the power of open source. In this article, I review some basics of network topology and offer suggestions about how to install a prototype server. I top it off with some tips for business-specific installations and configuration guidance."
Interviews Oracle: Linuxs biggest fan and vendor (Computerworld)Computerworld talks to Oracle's director of Linux engineering, Wim Coekaerts. "Oracle is involved with Linux, Coekaerts says, foremost because Oracle uses Linux. A lot of Linux. Right now, almost 10,000 Linux servers are in use internally at Oracle. Essentially, every production server at Oracle is a Linux server. In addition, about 9,000 developers at Oracle are using Linux to develop products. A lot of that can be attributed to one simple factor: cost savings."
Richard Stallman interviewed at GPLv3 Conference (Groklaw)Groklaw presents an interview with Richard Stallman. "Groklaw's own Sean Daly was in Barcelona at the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona, Spain, this week, and while there, he had the opportunity to interview Richard Stallman [ as Ogg (3.8 MB)]. He asked Mr. Stallman what programmers should focus on next, about DRM, binary drivers, proposed changes to the GPL, and what he feels he has yet to accomplish."
Behind Ubuntu Interview: Jane WeidmanBehind Ubuntu interviews Jane Weidman. "What have you been working on for Dapper? Tracking the targeted Dapper specs through their development life-cycles, getting regular Dapper Development Status Updates published, co-ordinating the Edubuntu team, and attempting to get the Edubuntu Cookbook written, responding to loads of public enquiries and generally keeping busy. Those 4am Status Update meetings ROCK! (not)."
Resources Making the Most of JDBC with WebRowSet (O'ReillyNet)Sharad Acharya looks at WebRowSet in an O'Reilly article. "Database to XML and back again. If everyone's doing some or all of this, then shouldn't we write it once, get it right, and standardize? JDBC 3.0's WebRowSet offers a profound increase in power over the old ResultSet."
Indie Podcasting with Open Source (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet takes a look at podcasting. "There have been quite a few articles and books on podcasting already, and some of them are excellent--particularly the ones that deal with some small part of the process. Quite often, however, they neglect to mention a common goal of podcasting: to be like a radio station, slick and with easily understood formats. That's odd to me. Podcasting is an ideal medium for experimentation because the costs are so low, so you should try out some off-the-wall stuff."
Creating A Safe Directory With PAM And EncFS (Howtoforge)Howtoforge has published a tutorial on the use of PAM And EncFS. "This HowTo is about creating a user-session-safe directory which offers security on- and offline. This is done with PAM, a module named pam_script and Encfs ("Encrypted Filesystem"). This safe directory is used to store credentials and other sensitive information during a session. When a usersession is ended, in the worst case an encrypted directory remains on the harddrive. In the best case everything is removed. This construction is only meant to store information during a session, not for documents or any other valid information."
Vim tips: The basics of search and replace (Linux.com)Linux.com has some Vim tips. "Vim beginners may be puzzled when it comes to doing search and replace operations in Vim. The syntax can be a bit arcane, but after you've practiced, it becomes second nature. Let's take a look at how easy it can be. Let's start by looking at searches and doing search and replace operations within Vim. You can do a search in normal mode by using /searchstring . This will search forward through the file for searchstring . Likewise, running ?searchstring will search backwards through the file."
Web 2.0 sows grassroots collaboration (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at the collaborative aspects of Web 2.0. ""The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration," said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox, who spoke at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston last week. "Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory medium." Though it lacks a precise definition, Web 2.0 generally refers to Web services that let people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation of Web offerings, Web 2.0 applications are more interactive, giving people an experience more akin to a native desktop application as opposed to a static Web page."
Fast Prototyping of Telephony Applications with YATE (O'ReillyNet)Maciek Kaminski looks at the YATE project on O'Reilly. "In this article, I will present the YATE project (Yet Another Telephony Engine). YATE's API boundaries separate the parts of a telephony application that have to be "fast" from those that have to be just "fast enough." As a result, YATE allows developers to write scripts in higher-level languages, while leveraging the performance of native libraries without sacrificing too much efficiency."
Reviews Reading feeds efficiently with Akregator (Linux.com)Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier investigates the RSS and Atom feed reader Akregator on Linux.com. "Information overload is a serious problem for most users. We all have so many sources of information to deal with, it's hard to keep them under control. One way to help deal with information glut is to use a good RSS and Atom feed reader, such as Akregator. One of the reasons I decided to start using Akregator is that I noticed the Sage extension for Firefox would throw an "XML Parse Error" on a few feeds that other readers -- like Akregator -- handle just fine. For example, Sage gives me an error on the Kubuntu feed, but Akregator parses it just fine."
Arcom - Development kit allows fast design of embedded Linux devices (electropages)electropages.com reviews Arcom's SBC-GX533 Embedded Linux development kit. "The kits SBC-GX533 board is well suited to deeply embedded, remote or unattended installations demanding reasonable processing power. It is a low profile, fan-less, RoHS compliant EBX form factor board, based on a 400MHz AMD Geode GX533 1.1W processor. It has 512MB of DDR DRAM and 32MB of Flash installed, of which 13MB are used by the Linux image. This leaves 19MB of physical memory, equivalent to about 38MB of usable space, available for Linux application and data storage. The board also features TFT or CRT support, an analog touchscreen interface, dual 10/100BaseT Ethernet ports, CompactFlash (CF+), 4 serial and 4 USB ports. Industrial expansion is provided through an 8-bit TTL I/O port, a PC/104 and a PC/104+ site. All usual PC interfaces are also included."
Choosing an open source CMS (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at a few content management systems. "It seems as if everyone is a Web publisher today -- from the habitual bloggers and online diarists to the companies running major news outlets, portals, and magazines -- and they're all using some kind of database-backed content management system (CMS) to do it. There are a lot of CMS choices -- Drupal, Mambo, Bricolage, WordPress, and Plone are some of the most recognizable names. While they all perform the same basic functions, you have to pick only one. How do you do it?"
CLI Magic: EncFS (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at EncFS. "EncFS is an easy-to-use, command-line tool for storing information in encrypted form. It's not really a filesystem, but it pretends to be one at the CLI. If you've been searching for a means of encrypting and decrypting your sensitive data easily, here it is."
Gnash, the free Flash player, makes progress (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at the Gnash project. "The Gnash project has been developing a free software Flash player since December. Filling one of the last major gaps on the GNU/Linux desktop, it is one of the Free Software Foundation's high-priority projects. We covered the project several months ago, when compiling the code was problematic. Now that Gnash has reached the 0.7.1 version, the player is still rough, but enough has been done to give us an indication of what the final version might be like."
Ion, the efficient window manager (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Ion. "The philosophy behind Ion is that window managers aren't meant to be seen, but to manage windows; anything more is dross. A few window managers out there share this aesthetic, such as Ratpoison, but they're rare in today's world of photogenic desktop environments, which seem to always be looking for an opportunity to add more decoration and ornament."
Getting started with Linux-VServer (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at Linux-VServer. "Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts, which operate like normal Linux servers but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. It utilizes operating system-level virtualization to enable the kernel to partition resources. All services, such as SSH, email, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VServer, without modification, just as they can on a real server. This also means you can restart your mail server, for example, without rebooting your Web server, while both co-exist on the same physical machine. Each virtual server has its own IP address, hard drive space, user account database, and root password, and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers."
Opera 9 Is Music to eWEEK Labs' Ears (eWEEK)eWEEK reviews the Opera 9 browser. "One of the coolest and most valuable new features in Opera 9 is its search customization feature. On any Web site to which we surfed with Opera 9, we could right-click in a search field and then choose to add the site's search engine to our list of integrated engines. We could even make it our default search engine. This is a feature that we have been looking for in browsers for a long time now, and Opera 9 has finally pulled it off."
Miscellaneous SUSE Linux course on a stick (ComputerWeekly)ComputerWeekly covers Novell's launch of a training course on a USB drive. "The SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 First Class course comes on a USB device complete with the learning content and an installed version of the beta SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop 10 on a virtual machine. The USB device will run on both Windows and Linux, giving students complete flexibility in how, and where, to study, said Novell. Putting the complete initial training course on a USB drive is an industry first, said Daniel Veitkus, vice president for training services at Novell."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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