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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Time for Coders to Get Political? (Linux Journal) Glyn Moody looks back at a 1999 interview with Richard Stallman to see how times have changed. "RMS may have felt back then that the best way for him to contribute to freedom was to code, or to encourage others to code, rather than trying to change the world directly, but things have moved on: today, Stallman is becoming something of a political activist. I'm not talking about the Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign, however entertaining and successful that has been in terms of raising awareness about the threats posed by DRM (Digital Restrictions Management or Digital Rights Mismanagement as Stallman likes to term it). What I have in mind are two recent meetings in France between RMS and highly-placed politicians there."
Patent infringement suit filed against Red Hat (No Lobbyists As Such) Florian Mueller reports on a new patent suit against Red Hat Inc. "The Patently-O blog reported yesterday that a software company named FireStar has sued Red Hat over an alleged patent infringement. Patently-O also provides the complaint and the patent document, and quotes from Red Hat’s patent policy. The FireStar suit relates to a piece of software that Red Hat acquired as part of JBoss Inc.’s intellectual property. It seems to me that the FireStar patent is quite broad, and if it is upheld, it will affect other companies as well."
Trade Shows and Conferences Ubuntu Developer Summit Paris: New alliances, new horizons (NewsForge) Benjamin Mako Hill covers the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit Paris on NewsForge. "Last week, more than 60 Ubuntu developers met in Paris to plan Ubuntu's next release, codenamed Edgy Eft. Officially, the meeting was billed as a developer summit and not a conference. Each day, groups of two to 10 attendees brainstormed, drafted, and advanced specifications in more than 60 sessions in up to 10 parallel tracks. These specifications, which will stabilize in the next week, will then be prioritized and approved by Canonical staff and will serve as the feature goals for the next release."
Success with VistA from the WorldVistA conference (LinuxMedNews) LinuxMedNews reports on the success of VistA. "This is a report on an excellent talk that I am hearing on the factors of success with VistA. The subject is the seven critical success with Medical Software. Essentially these are the lessons that VistA has learned via hard knocks. This list is partly compiled from those who have succeeded but mostly is the result of those who have failed with VistA."
The Long View of Identity (O'Reilly) Andy Oram discusses identity issues on O'Reilly. "Who are you online? Your digital identity is a complex bundle of information--not just what you say about yourself, but what other people say about you and how trustworthy they are. O'Reilly editor Andy Oram recently attended the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law's Berkman Center and reports on one of the most vital issues of privacy and usability on the internet."
The SCO Problem Wells' Order Granting in Part IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims (Groklaw) Groklaw reports on a new order by Judge Brooke Wells which grants IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims. "Here is Judge Brooke Wells's Order as text. 39 pages and 128 footnotes! Why? I can't read the judge's mind, of course, but my best guess is she is indicating to SCO not to bother to appeal this order. And if they do, she has provided her reasons -- with specificity, one might even say, sufficient to uphold her decision. You can follow along with the references on Groklaw's IBM Timeline page, where the docket numbers are provided."For further reading, Linux-Watch analyzes the situation: "This means that the vast majority of SCO's claims against IBM for misusing Unix code in Linux have been thrown out."
Companies Red Hat continues to make big bucks (Linux-Watch) Linux-Watch reports on the latest financial news from Red Hat, Inc. "The first quarter of Red Hat Inc.'s 2007 fiscal year was a great one. But, because it fell short of analysts' expectations, the company's stock fell in after-hours trading. The total revenue for the quarter, which was reported on June 28, was $84.0 million, an increase of 38 percent from the year ago quarter and 7 percent from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue from RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) was $71.5 million, up 45 percent year-over-year and 7 percent sequentially."
Linux Adoption Mobile next battleground for Linux (ZDNet) ZDNet reports on comments by Trolltech's Eirik Chambe-Eng concerning Linux adoption by the mobile phone sector. ""Linux gives manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) complete control," said Chambe-Eng, who also claimed that Windows Mobile and Symbian--Linux's two great competitors in the mobile phone market--come with "agendas attached." "Manufacturers are scared of Microsoft coming in and pushing margins away from the hardware. There are very thin margins in this business, and Symbian and Windows Mobile are typically expensive," he said."
The City of Munich praises Linux at the workplace (heise online) heise online reports on the move to Linux by the city of Munich. "The City of Munich's LiMux project center is rejecting charges by the Senate administration of Berlin that the migration to free software has gotten stuck before it ever got going. As Project director Peter Hofmann told heise online, "Open Source software at the workplace is a reality in Munich." At the end of May, his department presented the future basis client to the public at in information day. At present, the pilot phase is focusing on a software suite. The approximately 100 pilot users include Mayor Christian Ude and his deputy Christine Strobl."
Belgian government chooses OpenDocument (NewsForge) NewsForge reports on another step forward for open document standards. "Belgium's Council of Ministers last month approved a proposal that requires federal government departments to use open file formats for exchanging documents. As it stands now, the only accepted standard is the Open Document Format (ODF)."
Legal Patent jeopardizes IETF syslog standard (NewsForge) NewsForge covers a new patent threat on the syslog logging protocol. "The Internet Engineering Task Force is working on a proposed standard for the age-old but never standardized syslog protocol, but their efforts may be in jeopardy thanks to a patent application by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., of Shenzhen, China."
Interviews Erik Kjær Pedersen (People Behind KDE) The People Behind KDE have interviewed Erik Kjær Pedersen. Erik does Danish translations. "When did you first hear of KDE? I was on sabbatical at Odense University in Denmark 1997/98. While I was there two students lived in my house and used my computer. It had Win 3.1 on one third of the hard disk and OS/2 on another third, but the last third was empty. They wrote and asked me whether they could install Linux on the empty part, and I said yes. When I came back I tried to log into Linux, and I could see the files in the OS/2 partition. Just for fun I used Latex on one of my Tex-files, and I was very surprised that it worked without any problems. That turned me on to Linux, and shortly thereafter I noticed KDE somehow, I am not completely sure how it happened, but I think Red Hat had KDE as an option then." (Found on KDE.News)
Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross (SeattlePI) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an extended interview with Blake Ross, a founder of the Firefox project. "People expect us to come up with ever-better Spread Firefox campaigns. That's especially difficult for us, because the goal of Firefox has always been just to make things simpler, and making things simpler usually doesn't mean adding grandiose new features and making sure that the next version has something that identifies it as being new, which has kind of been the (Microsoft) Office model to date, every release has to have something new so people know they got their money's worth."
Resources The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Linux Journal builds the ultimate Linux box starting with the ultimate AMD64 motherboard. "One very important consideration in our choices was, will this work with most Linux distributions "out of the box"? We installed Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora Core 5, SUSE 10 and Mandriva on our do-it-yourself system. All of these distributions ran without any trouble and without the need for any additional drivers or special driver management. (We did, however, use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, not out of necessity, but in order to make use of the SLI features of the motherboards.) We also ran Knoppix, MEPIS and Kanotix live CDs without problems."
CLI Magic: Using command history in the bash shell (Linux.com) Linux.com presents an excerpt from chapter 9 of the Third Edition of A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which looks at the bash history mechanism. "The Bourne Again Shell's history mechanism, a feature adapted from the C Shell, maintains a list of recently issued command lines, also called events, providing a quick way to reexecute any of the events in the list. This mechanism also enables you to execute variations of previous commands and to reuse arguments from them."
Thinking about email security (NewsForge) Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has some thoughts on email security. "For many users, using encryption may seem like overkill, but Michael Lucas, author of PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid , says that it's good to have the option whether you have something to hide or not. "It's simply something in my gut that says, 'I want the option to have privacy,' and I think a lot of people feel the same way.""
Managing Many-to-Many Relationships with PL/pgSQL (O'ReillyNet) David E. Wheeler looks at PL/pgSQL in this O'ReillyNet article. "A common pattern when managing the relationship between object-oriented applications and databases is the many-to-many relationship. Object-relational mappers usually manage these relationships as collections of objects, wherein one class has an accessor that returns a collection of related objects. For example, imagine that you're creating (yet another) blogging application. You want to associate your blog entries with tags. Tags can be used over and over again for different blog entries, and each blog entry can, of course, have more than one tag. In this scenario, the blog entry class might have a method that returns a collection of tag objects."
Linux moves towards unified APIs (IT Week) IT Week covers the Portland Project's interfaces for GNOME and KDE. "The Portland Project has released a beta version of its programming interfaces for the Gnome and KDE Linux environments. This is designed to boost development of desktop Linux applications by creating common application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers to use."
Killing That Spam With Postgrey And Postfix (HowtoForge) HowtoForge shows how to set up a greylist spam hurdle. "Greylisting in short means that when someone wants to deliver a mail to your mailserver it will simply reply "Please come back later". That is something all RFC compliant mailservers do and when they do come back the mail is accepted. Most spammers and spam software are not compliant and not patient enough to try again. You will be surprised to see how effective this is. Anyway, follow the links below to really learn about it. There are as always pros and cons so do your homework before you put it on a production server."
Uncovering progress in FOSS-based archeology (NewsForge) NewsForge looks at free software and archeology. "The discovery of the free software philosophy and development model in archeology is a consequence of several methodology problems that caused what some call the "great crisis" of archeology. According to researcher Benjamin Ducke, "Since the 1990s ... there has been a lot of development on fundamental quantitative methods but no software to put them into practice on a broad scale." However, Ducke continues, today there is much more awareness of what is possible and needed, as well as the notion that free software and formats can play an essential role. Many researchers have realized that proprietary archeology software is a dead end from many points of view, both scientific and economic."
Reviews What's New in Eclipse 3.2 Java Development Tools (O'ReillyNet) Ed Burnette reviews the Eclipse 3.2 Java Development Tools on O'Reilly. "The popular Eclipse IDE's latest release, version 3.2, is the cornerstone of an ambitious release of ten Eclipse-branded projects on the same day. But what's in it for you? Ed Burnette takes a look at the new features in Eclipse's Java Development Tools and shows you how they'll make your development much easier."
Set up a Freevo media center (Linux.com) Linux.com looks at a Freevo setup. "Freevo is like a window manager -- an interface controlled by a remote control or the keyboard -- that provides access to various media. It is written mostly in the Python programming language, which makes it hacking-friendly. Everything you expect to find on a media center platform is present in Freevo; you can listen to music, view pictures, and watch TV and video."
NSpluginwrapper: A cross-architecture browser plugin tool (Linux.com) Linux.com looks at NSpluginwrapper. "NSpluginwrapper is a cross-architecture tool designed to let Firefox users on AMD64 and PowerPC Linux use i386-only, binary Web browser plugins -- such as those frequently provided by closed source, commercial interests. Following a protracted delay after its initial, binary-only release back in May, NSpluginwrapper is now available with source code."
Miscellaneous Dick Tracy's New Linux Box? (Slashdot) Slashdot mentions a new Linux platform, the Eurotech ZYPAD. ""The Zypad is a new arm-wearable computer right out of Futurama. It can run Windows CE or Linux and has a 400 MHz CPU, 64MB Flash memory, 3.5 inch screen. The Zypad leaves the user's hands free — it has no keyboard, just a touchscreen and navigation keys. Voice recognition is 'being developed.' It turns on only when you look at it, so it saves power. It has GPS and Bluetooth/WLAN/GSM connectivity."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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