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Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Free software's secret weapon: FOOGL (Linux Journal)
Linux phones will lock down users (vnunet)
vnunet warns us that Linux phones will not be as hackable as we might like. "Consumers who run Linux on a PC are used to having full control over the operating system, but should not expect that same level of control on a Linux powered mobile phone, warned Mike Kelley, senior vice president of engineering at PalmSource."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Get rid of software patents says leading open source law professor (ZDNet)
ZDNet covers Eben Moglen's comments on software patents, made during a LinuxWorld panel discussion. "He said that tech companies were having to register software patents as a defensive move, and that none could "unilaterally disarm" and stop filing for patents. And with potentially many rights holders in software, negotiating licenses becomes very difficult and harms innovation. He said that many companies were having to bear the burden of IP laws that have been influenced by pharma, and that it was time for the tech industry to be freed of constraints created to serve the interests of just "the few.""
Lessig Addresses 'Crazy' Linux Users at LinuxWorld (ABC News)
ABC News covers Lawrence Lessig's LinuxWorld keynote speech. ""What is read-only culture in the digital age? It's an Internet that can increasingly protect the control that the copywrite owner has over that content," Lessig said. "In that sense, the law embraces the read-only Internet. At the same time, there is a different Internet being built. A read-write Internet built by companies much more interested in how people create and share their creativity.""
LinuxWorld Expo Report, Part 2 - by Marty Connor (Groklaw)
Groklaw has this LinuxWorld report. "In this part of my LinuxWorld Expo report, I'll share with you how we plan, prepare for, and execute our show experience. Hopefully, you will find it interesting to see how things look look from the inside. This is Open Source, after all, and transparency of mechanism is a central theme in what we do."
Linux’s iPod Generation Gap (Red Herring)
Red Herring covers a LinuxWorld panel that looked at the intersection of desktop Linux and portable music players. "'The question I get asked most about Linux by people under 30 is ‘will it work with my iPod?'' said Eric Raymond, a celebrated figure in the open-source movement who penned the popular book 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar.' For Windows and OS X fans, such questions don’t enter the discussion. But the runaway popularity of iPods, iTunes, and digital media on PCs and devices has forced the open-source community to consider the wave of expectations for multimedia."
LinuxWorld day three (NewsForge)
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier covers day three of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. "I went to two sessions on Wednesday, one about the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and another about desktop development and the Linux Standard Base (LSB). The GCC presentation by Janis Johnson, "Recent Developments in GCC," was an overview of the GCC project and recent changes in it -- with "recent" being within the last few years. Johnson is the test suite maintainer for GCC and is employed with IBM's Linux Technology Center. Since my main interaction with GCC is watching compiler messages float by when I build software from source, I found the talk somewhat interesting. Johnson explained the way that GCC works as a project and as a compiler, how decisions are made to add features, and what platforms supported by GCC."
LinuxWorld wraps up (NewsForge)
NewsForge has a final LinuxWorld report. "During the last session, Kroah-Hartman gave a presentation on doing kernel version control with Quilt, Ketchup, and Git. As it turned out, Quilt and Git are actually useful for other projects as well, and Ketchup also looks like it could be useful for admins, so the presentation was of value for those of us who aren't kernel developers."
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek)
For the curious, here is how BusinessWeek sees the GPLv3 process. "At a panel at LinuxWorld, [Eben] Moglen described the process as nothing short of a massive community looking deep within itself and answering the lofty question: What does freedom mean? It's a very open-source way to solve a problem; only unlike fixing bugs in a code, there's no easy answer and big divides that are hard to bridge. 'It's an unusual activity,' Moglen says. 'It's more about the development of the society and less about the software license.'"
Companies
Linux heavies plan lightweight virtualisation (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports on containers and Linux distributions without getting into the vast amount of work which remains before an unpatched mainline kernel will support these technologies. "Novell, which wants to maintain Suse's reputation as the first place to find advanced new features for Linux, is more eager and is considering adding OpenVZ in Service Pack 1 of SLES 10. 'We are still evaluating if this is something we can take into SP1,' said Holger Dyroff, vice president of Linux product management."
Linux Adoption
Hoosier Daddy? Indiana Schools Adopt Linux (Information Week)
Information Week reports on a large Linux deployment by the Indiana Department of Education. "Local schools can choose which platform to use, according to Huffman. "Many will install Windows machines. What we're doing in our grant program is, when we put one-to-one computers in language arts classrooms, they are loaded with Linux. "We have a million kids in the state of Indiana," he continued. "If we were to pay $100 for software on each machine, each year, that's $100 million for software. That's well beyond our ability. That's why open source is so attractive. We can cut those costs down to $5 [on each computer] per year." Huffman said he's eager to get a read on student acceptance of Linux. In surveying one classroom last year, he asked a student what he thought of using a Linux desktop vs. a Windows desktop, and the student responded, "Who cares?""
Interviews
Exclusive Q&A: Linus Torvalds (Red Herring)
Red Herring has a brief interview with Linus Torvalds. "I don't think five-year planned economies work, and I don't think it works when you do software design, either. Linux development has always been a kind of open market, where the development direction gets set by customer demand, together with obviously a lot of what I simply call good taste - the avoidance of things that are obviously going to be problematic in the long run."
Resources
Protect your applications with AppArmor (Linux.com)
Linux.com presents an excerpt on AppArmor from the new O'Reilly book, SUSE Linux. "AppArmor is a product that Novell acquired when they bought the company Immunix in May 2005. It provides an interesting alternative to traditional security measures. AppArmor works by profiling the applications that it is protecting. A profile records the files that an application needs to access, and the capabilities it needs to exercise, during normal, "good" operation. Subsequently, a profile can be "enforced"; that is, attempts by the application to access resources not explicitly permitted by the profile are denied. Properly configured, AppArmor ensures that each profiled application is allowed to do what it is supposed to do, and nothing else."
Free Open Document label templates (Free Software Magazine)
Free Software Magazine looks at open document format templates for labels, business cards and more. "If you've ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned "There has got to be a better way to do this," here's the solution you've been looking for. Working smarter, not harder, with the OpenOffice label templates will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels."
OOoBasic crash course: Creating a lookup macro (Linux.com)
Dmitri Popov shows how to use OpenOffice.org's OOoBasic to write a macro. "Learning OOoBasic can be a bit like learning a foreign language. If you have the time and ambition to communicate fluently, you can spend months or even years studying grammar and expanding your vocabulary. But sometimes you just need some basic skills to get you through daily situations. In this case, a crash course that introduces you to some basic principles and building blocks of the language would do just fine. The same is true for OOoBasic -- if you need to write a simple macro that makes your daily computing life a bit easier, you don't have to spend time reading about methods, routines, and object properties. What you need is some working examples and an explanation of how they work."
W3C Updates XML (eWeek)
eWeek covers the release of four core XML specifications by the World Wide Web Consortium. "The Cambridge, Mass.-based standards body announced the release of the fourth edition of XML (Extensible Markup Language) 1.0 and second editions of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1, Namespaces in XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML 1.1. W3C officials said these core XML specifications stand as the foundation for W3C-defined technologies for querying, transforming, displaying, encrypting, and optimizing XML. The new releases includes corrections for "all known errata and clarifications where there was some potential for misunderstanding," according to a W3C document about the XML updates."
Reviews
Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) & GNOME 2.16 Features (A Stranger's Universe)
A site called A Stranger's Universe has a review of GNOME 2.16 Beta under Ubuntu 6.10. "GNOME 2.16 Beta has been in Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) for the past few days [or even a week or so]. It is functioning extremely well. I’ve seen some occasional crashes with Epiphany and Nautilus but I hope that it will be fixed soon. Other than that, there are lots of new things in GNOME 2.16".
The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal editor Nicholas Petreley is having a MythTV experience. "I admit that I find everything I have learned interesting, and I will enjoy writing it up as a Linux Journal article when I'm done taking this project to a point where I'm satisfied with the results. But I don't think I should have had to become so familiar with everything from driver firmware to the way television signals are formatted in order to get satisfactory results. It was never my goal to learn any of this."
Using screen for remote interaction (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at GNU Screen. "Recently I needed to do some distance education; one of my coworkers wanted me to show him how to do software builds on Linux. The only problem was that I'm on the East Coast and he is on the West. How could I show him the build and install process? After considering some alternatives, we found our solution in GNU Screen."
Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)
NewsForge reviews Syllable, a GPL-licensed operating system. "Once I had Syllable installed, I was floored by how fast it was on my test machine, a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM. Syllable blew away Windows, Linux, and Solaris as far as speed is concerned. From the time the boot loader came up to the time the login prompt appeared was just under eight seconds. It took another two seconds or less from the time I logged in to the time the desktop was ready to go."
Take notes with Tomboy (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews Tomboy. "A few weeks ago, I started looking around for an application that makes it easy to take notes. I do all my writing in Vim, but I wanted something that was good for quick and dirty notetaking and for organizing information without maintaining a collection of text files. After some research, I settled on Tomboy."
Miscellaneous
GNOME and Google reach out to women (NewsForge)
NewsForge covers GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program. "Originally, the proposal was for three women, but after the GNOME Foundation gave thumbs up, Google doubled the funding so that six women could participate. The projects that were accepted are Cecilia Gonzalez Alvarez's work on optimizing Evolution components; Clare So's work to edit MathML expressions in GtkMathView; Fernanda Foertter's gJournaler, a tool for create a virtual library of PDFs; Maria Soler Climent's work to synchronize Tomboy notes; Monia Ghobadi's proposal to integrate GNU Screen with gnome-terminal; and Umran Kamar's project to create an Evince plugin for Mozilla."
Mozilla opens Calendar testing to user community (NewsForge)
NewsForge announces a Mozilla Corp. Calendar Community Test Day. "Mozilla Corp. is preparing to release updates to its calendar applications for Sunbird and Lightning early next month. Before then, developers hope to get "lots of eyeballs" on it by inviting users to participate in Calendar Community Test Day on Tuesday, August 22."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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