Linux in the news

Putting Open Source Development Under the Scope (TechNewsWorld)

TechNewsWorld covers a University of California, Davis study on how the open source process works. "How are open source software projects able to set their speed and quality on the best participants? That's simple: 'No meetings,' [PostgreSQL developer Josh] Berkus said."

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Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Linux Format interviews Mark Shuttleworth. "We will definitely see a multimedia version of Ubuntu kick in, and we'll probably see an embedded version. At that point we'll pretty much span the gamut from the server, through the very lightweight client through Xubuntu, and to the embedded client, with Ubuntu and Kubuntu in the middle. Beyond that, I think we'll start to see more fragmentation around vertical markets. Edubuntu is a leading indicator of that -- an aggregation of stuff from both Ubuntu and Kubuntu, but optimised for education."

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Replacing init with Upstart (Linux.com)

Linux.com has an article about upstart written by one of its developers. "We wanted an init daemon that allowed the selection and order of scripts to be determined not just by information in the scripts themselves, but by events coming from outside the init system, in particular udev. In fact, what we wanted was an init sequence driven entirely by these events and those of its own making."

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Akademy Hackathon Starts (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the Akademy 2006 KDE contributors conference. "The inspirational Aaron Seigo started the conference off in a confrontational manner by looking the KDE project community in the eye and asking "who are we?". Punctuated by some awful music and a rapid-fire slide-show of contributors, Aaron outlined what he thought is the most important aspect of the KDE community: Building communities around Free Software and bringing Free Software into communities."

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Developers Gather for ODF Day (Yahoo Business)

Yahoo Business reports on ODF Day at Akademy. "The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Desktop Linux (DTL) group, NLnet, and the KDE open source development community recently hosted an ODF Day at aKademy 2006. This year the leading open source developers from the KDE community were joined by senior technical staff member representatives from Intel and IBM for a day of seminars and technical talks on the many facets of software development opportunities enabled by the new ISO/IEC 263000 (OpenDocument Format) international standard." (Found on KDE.News)

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KDE Regional Groups at Akademy (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the Akademy the KDE regional groups session. "Last Wednesday the KDE regional groups Birds of a Feather session took place at aKademy 2006, Dublin. The focus of this BoF session was to share experiences that regional KDE-groups have had in building a community. A regional group is generally country based, e.g. KDE-IT for Italy and KDE-NL for Netherlands."

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Hackers claim zero-day flaw in Firefox (ZDNet)

ZDNet reports from ToorCon, where a pair of presenters disclosed a remotely exploitable JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox. "The JavaScript issue appears to be a real vulnerability, Window Snyder, Mozilla's security chief, said after watching a video of the presentation Saturday night. 'What they are describing might be a variation on an old attack,' she said. 'We're going to do some investigating.'" The presenters claim to know about another 30 undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities.

Update: it seems that the presenters' claims may have been a little overblown, if not entirely fraudulent.

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OpenSparc Project Taps Advisory Board, Sees Linux Momentum (IT Jungle)

IT Jungle reports that Sun has set up an advisory board for the OpenSparc project. "First up, Sun has created an independent OpenSparc advisory board, which includes two representatives from Sun as well as three other industry luminaries. "Just like any well-behaved open source project, we want to establish an independent advisory board," explains Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business development for OpenSPARC. This board will steer the OpenSparc project and, after a 12-month period, it will create a permanent governance board for the project. The initial board members include Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun, and David Weaver, a senior systems engineer on the Sparc T1 development efforts inside Sun."

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Weinstein: automatic hobbling mechanisms in Vista

Lauren Weinstein has sent a message to his Privacy Forum on the anti-piracy mechanisms which, it seems, will be built into Microsoft Vista. Free software looks more appealing all the time. "In particular, Vista will include technologies that can be used by MS to drastically reduce the functionality of systems that they believe to be pirated. This restricted environment will give users a choice between running Windows in its very limited 'Safe Mode' (apparently with networking disabled), or alternatively running a Web browser that will exit automatically after each hour or so of usage."

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SMB Linux Use on the Rise (eWeek)

eWeek's looks at the increasing use of Linux by small and midsize businesses. "A growing number of the estimated 5.8 million small and midsize businesses in the United States are buying Linux solutions, mostly from solution providers, according to research from AMI-Partners. Linux, according to AMI, of New York, is benefiting from a growing acceptance of open-source products overall. "While Linux is becoming more mainstream, our research shows that SMBs are more interested in open-source solutions than Linux per se," said Abhijeet Rane, AMI's senior vice president. "The SMBs buying Linux solutions are mostly buying apps that operate in the background of a business.""

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Interview with Tim Bray (Linux Journal)

James Gray talks with Tim Bray on a variety of topics. "No history book on the Internet would be complete without a chapter on Tim Bray. Not only was Tim a co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, but he also created the first parser software for XML documents and has been co-driving the development of Atom. Today, fulfilling a dual role as tireless Netizen-evangelist and Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems, Tim continues to build on his early work by advocating for a more elegant, platform-independent and user-friendly Internet. Linux Journal recently checked in with Tim Bray to get an update on where he is channeling his creative energies these days."

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Interview with Milosz Derezynski (LinuxInterviews.com)

LinuxInterviews.com talks to Milosz Derezynski, lead developer of the BMPx media player. "BMPx is a media player rewritten from the ground up on the foundation of BeepMediaPlayer. Originally started as a "behind doors" project, BMPx aims high and will get there very soon. Version 0.30.x was launched just days ago in a totally new form that drops the old Winamp-style look, bringing a more iTunes-like interface that will soon support SVG themes."

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Philip Rodrigues (People Behind KDE)

The People Behind KDE have interviewed Philip Rodrigues. "In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? Any way I can :-). If you want something 'official', I'm a documentation writer and I do some co-ordination work for the docs team too. But I also do user support on IRC and mailing lists and some bug triage. I even have one or two code patches in KDE (though admittedly, they're one-liners). (Found on KDE.News)

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A New JRuby Interview and More (Linux Journal)

Pat Eyler talks with JRuby developers, Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, and Ola Bini. "Okay Charles, since you brought up refactoring tools -- you and Thomas, are supposed to be looking at programmers tools (which most people read as NetBeans). What do you think has been holding back refactoring tools for Ruby? More importantly, what can/will you be doing about it? (Ola, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too.)"

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JRuby Interview (Part 2) (On Ruby)

Here's part 2 of an interview with the developers of JRuby. "Charles, you've mentioned 'Rubifying' some existing Jave tools and libraries. Can you give us some examples? Charles: A large part of our focus has been trying to fit Ruby into a Java-centric world. There are countless libraries and frameworks out there in Java-land...libraries that would be very useful for Ruby applications like Rails. However the effort required to hand-wrap those libraries in a Ruby lib is sometimes prohibitive; the set of interfaces provided in the Java code can be extensive and not particularly "Rubyish". We seek to make accessing those libraries simpler."

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Keep your Web site online with a High Availability Linux Apache cluster (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at heartbeat and high availability Linux clusters. "Failover clusters are used to ensure high availability of system services and applications even through crashes, hardware failures, and environmental mishaps. In this article, I'll show you how to implement a rock-solid two-node high availability Apache cluster with the heartbeat application from The High-Availability Linux Project. I tested the cluster on Fedora Core 5, CentOS 4.3, and Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS server distributions."

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Managing a Honeypot (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet covers the use of honeypots. "It's no secret that many intruders choose their victims by scanning large chunks of addresses and searching for services vulnerable to existing tools and exploits. This can be an effective approach, although there are still some problems for intruders. People employed in IT security must trace bug trackers and the appearance of new exploits. Even open source code cannot guarantee that the good guys will find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do."

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MySQL Backup And Recovery With mysql-zrm On Debian Sarge (HowtoForge)

Falko Timme shows how to backup a MySQL database with mysql-zrm. "This guide describes how to back up and recover your MySQL databases with mysql-zrm on a Debian Sarge system. mysql-zrm is short for Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, it is a new tool that lets you create full logical or raw backups of your databases (regardless of your storage engine and MySQL configuration), generate reports about the backups, verify the integrity of the backups, and recover your databases. It can also send email notifcations about the backup status, and you can implement multiple backup policies (based on your applications and based on time (e.g. daily, weekly, etc.))."

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LDAP Series Part II - Netscape Directory Server (Linux Journal)

Tom Adelstein takes a look at the Fedora Directory Server. "If you wander on over to the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server. This isn't your older brother's directory server. Aside from open sourcing the Netscape server, you'll find an abundance of documentation to help you learn and operate a stellar product."

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Linux Gazette #131

The October issue of Linux Gazette is out. In addition to the usual features you'll find the following articles: Apache2, WebDAV, SSL and MySQL: Life In The Fast Lane, Sharp does it once again: the SL-C3200, Ogg, WAV, and MP3, On Qmail, Forged Mail, and SPF Records, Songs in the Key of Tux: KGuitar and SVN Hackery: Versioning Your Linux Configuration.

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Attack of the Pod Penguins 3: Sampling, quality, and bitrates (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld looks at Audacity. "Last month, we described the open source audio editing application Audacity as the 16-ounce framing hammer of podcast creation and editing. This month, we'll take a deeper look into Audacity, familiarizing you a bit more with the interface and some of the more esoteric but useful features of the application."

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Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices covers the Dillo project. "A project to create an ultra-lightweight web browser for use in embedded devices and other resource-constrained hardware has issued a plea for financial help. The Dillo Project says it needs to find a corporate sponsor in order to add anti-aliased text, CSS, Javascript, and internationalization/localization support." (Thanks to Alan Carvalho de Assis)

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Kamaelia 0.5.0 Released! (Ryan's Development Blog)

Ryan looks at some new code in Kamaelia 0.5.0. "Kamaelia is an intuitive way to structure applications -- as a network of components which message each other. Much like Unix pipes implemented in Python. It was originally designed by BBC Research for rapid development of server software."

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Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com)

Linux.com has reviewed three open source messaging servers. "This week on Linux.com we reviewed Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, three of the highest-profile open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. All of them have their defects, and all three offer commercial versions that make installation and maintenance easier than it is for their open source versions. We've also talked to marketing people from all three companies, and while they all talk about growing sales and a rosy future, it's obvious from the reader comments attached to the reviews of their products that none of them is an immediate threat to Microsoft's domination of the corporate messaging server market. But on the other hand, each one of these products has at least one or two features that Microsoft Exchange lacks."

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Google's Tesseract OCR engine is a quantum leap forward (Linux.com)

Nathan Willis looks at the Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine on Linux.com. "The Tesseract code was written at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s and '90s. In 1995, it was one of the top-tier performers at UNLV's OCR competition, but when HP withdrew from the OCR software marketplace, the code languished. Then in 2005, HP handed off the code to UNLV's Information Science Research Institute (ISRI), an academic center doing ongoing research into OCR and related topics. ISRI discovered that original Tesseract developer Ray Smith was now an employee at Google, and asked the search engine giant if it was interested in the code. Google spent a few months updating the code to compile on modern operating systems, and released it on SourceForge.net."

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Google's Summer of Code wraps for 2006 (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld looks at the software from this year's Summer of Code. "The 2006 season of the Google's $3 million open source student development program is drawing to a close, with some of the resulting software already released as part of widely used open source projects. A total of 630 student developers from 90 countries took on software projects for 102 different open source projects as part of Google's "Summer of Code", said Leslie Hawthorn, the project coordinator."

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Debian's in fine health? (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch ponders the fate of the Debian distribution. "After my recent story asking the question, "Is Debian Dying?" I received several email messages. By far the best of them was by C. J. Fearnley, CEO of LinuxForce Inc., a Linux service provider, and a long-time Debian developer. Here's what Fearnley had to say in defense of Debian: You are correct that Debian infighting is not an isolated incident, but your interpretation that Debian may be dying is way off the mark. From my perspective as a practitioner, philosopher, design science revolutionary, a Debian user and a Debian volunteer for over 10 years, my interpretation of the "infighting" is that it reveals, to the careful observer, Debian's strengths and not its weakness!"

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Mambo and Joomla: One year on (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at Mambo and Joomla. "In August 2005 Mambo, one of open source's poster child content management systems (CMS), was involved in a bitter duel with its core developers, who forked the project to give birth to Joomla. Could the developers survive without the management? Could Mambo do without its developers? Surprisingly, both projects today are doing pretty well. Here's a look at the projects' history, developer relations, community-building, and future prospects."

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