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LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 8, 2007Bitfrost: the OLPC security modelThe One Laptop Per Child platform was always going to present some interesting security challenges. Millions of identical, network-attached systems will be deployed into some remote parts of the world, where they will be managed by people who are not security experts. The systems will be obvious targets for theft, self-propagating malware, and the creation of botnets. None of these activities feature highly on the OLPC project's list of educational objectives, so it stands to reason that some significant thought needs to go into how to prevent them.The person charged with the OLPC's security thinking is Ivan Krstić. The initial results of his work, done with help from Simson Garfinkel, have now been posted with a request for comments. Ivan and company have come up with a platform named "Bitfrost," which, it is hoped, will keep OLPC systems out of trouble and available for their owners. At this point, there is quite a bit of information on what Bitfrost will do, but very little on how it will be implemented. After an introduction on the shortcomings of the traditional Unix file permissions model, the Bitfrost specification gets into the overriding principles and goals. The principles are consistent with the approach the OLPC project has taken so far: security cannot depend on hardware or software design secrets, it must be possible for users to gain complete control over the system, security cannot depend on the user being able to read, and the security mechanism must be unobtrusive. "Unobtrusive" does not mean that security won't ever get in the way; instead, it means that the user will not be pestered by popups with security-related questions. The associated goals include no user passwords, no unencrypted authentication, a system which is secure when it is first powered on, a very limited use of public-key encryption infrastructure, and no permanent data loss. The process starts at manufacturing time, when each laptop will be equipped with unique, randomly-generated serial and UUID numbers. The laptop starts out in a non-functional, deactivated state; making it work involves the use of a special activation key generated from the serial number and UUID. The customer countries will have lists of serial and UUID numbers; from those it will be able to create the activation keys. The plan is for these keys to be generated in small batches and shipped, on a USB key, to the destination schools. Once installed on a server there, the keys can be used to enable the laptops sent specifically to that school. The purpose here is to deter thieves who would grab pallets of laptops; without the activation keys, those laptops would only be useful as spare parts. There is an interesting step which happens once a laptop is activated and booted:
On first boot, a program is run that asks the child for their name,
takes their picture, and in the background generates an ECC key
pair. The key pair is initially not protected by a passphrase, and
is then used to sign the child's name and picture. This information
and the signature are the child's 'digital identity'.
The laptop transmits the (SN, UUID, digital identity) tuple to the activation server. The mapping between a laptop and the user's identity is maintained by the country or regional authority for anti-theft purposes, but never reaches OLPC. The ability to locate the proper owner of an OLPC system has obvious advantages; it should help to keep each laptop in the proper set of small hands. On the other hand, the potential for a repressive government to misuse this data seems real; it would be sad if the OLPC systems could not be used for truly free communications without fear about who might be listening. At the BIOS level, security will be handled as described in this LWN article from last August. The BIOS will only be rewritable when the new image has been signed with a special cryptographic key. There will be "developer keys" available which will enable a laptop's owner to reflash the BIOS, but, in general, the children will not have that functionality available to them. At the Linux level, security will be handled through a set of privileges assigned to each installed program. Privileges look much like Linux capabilities, but they are not capabilities; they are a new layer of protections which will be implemented via some other means. Some of the expected privileges will include:
In addition, every program will be run in an isolated mode:
A program on the XO starts in a fortified chroot, akin to a BSD
jail, where its visible filesystem root is only its own constrained
scratch space. It normally has no access to system paths such as
/proc or /sys, cannot see other programs on the system or their
scratch spaces, and only the libraries it needs are mapped into its
scratch space. It cannot access user documents directly, but only
through the file store service, explained in the next section.
Again, details on just how the sandbox will be implemented are scarce for now - though your editor has heard from Mr. Krstić that it will be based on Linux-VServer. The "file store service" is described as a sort of object-oriented database for documents, "similar in very broad terms to the Microsoft WinFS design". All access to files from programs goes by way of a user dialog; there should be no way for a program to modify files outside of its own scratch area without the user knowing about it. There is also an optional anti-theft mechanism:
It works by running, as a privileged process that cannot be
disabled or terminated even by the root user, an anti-theft daemon
which detects Internet access, and performs a call-home request --
no more than once a day -- to the country's anti-theft servers. In
so doing, it is able to securely use NTP to set the machine RTC to
the current time, and then obtain a cryptographic lease to keep
running for some amount of time, e.g. 21 days. The lease duration
is controlled by each country.
If a machine has been reported as stolen, the "anti-theft server" will instruct it to shut down hard and go back into the deactivated state. The same thing will happen eventually if the stolen system is kept isolated from the net. This mechanism should help to deter thefts; one can only hope that it is sufficiently well designed that nobody figures out how to trigger it as a denial of service attack. The phone-home feature can be disabled - but only in the presence of a developer key. One feature which will not be built into the laptops is filesystem encryption. The CPU in the OLPC XO laptop is simply too slow to perform that task without bogging down the system entirely. This issue will be reconsidered in the future. The OLPC developers have also explicitly decided to stay out of the content-filtering business. In summary, the security model developers have this to say:
[W]e believe we've imbued the OLPC security system with cunning and
more magic art than other similar works of craftmanship -- but not
for a second do we believe we've designed something that cannot be
broken when talented, determined and resourceful attackers go forth
harrying. Indeed, this was not the goal. The goal was to
significantly raise the bar from the current, deeply
unsatisfactory, state of desktop security.
If the implementation lives up to the specification, chances are that the project will have achieved that goal. The OLPC platform is an ambitious experiment from beginning to end, and its developers have, once again, not wasted the opportunity to do something interesting with it. If the security ideas incorporated into the OLPC systems work out as desired, it would not be surprising to see at least some of them adopted by other desktop environments. This could be another case where the OLPC project creates benefits for a large group of people beyond its immediate target.
Comparing Linux and MinixToward the end of his linux.conf.au talk, Andrew Tannenbaum put up a few slides on the runtime cost of the microkernel approach. He had quite a few benchmarks, but the bottom line was that the microkernel architecture used in Minix imposed a roughly 5-10% performance penalty, depending on what one is trying to do. While operating systems hackers would normally cringe at the prospect of paying a 5% penalty, to many people this could seem like a good deal: give up 5-10% of a processor which is mostly idle anyway in exchange for a more reliable system.In truth, neither the claim of a 5-10% penalty nor that of higher reliability has been proved in any definitive way. At the conference, a number of attendees questioned the way in which the benchmarks had been done, suspecting that Minix had been benchmarked against a monolithic version of itself. If that is the case, the benchmarks will capture the context switching costs but will have nothing to say about the costs of the message-passing architecture. To get a true measure of the penalty of the microkernel architecture, it was suggested, one should benchmark Minix against Linux. As it turns out, the linux.conf.au swag bag contained a CD with Minix 3.1.2a on it; one might almost think the organizers had this sort of test in mind. So your editor came home with the intention of installing that version of Minix and doing a bit of benchmarking. That job has now been done, and we can talk about how Minix and Linux compare. Time for a brief digression: once, some years ago, your editor actually had a spare moment in which to see how nethack was coming along. One must stay on top of all the important development projects, after all. The graphics have improved, the game contained more monsters than ever, etc. But there is an especially amusing moment when one drops into a level and is informed of a sense of having entered a more primitive place. The graphics on that level are straight from VAX-era rogue, and the whole thing feels rough and, well, primitive. A similar feeling will come over a Linux user who tries to get things done on a Minix system. It is a POSIX-like environment, and it has a working version of the X Window system (but don't go in expecting GNOME or KDE), but that's as far as it goes. The shell is painful to use, many commands are missing, and one runs into obstacles on every path. Since Minix does not really do paging, memory quickly runs out if too many processes are run; your editor had not seen the old "not enough core" message in quite some time. One of the harder things to do on Minix, it turns out, is to build any sort of non-trivial software package - even after figuring out that the default C compiler is crippled but gcc can be found under /usr/gnu. As a result, your editor had to give up on most of his attempts to build current benchmarks; they just would not compile on Minix. In the end, your editor succeeded in building and running two benchmark programs: IOtest and UnixBench. Neither seems to be recent enough to have a currently-maintained web page. IOtest is a disk exerciser, evidently intended originally as a tool for driver developers. It's useful for exercising drives in a serious way; it also produces performance numbers on the side. UnixBench was developed by Byte in the 1990's, and hasn't seen a whole lot of work since. It remains, however, a useful way to get a snapshot of the relative speeds of many operating system functions. The benchmarks were run on an AMD Athlon 1700 system using an unremarkable ATA disk. There are three partitions on the disk: one for the operating system, one for swap (Linux only, since Minix does not support it), and one for destructive disk tests. The partitioning was not changed between the installations. Minix does not support partitions larger than 4GB (who could ever need more than that?) so the disk tests were restricted to 4GB on both systems. The Minix tests were done on a full installation of Minix 3.1.2a; the Linux side was represented by a late-September Debian Etch snapshot running a 2.6.17 kernel.
Comparable results would be expected with a benchmark like this, since it will be dominated by the drive's seek performance. The portion of the disk being exercised (only 4GB, remember) was not enough to demonstrate a difference in I/O scheduler implementations. The disk never comes near its peak I/O rate. So the main conclusion to draw from these results is that Minix does not get terribly in the way.
One can argue that Minix is a new and unfinished system which has not, yet, had the benefit of a great deal of performance tuning. There is doubtless some merit to that claim; the Minix folks will probably find a number of ways to make things faster. On the other hand, it would not be unreasonable to argue that Linux, by supporting much greater functionality on a far wider range of hardware, has every right to be slower - but it's not. Linux is quite a bit faster; the Minix folks certainly ran benchmarks which showed a 5-10% difference, but they were not benchmarking against Linux. Dr. Tanenbaum made the claim that only a computer geek would accept better performance if that trade brought with it lower reliability. By that reasoning, it doesn't matter that Minix is much slower than Linux on the same hardware; Minix is aiming for a different goal. But people do care about performance; the fact that Dr. Tanenbaum felt the need to put up benchmark results suggests that he cares too. Trading some performance for reliability could well be a good deal. When one compares Minix (in its current state) to Linux, however, the performance difference is large, and the increased reliability is unproven.
Reader survey followupLast week's reader survey drew just about 1000 responses - approximately 25% of our entire subscriber base. We appreciate the time you all took to tell us what you think about LWN. Fully digesting the responses will take some time, but there are a few things which jump out quickly.About 90% of those who responded were individual subscribers. As it happens, almost 25% of LWN subscribers get their access through group subscriptions, but fewer of them took the time to respond. Perhaps people on group subscriptions tend to be more busy, or perhaps fewer of them follow LWN every week. In any case, the opinions of group subscribers were somewhat underrepresented. A full 50% of the responses came from Europe, compared to 39% from North America and 5% from Australia and New Zealand. It has been a while since we had accurate statistics of where our readers are coming from - the current LWN server isn't up to the task of recording all that information. Once upon a time, North Americans and Europeans made up approximately equal parts of our reader base. It would be interesting if the Europeans have now pulled ahead. There were few surprises in the responses on which parts of LWN readers enjoy the most. It seems maybe we'll have to keep the Kernel Page after all. Seriously, though, the most interesting result may have been the relatively low scores given to the weekly Announcements Page. One of the things we have noticed over the years is that a surprising number of items from that page end up being mentioned in the annual LWN timeline feature. Important stuff goes on that page, but it is currently set up as a sort of dumping ground at the very end of the Weekly Edition. Some changes may be called for there. Quite a few readers were surprised to discover the index of kernel articles. The index was prominently announced on the Kernel Page when it was created, and it's linked at the top of the kernel subsection page. But, clearly, it is not easy enough for people to find. More generally, a number of respondents suggested that the time has come for a site redesign. Trust us, we know that. The current design is mostly unchanged since its unveiling in June, 2002, but it really dates back to January, 1998, when LWN first hit the net. Our purpose was to create a clean, easy-to-read, text-oriented site, and the result has served us well for some time. But it is definitely time to rethink things. That will be a slow process, however. Complaining about comment quality has been a popular activity in recent times, but there was not a great deal of interest in either of the proposed comment filtering mechanisms. A few readers really do want a blacklisting capability, though. Instead, there were a number of requests for a feature which would highlight comments posted to an article since the last time one looked. Both blacklisting and highlighting (and many other potential features) run into one practical problem: the single 1300 MHz Duron processor which runs the entire LWN site is already feeling a little stressed. The more complicated content - weekly edition pages, long comment trees, etc. - is aggressively pregenerated and cached; adding per-user rendering would defeat that caching and force those pages to be rendered on the fly. For various reasons, upgrading the server involves far more expense than just buying a new box. The day when we have to make that leap is coming, though. There was a suggestion that the entire LWN archive be closed to non-subscribers. That is not a step we expect to take. Closing the archive would make LWN disappear from the net for all practical purposes, with little in the way of expected benefit. It is also very much our goal to increase the amount of useful information available to the community as a whole, and that runs counter to the idea of a closed archive. For those who called for more Grumpy Editor articles: you have been heard. Those articles are a lot of work, and times have been busy, which is why they have been relatively scarce recently. There are a couple of topics queued up, however, so expect the Grumpy Editor to make another appearance here before too long. In summary: the information you have provided is useful - we are most grateful. We will be looking at it closely as we ponder changes to LWN to help make it more successful in the future. What will not change, however, is our commitment to high-quality writing and high-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community from within.
Security SLIDE into SELinux policy developmentComplaints about SELinux often center around its overall complexity and the difficulty in developing policies for applications that run on the system. The SELinux Policy IDE (SLIDE) is an Eclipse plug-in that provides a framework for developing and testing policies that should help reduce some of these problems. SELinux is a security framework that uses the Linux Security Module (LSM) kernel interface to implement mandatory access control (MAC) mechanism. MAC controls the capabilities that a particular process can have based on the policies installed by the administrator. Those policies govern much more than traditional UNIX-style permissions and for that reason can be difficult to generate and especially to test. Readers of this page will remember an overview that covers a bit more detail about SELinux internals. SLIDE is an effort to ease the process of developing policies with an eye towards applications and daemons that have policy support. To do that, it uses the popular Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) as a way to organize and control policy development. It provides all of the expected capabilities within Eclipse: syntax highlighting, auto-completion, integrated searching, etc. One of the biggest hurdles that developers face is keeping track of the various interfaces, types, roles, and modules and how they interact; SLIDE organizes and indexes them, along with their comments, and makes that available in a nice GUI. The testing features are particularly useful; one can set up a remote machine (or local virtual machine) that can accept policy updates from SLIDE. Once the updates have been accepted, various tests can be kicked off on the remote machine and the audit log can be monitored to determine whether the policies covered all of the required resources. If not, the policy can be modified in SLIDE, pushed out to the remote machine and tested again. SLIDE is a project of Tresys Technology, which has released it under the GPL. It does not appear to have attracted much of a development community, at least yet and the SourceForge project page has not been updated in quite some time. The documentation and trac site provided by Tresys are excellent. Perhaps the SourceForge project was an attempt to enlist community aid which did not attract the level of interest that they might have hoped for. It is a fairly esoteric subject that does not cause too many open source developers to itch. Many of those developers, perhaps, simply turn SELinux off. As with most complex tools, SLIDE will not be terribly helpful to those who know little about SELinux policies. It has a steep learning curve even if you have a bit of that background, but for experts it is probably quite intuitive. For those reasons, it probably will not help other projects to generate policies for their software. In order to foster more applications with SELinux policies, it is likely that experts in policy development will have to join forces with these other projects to produce and maintain the policies. Using SLIDE will likely speed up that process and it is a welcome addition to a fairly sparse toolkit.
New vulnerabilities bcfg2: local password disclosure
gd: buffer overflow
kdelibs: cross-site scripting
mpg123: denial of service
postgresql: insufficient verification
samba: several vulnerabilities
thttpd: remote file access
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
Updated vulnerabilities acroread: multiple vulnerabilities
apache: cross-site scripting
bind: denial of service
bind: denial of service
bluez-utils: hidd vulnerability
bugzilla: multiple vulnerabilities
busybox: insecure password generation
cpio: arbitrary code execution
vixie-cron: privilege escalation
cscope: buffer overflows
cscope: buffer overflows
cvstrac: denial of service
Cyrus-SASL: DIGEST-MD5 Pre-Authentication Denial of Service
dbus: denial of service
dovecot: index cache file handling error
elinks: arbitrary file access
fetchmail: password disclosure and DOS
ffmpeg: buffer overflows
Mozilla stuff: multiple vulnerabilities
freeradius: several vulnerabilities
freetype: integer overflows
ftpd: privilege escalation
gcc: file overwrite vulnerability
gdb: buffer overflow
gdm: improper file permissions
gedit: format string vulnerability
gnupg: stack overwrite
grip: buffer overflow
gtk2: denial of service
gv: stack-based buffer overflow
gzip: multiple vulnerabilities
horde-kronolith: local file inclusion
imagemagick: buffer overflows
ImageMagick: buffer overflows
imlib2: arbitrary code execution
java: multiple vulnerabilities
kdelibs: integer overflow
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kdenetwork: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service by memory consumption
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
koffice: integer overflow
krb5: uninitialized pointers
krb5: local privilege escalation
libgadu: memory alignment bug
libgtop2: buffer overflow
libmodplug: boundary errors
libpng: buffer overflow
libpng: heap based buffer overflow
libtiff: buffer overflow
libvncserver: authentication bypass
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
lynx: arbitrary command execution
mysql: format string bug
MySQL: privilege violations
MySQL: logging bypass
nbd: arbitrary code execution
ncompress: buffer underflow
openldap: security bypass
OpenSSH: denial of service
openssh: privilege separation issue
openssh: remote denial of service
php: several vulnerabilities
php: buffer overflows
phpbb2: missing input sanitizing
phpbb2: multiple vulnerabilities
postgresql: SQL injection
proftpd: stack-based buffer overflow
quake: buffer overflow
rmake: privilege escalation
rpm: arbitrary code execution
shadow-utils: mailbox creation vulnerability
squirrelmail: multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
ulogd: buffer overflow
unzip: long file name buffer overflow
w3c-libwww: possible stack overflow
xine: format string vulnerabilities
xine-lib: buffer overflow
xine-lib: buffer overflow
xinit: race condition
X.org: local privilege escalations
X.org: integer overflows
xpdf: buffer overflow
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.20, released by Linus on February 4, otherwise known as Super Kernel Sunday. There's a bunch of new stuff in 2.6.20, including paravirt_ops and KVM, lots of new drivers (including your editor's OLPC camera controller driver), the UDP-Lite protocol, Playstation 3 support, and more. See the short-form changelog for details, the long-format changelog for more details, the LWN 2.6 API changes page for a summary of internal API differences, or the KernelNewbies Linux Changes page for lots more information.The patches for the 2.6.21 merge have just begun to find their way into the mainline git repository as of this writing. A number of architecture updates have been merged, along with a GFS2 patch set. There have been no -mm tree releases over the last week. For older kernels: 2.6.19.3 was released on February 5. It contains quite a long list of fixes. The -stable team had originally intended not to release any more 2.6.18 updates. It seems that there are some fixes for that kernel which are worth distributing, however, so one more 2.6.18.x release can be expected in the near future. Adrian Bunk has released 2.6.16.40-rc1 with a relatively small number of fixes. For 2.4 users, Willy Tarreau has released 2.4.34.1 with only three patches.
Kernel development news Quote of the week
Pretty simple: you read the largely-useless changelog then call the
bravely uncommented blk_plug_current() when you're about to submit
some IO and you call the audaciously uncommented
blk_unplug_current() when you've finished and you're ready to let
it rip.
Kernel fibrillationLast week's article on fibrils caught the discussion in a relatively early state. That discussion is still in an early state, but some interesting ground has been covered. Here, we'll catch up on a few themes from that conversation.Alan Cox has requested that the "fibril" name be dumped:
The constructs Zach is using appear to be identical to co-routines,
and they've been called that in computer science literature for
fifty years. They are one of the great and somehow forgotten ideas.
Alan also points out that a number of hazards lie between the current state of the fibril patch and anything robust enough for the mainline kernel - but everybody involved already knew that. Linus acknowledges the similarities with coroutines, but also maintains that they are sufficiently different to merit their own name. A full coroutine implementation in the kernel, he says, would be impractical. Linus has also responded to Ingo Molnar's criticisms of the fibril concept. He maintains that the real benefits to fibrils are (1) the elimination of the separate code paths currently associated with asynchronous I/O, and (2) reductions in setup and teardown costs. The latter is significant, he says, because the bulk of asynchronous operations can actually be satisfied from cache; being able to run those operations without going through the full AIO setup would be a big win. Ingo has clarified his comments somewhat. The stumbling point seems to be the addition of a new scheduling concept which, he thinks, is not necessary. He has proposed alternatives which take the form of a pool of kernel threads; rather than create a fibril, a blocking system call could simply switch to another kernel thread which is there waiting for just that occasion. Ingo believes that kernel threads perform well enough to handle this task, and they could be made lighter; in addition, the use of kernel threads would allow asynchronous calls to spread across a multi-CPU system. Fibrils, instead, are currently limited to a single processor. Zach Brown, the creator of the fibril patchset, seems to think that the idea is at least worth a try. Linus, instead, has said that any adaptation of kernel threads to this task would end up looking a lot like fibrils anyway. Rather than bear the expense of keeping a (potentially large) pool of kernel threads around, one might as well just create a truly lightweight object - a fibril. Some discussion of the eventual user-space API has occurred. Linus has suggested that the asynchronous submission call look something like this:
long async_submit(unsigned long flags, long *result_pointer,
long syscall_number, unsigned long *args);
The role of the flags argument has not really been discussed; one just assumes such an argument will be necessary, sooner or later. The result_pointer argument tells the kernel where to put the result of the operation. Interestingly, the result code would follow the in-kernel conventions: zero for success or a negative error code for failure. While the operation is outstanding, the kernel would store a positive "cookie" value which could be used by the application to wait for (or cancel) the call. The wait_for_async() system call remains for applications wanting to get the completion status of their asynchronous operations. There have been a couple of requests, however, for a mechanism by which applications could obtain completion status without having to go back into the kernel. That inspired David Miller to complain about a big part of the conversation which is not happening: the integration with the kevent patches. Much of the kevent work has been aimed at solving just this problem, but Evgeniy Polyakov continues to have trouble getting people to look at it. To a great extent, wait_for_async() is another event interface. It seems unlikely that the kernel needs two of them. What does all this work bode for the existing asynchronous I/O interface, and, in particular, the buffered filesystem AIO patches which have not yet been merged? Seeking to fend off doubt about the future of that interface, Suparna Bhattacharya has argued that the buffered AIO patches should still be merged:
Since this is going to be a new interface, not the existing linux
AIO interface, I do not see any conflict between the two. Samba4
already uses fsaio, and we now have the ability to do POSIX AIO
over kernel AIO (which depends on fsaio). The more we delay real
world usage the longer we take to learn about the application
patterns that matter. And it is those patterns that are key.
Decision time will be soon, since the buffered AIO patches seem to be ready for merging into 2.6.21. Over the next couple of weeks, somebody will have to decide whether to merge those patches - and maintain them indefinitely - or hold off with the idea that fibrils will evolve into the preferred solution. Finally, Bert Hubert noted that DragonFly BSD had an asynchronous system call interface - until last July, when the developers pulled it out. DragonFly had created two system calls - sendsys2() and waitsys2() - which split up the tasks of initiating a system call and waiting for its completion. A followup suggests that DragonFly BSD had taken a different approach, requiring that every system call have asynchronous support built into it. In that sense, their asynchronous interface looked like a more general version of Linux AIO. Pushing asynchronous support down into system calls, filesystems, and device drivers brings a lot of complexity; the slow progress of Linux AIO illustrates just how hard it can be. One of the major advantages of the fibril idea is that (with few exceptions) the system calls do not have to be changed; they do not need to be aware of asynchronous operation at all. The ability to pull asynchronous support into a relatively small chunk of core kernel code may be the key idea that sells the entire fibril concept.
Review: Linux Kernel in a NutshellOnce upon a time, the ability to download, compile, and install a new kernel was a vital skill for any Linux system administrator. That skill is less in demand now; the kernels shipped with most distributions tend to be adequate for most needs. Still, there comes a time, even for those who do not hack on the kernel itself, when a system needs a custom kernel. Many system administration books devote a bit of space to this task, but they
tend to pass over it fairly quickly. Configuring, building, and installing
a kernel remains a relatively dark art for many.
Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman decided to do something about it; the result is Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, published by O'Reilly. By the standards of other kernel books from that publisher, this is a thin volume indeed: just over 180 pages, including the index. But it is packed with information that should be useful to just about anybody who has to deal with the kernels on their systems. The early chapters cover some of the basics: what tools are required, where to get the kernel source, etc. There is a chapter on the various ways of configuring a kernel. Your editor remembers the days of configuring kernels by stepping through the entire "make config" process; it's nice to see Greg recommending against that approach now. The build process is discussed, as are the necessary steps for installing the kernel once it's built. The second major part of the book discusses customizations - in particular, enabling support for a device. The process for determining which driver should be enabled for a specific device is distressingly hairy; it involves listing out the PCI bus configuration, digging through sysfs, then trying to find a match in the kernel source. It's not for nothing that Greg says:
The easiest way to figure out which driver controls a new device is
to build all of the different drivers of that type in the kernel
source tree as modules, and let the udev startup process match the
driver to the device.
As they say, there really should be a better way. But one can't fault Greg for telling it like it is. Next there is a set of "kernel configuration recipes" for enabling specific behavior. The advice here is terse, sometimes to a fault. The discussion on enabling kernel preemption, for example, could have benefited from a mention of the reliability concerns which have kept most distributors from turning preemption on. Similarly, it talks about how to enable SELinux with no mention of the need for an accompanying policy loaded from user space. The audience for this book seems likely to include quite a few people from the "know just enough to hurt themselves" population; a few more hints might have proved most helpful to those readers. The final section, making up almost half of the book, is devoted to reference material. There is an extensive list of kernel command line parameters and what they do - though the treatment is, once again, terse. There is a useful chapter on the various make targets and options for the kernel; somehow your editor had managed to avoid learning about make randconfig until now. There is also a reference chapter for configuration options. This chapter is incomplete, however, and the options do not appear to be listed in any particular order. Minor grumbles aside, there is value in this book's conciseness. When faced with a question about kernel configuring, building, or booting, this book is likely to yield an answer without forcing the reader to search for a needle in an 800-page haystack. It covers an area which was very much in need of some improved documentation; it is also reasonably up to date, having been written for the 2.6.18 kernel. Happily, Greg has made the book available online. Overall, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a more than welcome addition to your editor's bookshelf.
Priority-Boosting RCU Read-Side Critical Sections
The RCU implementation for the -rt patchset is unusual in that it permits read-side critical sections to be blocked waiting for locks and due to preemption. If these critical sections are blocked for too long, grace periods will be stalled, and the amount of memory awaiting the end of a grace period will continually increase, eventually resulting in an out-of-memory condition. This theoretical possibility was apparent from the start, but when Trevor Woerner actually made it happen, it was clear that something needed to be done. Because priority boosting is used in locking, it seemed natural to apply it to realtime RCU. Unfortunately, the priority-boosting algorithm used for locking could not be applied straightforwardly to RCU because this algorithm uses locking, and the whole point of RCU is to avoid common-case use of such heavy-weight operations in read-side primitives. In fact, RCU's read-side primitives need to avoid common-case use of all heavyweight operations, including atomic instructions, memory barriers, and cache misses. Therefore, bringing priority boosting to RCU turned out to be rather challenging, not because the eventual solution is all that complicated, but rather due to the large number of seductive but subtly wrong almost-solutions. This document describes a way of providing light-weight priority boosting to RCU, and also describes several of the number of seductive but subtly wrong almost-solutions.
ApproachesThis paper describes three approaches to priority-boosting blocked RCU read-side critical sections. The first approach minimizes scheduler-path overhead and uses locking on non-fastpaths to decrease complexity. The second approach is similar to the first, and was in fact a higher-complexity intermediate point on the path to the first approach. The third approach uses a per-task lock solely for its priority-inheritance properties, which introduces the overhead of acquiring this lock into the scheduler path, but avoids adding an "RCU boost" component to the priority calculations. Unfortunately, this third approach also cannot be made to reliably boost tasks blocked in RCU read-side critical sections, so the first approach should be used to the exclusion of the other two. Each of these approaches is described in a following section, after which is a section enumerating other roads not taken. [ Editor's note: this article is long - but worth the read. Please go to the full article text to learn more about this technique.]
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials Does Debian need a Social Committee?The idea of a "Social Committee" came up during a private discussion. With about 1,000 active developers the Debian project has grown to a size where a lot of problems are expected to happen. As an international project, Debian people originate from different countries and have different social backgrounds which may contribute to some problems.Josip Rodin proposed to establish a "Social Committee" within the Debian project, a term Andreas Tille coined. Such a committee would try to resolve or mitigate conflicts between various members of the Debian project which are not of a technical matter. For the latter, the "Technical Committee" has developed the Debian policy manual. According to Josip, the mere existence of such a committee would already indicate a major change in the thinking of Debian developers. In fact, many developers have evolved into strong personalities. It's good to have self-confident people maintain important packages and infrastructure, but it is not always helpful when dealing with different opinions or even conflicts. Social conflicts could emerge when two developers get in dispute over a bug report or a discussion and don't seem to accept the other person's opinion. On mailing lists, a participant could demonstrate difficult behavior when communicating with other people. This could be a situation where mitigation is required. When teams inside the Debian project cause non-technical problems with other groups, or with the general developer body, the "Social Committee" could be called for help. Josip outlined how such a committee could work. First, it would have to agree on its own charter, similar to other groups within the Debian project. Once established, the committee would become active only upon request by other developers or mailing list participants, just like the Technical Committee. The social committee would delegate certain tasks such as monitoring mailing lists and teams inside the project. The developers acting as delegates would have a bit more authority to talk about problems than the average member of the groups they're sent to. However, they may need to earn this authority or respect first, by monitoring the discussions and ensuring that all problems are addressed and no complaints go unresolved. Manoj Srivastava, leader of the Technical Committee, questioned this proposal, however. He noted that all social problems are very much subjective. Participants come from a variety of cultures and may recognize interaction with others differently. Often they come with different norms and metrics which could make solving conflicts difficult for a neutral third party. In response, Lars Wirzenius, countered with the suggestion to develop social and cultural norms for the entire project first, based on what all developers could agree to. After all, members of the Debian project all agree on certain aspects, which could be summarized, just like the project's technical policy. Currently, it is not clear which powers such a committee could use to enforce a social policy, due to the nature of the Debian project. Its members are volunteers and not employees on a company's payroll. Hence, adding pressure to people could become an interesting exercise. While the "Social Committee" will become active only upon special request, it can also only exercise selective enforcement which might be interpreted as unfair. The same behavior by other people on the same mailing list may be tolerated. If there is something resembling a discussion culture in the Debian project, it's most probably a very tough one. Some list participants usually put on armored pants when discussing controversial issues on the lists. Debian people are known for raising their voices loudly. This is not limited to Debian developers, though. However, it's surely a detail that drives away interested people when they accidentally find themselves in the middle of a flame war. It happens every now and then that discussions on mailing lists end up as flame wars of one sort or another. One side pretends to know what another participant thinks and their words get interpreted in a way that was not intended. This is often followed by smearing and more smearing, soon the entire discussion becomes totally useless and only eats up bandwidth and disk space. Because of this behavior, a "Social Committee" or at least a mildly enforced charter for Debian lists is due. For several years the Debian code of conduct has asked participants not to use foul language and not to flame. However, the number of discussions that have been turned into flame wars has rather increased recently. The code of conduct for the Ubuntu community covers the behavior of its members in any forum, mailing list, wiki, web site, IRC channel, install-fest, public meeting or private correspondence. The Ubuntu Community Council will arbitrate in any dispute over the conduct of a member of the community. The number of flame wars in this community demonstrates at least that it is possible to limit them to a minimum. Several responses in the discussion on the "Social Committee" for the Debian project indicate a strong interest in this, and a desire to improve the climate. However, some developers are skeptical both on the establishment of such a committee and its potential exercise of power. In the meantime Gustavo Franco started to build an ombudsman team that will improve several social issues.
New Releases Announcing Fedora 7 Test 1The first test release for the upcoming Fedora 7 distribution is now available; click below for details and download instructions. More information on what's in Fedora 7 can be found on this page.
Ubuntu Herd 3 releasedThe third Feisty Fawn herd CD is available for testing, in Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu flavors.
BLFS 6.2.0-rc1 ReleasedBeyond Linux From Scratch has announced the first release candidate for version 6.2.0.
Distribution News Get Involved! Second openSUSE community meetingThe second openSUSE community meeting is scheduled for February 11, 2007 20:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net #opensuse-project "This is the second ever community meeting taking place, and it is run by openSUSE Community members who are not employed by Novell/SUSE."
Ubuntu Feisty feature freeze imminentThe feature freeze for Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn main repository is scheduled for February 8, 2007. The feature freeze for Universe starts on February 22, 2007. The first beta is expected March 22, 2007.
Confirmation of the MOTU CouncilA council is being formed to oversee Ubuntu's Masters of the Universe. The first council members have been nominated. The council will help find a consensus and have have a final say in conflicts. It will also approve new MOTUs and organize MOTU efforts.
Announcing FUDCon Brussels2007There will be a FUDCon in Brussels at the Free and Open Source Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels Belgium. If you are at FOSDEM stop by room H2214 for FUDCon.
Unofficial Fedora FAQ Updated for Fedora Core 6!The unofficial Fedora FAQ has been updated for Fedora Core 6. Click below for a quick look at the updates.
Debian announcementsIt is time once again for Debian Project Leader Elections. Here's the first call for nominations.Testing is underway on the second release candidate of the Debian Installer. Daily images are built using the 2.6.18-4 kernel packages. Here's a status report on the Debian GNU/FreeBSD port. This port consists of two architectures: kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. "Currently we have reasonable subset of Etch packages, but the number of unmerged patches is still too high. So doing real Etch release looks difficult. Instead, we plan to release snapshot of sid in time of Etch release for both kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64." debian.ch is a non-profit organization formed to represent, hold assets for and further the Debian project in Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein. Anthony Towns has sent out this announcment encouraging more meetings between Debian developers.
Distribution Newsletters Fedora Weekly News Issue 76The Fedora Weekly News for February 5, 2007 looks at Announcing Fedora 7 Test 1 (6.90), Congratulations and thank you, Smolt: Fedora Hardware Profiler, Fedora Package Database 0.1, Fedora LiveCD 7 Test 1 Preview, First test of Fedora 7 released, Fedora's metrics have ripple effect and several other articles.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for January 29, 2007 covers Xfce 4.4 released, Second anniversary of Gentoo Forum Netherlands and several other topics.
Ulteo at SCALE5X! +other newsThe second issue of the Ulteo newsletter covers Ulteo at SCALE 5X, a follow-up on the Connected Desktop which will be demoed at SCALE, plus the latest news from the development team, and more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 188The DistroWatch Weekly for February 5, 2007 is out. "As usual, this week's issue focuses on a variety of distributions and topics. We'll start with a frightening financial analysis of Mandriva Corporation whose most recent financial results were published last week. The news section then looks at the release process of the Fedora Project whose latest -- and incomplete -- test release came, once again, without any release notes or other useful information. Also in the news: Ubuntu has quietly scrapped the idea of including the 3D desktop in Feisty Fawn, openSUSE and Linspire brace for surprise announcements, Red Hat's Matthew Szulik has kind words to say about Linus Torvalds, and Nexenta announces plans to produce more frequent development releases. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch January 2007 donation has been awarded to the GQview and Kaffeine projects."
Package updates Looking for Package updates?The LWN staff has decided that the time spent processing package updates for various distributions could be better spent producing original content. If you feel like you are missing out on these updates here's the mailing list information for them.
Newsletters and articles of interest Free Operating System For Blind: Adriane Knoppix (EFYtimes)EFYtimes introduces Adriane Knoppix. "It was my first meeting with the couple -- Klaus and Adriane Knopper -- at LinuxAsia 2007. I had already met Klaus Knopper, the creator of Knoppix, and was pretty much touched by his passion for developing Knoppix. This time he was accompanied by his wife Adriane Knopper who is visually handicapped and helps Klaus in developing Linux for the blind, Adriane Knoppix."
First test of Fedora 7 released (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at Fedora 7. "There are two more test releases scheduled before Fedora 7 is slated for general availability on April 26. Though the team has remained on schedule to this point, there is still plenty of work to be done. Keating says some features of Fedora 7 are well under development while others have yet to get off the ground. The team's goal is to have them all testable by the release of Test 2 later this month with the understanding that whatever is not ready for testing at that point will be removed from the package and shelved for the time being."
Distribution reviews Scientific Linux live CD/DVD previews RH5 (DesktopLinux.com)DesktopLinux.com reviews the Scientific Linux 5 (SL5) alpha live CD/DVD. "A preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which won't be released for about a month, is available via the latest Scientific Linux 5 (SL5) alpha live CD/DVD, released this week. Built from source packages for RHEL 5, SL5 sports a 2.6.18 kernel and either the KDE or GNOME desktops. On the SL5 alpha live DVD, all client/workstation RPMs are installed and GNOME is the default desktop. On the SL5 alpha live CD, KDE is the default desktop."
Foresight Is a Linux Distro to Watch (eWeek)eWeek reviews Foresight Linux. "Foresight is one of the most active projects based on rPath's Conary software management system, which offers administrators a great balance of flexibility and control in deploying and maintaining applications on Linux."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development KDE 4 Graphics Gets New Direction with Gwenview IIOn January 27th, KDE developer Aurélien Gâteau made an entry on his blog announcing the next version of his Gwenview image viewer. The announcement is the result of extensive discussion on the kde-usability mailing list towards a completely new interface for the KDE 4 release of the popular image viewer. The new release features a refocusing on simplicity which will have interesting consequences for the venerable application, now in its seventh year of development, and for the K Desktop Environment as a whole. Gâteau designed the new interface to be efficient for, in his words, "two use-cases...: 1: The user wants to see a single image, for example from an image attachment. Maybe rotate it, scale or crop it. 2: The user wants to browse all images of a folder, which he selected from Dolphin or Konqueror. Maybe in fullscreen mode, as a slideshow or not." He summarizes, "...Gwenview [II] strives to be a "simple" image viewer, not a full blown photo management application." The original Gwenview was made with tasks that were less dependent upon the file manager in mind. Gwenview 1.4 has directory tree and folder view panes for image navigation. For Gwenview II, these have been removed. Gâteau explains, "I simplified the interface by removing the folder view and the use of docked windows..." He explains that these changes were prompted by the evolution of desktop file managers: "...nowadays file managers are capable of providing simple image browsing and cataloging, people won't resort to external image applications until they need the cataloging power of applications such as KPhotoAlbum or Digikam." Gwenview II's purpose is to augment the features of these file managers. Gâteau writes, "The new goals of Gwenview are to complement the file manager to provide features it does not supply, such as immersive fullscreen support (not just hiding title bars: showing only the image and providing a discreet minimalist user interface to browse), slideshow and basic image editing (rotate, mirror, scale, crop, adjust colors, maybe red eye correction)." To facilitate this simplification, the new interface makes these functions readily available via toolbar buttons. The current interface mockup does not include any menu bars. Gâteau elaborates on the principle: "In the mockups, I ...removed various toolbars and took into consideration the fact that KDE4 will ship with captions below icons by default. To make it easy to perform some editing tasks, I added a new "tools" side bar." In light of this new direction, Gwenview has found itself with a more prominent position in KDE for the upcoming fourth version of the desktop. Long relegated to the kde-extragear module, Gwenview will be moving to kde-graphics. Extragear is, officially, "a collection of KDE applications that are associated with the KDE project. Those apps are not part of the main KDE distribution for various reasons, but they are still part of the project." The space is generally used for applications that either duplicate the functionality of other applications in the main distribution or are too specialized for mass consumption. The kde-graphics module, as one might expect, is filled with KDE applications designed for image manipulation and viewing. In Gâteau's words, "Yes, Gwenview will play a larger role in KDE4 than it played in KDE3." The move to kde-graphics is symbolic of higher stature within the KDE project, but has other practical consequences, as well. In order to avoid shipping duplicate functionality within the core of KDE, other applications in the graphics module may have to be forced out. Gâteau writes cautiously, "I would like to see Gwenview replace KView and Kuickshow as well as the photoalbum KPart, but we need to make sure we provide similar features and performance. Please note that this is just my (subjective) personal opinion, I am not the one who makes such a decision." KView and Kuikshow are the current members of kde-graphics responsible for simple image display tasks. KParts are components of KDE applications which can be easily embedded within other applications; for instance, videos played in Konqueror use the Kaffeine KPart. Furthermore, the move should ease the work of both developers and users. Gâteau explains, "I believe lots of users will simply use what's supplied by the desktop, and won't take the time to install an application such as Gwenview, so it makes sense to move Gwenview to [the main KDE distribution]. It will also save me some time, as I won't have to worry about making tarballs anymore." Previously, users of GNU/Linux distributions which do not distribute the kde-extragear module through their package management system would have to install Gwenview manually using tarballs. Gâteau had help from KDE Usability in designing Gwenview's new interface. KDE Usability is a community of interface usability experts within the project who assist developers throughout the organization. Gâteau recalls the process: "...after getting confirmation from the kde-devel-core mailing list that Gwenview would move to kdegraphics, I was asked to work with the usability team. I already had some ideas in my mind so I prepared some mockups of them, which I posted on the kde-usability mailing list. They were basically satisfied with the general idea of my first set of mockups, but nevertheless made quite a few suggestions to improve them. Based on this feedback I created a second set of mockups, which are the one I posted on my blog. We mainly discussed the toolbar layout, what should get in the toolbar and what should not, as well as the expected behavior of some elements of the interface." Among the usability experts who assisted him were KDE developers Aaron Seigo, John Tapsell and Celeste Lyn Paul. Gâteau, also a developer on the open-source VOIP application WengoPhone, only recently decided to see Gwenview through to a second major release. He laments, "I decided to give up mainly because I couldn't find the time to work on it anymore and because I thought I was no longer interested in maintaining Gwenview." His decision to return to the project reflects amusingly ideal behavior for a free software developer: "Taking some days off I realized I was still interested in working on Gwenview, and that it would be better to stop some other non-KDE related activities." Gâteau remarks that he was also influenced by the user comments following his call for a new Gwenview maintainer. Gwenview II clearly holds some drastic and exciting changes for the classic KDE application, but Gâteau recognizes that they will not be universally well-received. He notes: "Since Gwenview II will be quite different than the present version, it's quite certain that there will be a new [set of] users. I am also aware that, unfortunately, some users of the present version won't like the new interface." Fortunately, the needs of all users should be well addressed in KDE 4, with the Konqueror file manager for the most basic image management, Gwenview II for more intermediate functions, and digiKam for advanced photo management capabilities.
System Applications Database Software Tuning Derby (O'Reilly)Dejan Bosanac shows how to tune Derby, the Apache DB project, on O'Reilly. "There is a big difference in the behavior of a database when it is populated with a small amount of test inputs and when it holds a large amount of data. Usually, you would not address these database performance issues early in the development process, but when the time comes, you should take some action to ensure that the application is working correctly with large amounts of data. The all-Java open-source database Derby is no exception, so you'll have to make sure it will not be a bottleneck to your application."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe February 4, 2007 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Mail Software sendmail 8.14.0 availableVersion 8.14.0 of the sendmail MTA has been announced. New features include support for transparent 8 bit headers and an extension of the milter API.
Networking Tools Streamline 1.6.3 released (SourceForge)Version 1.6.3 of Streamline, a stream-based network subsystem for Linux, has been announced. "This first release in over a half year has been thoroug[h]ly stress-tested, so it should be more stable. New features include support for named and unnamed pipes, the full POSIX file IO interface, a write-after-read optimization similar to splicing, a method for catching HTTP GET requests and self-resizing (based on load) ringbuffer designs."
Virtualization Software EasyVZ: An OpenVZ management GUI under the GPLThe EasyVZ project has been launched. "I am happy to annou[n]ce the availability of EasyVZ, an OpenVZ management GUI under the GPL. EasyVZ makes it simple to create, destroy and manage Virtual Private Servers from within a cozy and comfortable graphical user interface. The EasyVZ client can manage the server from anywhere over the network, although, currently there is no authentication available."
KQEMU 1.3.0pre10 released - under the GPLKQEMU is the kernel acceleration module for the QEMU processor emulation system. As can be seen in the KQEMU changelog, the 1.3.0pre10 release quietly added a couple of interesting features: full x86_64 virtualization support and a license change to version 2 of the GPL. Since KQEMU had previously been released under a proprietary license, this is a welcome change. (Thanks to Tzvetan Mikov).
Web Site Development Drake CMS v0.3.0 Beta (SourceForge)Version 0.3.0 beta of Drake CMS, a light-weight dynamic web authoring and content management system, has been announced. "Drake CMS v0.3 is the second major release of Drake CMS. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Drake CMS v0.3.0; backward compatibility with Drake CMS v0.2 is granted. We suggest to upgrade because of the new features (you might have already tasted them in Alpha releases 0.2.6-0.2.10) and the improved stability."
mnoGoSearch 3.2.41 releasedVersion 3.2.41 of mnoGoSearch, a web site search engine, is available for Unix platforms. See the change log for release details.
Nuxeo releases Nuxeo EP 5.0.0.GANuxeo has announced the release of Nuxeo EP 5.0.0.GA, an open source enterprise content management (ECM) platform. "Nuxeo ECM solutions are built on the experience accumulated for 5 years by Nuxeo and community members building mission-critical ECM applications (web content management, document management, records management, collaboration, intranet portals and workflow) for major customers, using previously Zope technologies, and now Java EE 5, JBoss Seam and OSGi."
Rails 1.2.2 announcedRelease 1.2.2 of the Rails web development platform has been announced. "Its time for another minor update to Rails 1.2. This was primarily prompted by a change in the API for SQLite between version 3.3.7 and 3.3.8+, which left the Rails database adapter for dead by the road side. But with this release and Jamis Bucks sqlite3-ruby gem at version 1.2.1, were back in business on all versions of SQLite3. Second, were now depending on RubyGems 0.9.0 and above."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Alsaplayer 0.99.77 releasedVersion 0.99.77 of Alsaplayer, a multi-threaded PCM audio file player, is out. "This is a bugfix release. It include all the fixes and security committed by Hubert Chan from Debian. Both the patch committed at alsaplayer-devel list and for Debian are included. They include patches from him and other peoples, and even a new man page from Debian. Another good news is at the cvs will compile again, inclusive the fftscope plugin."
Amarok Weekly NewsletterIssue #6 of the Amarok Weekly Newsletter has been published. Topics include Amarok 1.4.5, Plans for 1.4 series, Amarok 2.0 and Cool tips: running Amarok in fullscreen.
Aqualung 0.9beta7 releasedRelease 0.9 beta 7 of Aqualung has been announced. "Aqualung is an advanced music player originally targeted at GNU/Linux, today also running on other operating systems such as FreeBSD and MS Windows. We are striving to create one of the finest music players available, with respect to sound quality, stability, features and ease of use. This release is the latest in a series of beta releases on our way to the future stable release of Aqualung 1.0. It adds significant new functionality as well as important bugfixes."
JackMix 0.2 releasedVersion 0.2 of JackMix has been released. "After almost two years of silence I managed to put together a new release of JackMix. The name explained: Comparing to jackmix:0.1.0 some experimental features are dropped. On the other hand this release is the first to use scons for the buildsystem and qt4 for the toolkit."
Jokosher freeze for 0.9 beginsThe feature freeze for version 0.9 of the Jokosher audio workstation project has been announced. "So January ticks inevitably into Feburary and in sympathy with the weather (or the ice cream in the southern hemisphere!) Jokosher has frozen. Yes thats right, we are now in feature freeze for the next release which will be 0.9 and is due for release mid March In the last week (from the 28th Jan) there have been commits from no less then 7 different people, and a quick bit of maths gives us the shock result that Laszlo is tied with David Corrales to be this weeks most prolific commiter with 17 commits each. Congratulations not only to David and Laszlo but also Johnk, johng, luket, mikes and stuartl for all their hard work across the 47 commits (theres still a few hours to break the 50 barrier so get coding!)"
Sweep 0.9.2 releasedVersion 0.9.2 of Sweep is out with several new features and bug fixes. "Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins. Inside lives a pesky little virtual stylus called Scrubby who enjoys mixing around in your files."
Business Applications Sugar Open Source 4.5.1 GA available (SourceForge)Version 4.5.1 of Sugar Open Source, a complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for businesses, has been announced. New features include a Campaign Wizard, a Campaign Manager with ROI Reports and Automated Lead Capture.
Data Visualization Gmsh 2.0.0 announcedVersion 2.0.0 of Gmsh, a three-dimensional finite element mesh generator with built-in pre and post-processing facilities, has been announced. See the versions file for change information.
Desktop Environments GARNOME 2.16.3 releasedVersion 2.16.3 of GARNOME, the bleeding-edge GNOME distribution, is out. "As usual it includes a lot of updates and fixes, together with a host of third-party GNOME packages, Bindings and the Mono(tm) Platform -- this is the last release of the current stable GNOME branch."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
Season of Usability Focuses on Two KDE Applications (KDE.News)KDE.News notes two KDE applications that are part of the Season of Usability. "The Season of Usability, run by the OpenUsability project has kicked off with two KDE applications in the focus: BasKet Note Pads and the KDE 4 universal document viewer Okular. Usability, as one of the important focus points of the upcoming fourth major version of KDE, is also an active part of the KDE project. The Season of Usability manifests KDE's close involvement with OpenUsability."
KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News)The February 4, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "Work begins on Amarok 2.0. KBlackBox becomes the latest games application to take the step into the scalable graphics arena. KTTT, a tic-tac-toe game, is ported to KDE 4. Further progress made on the knewstuff2 framework. Software RAID monitoring, along with other improvements in KSysGuard. Mailody gets support for printing HTML emails. Improved support for custom emoticons in Kopete. The sublime-integration user interface branch is merged back into the main KDevelop source tree. Step, an educational physics simulation package, is imported into KDE SVN. KitchenSync is removed from KDE SVN, in anticipation of an OpenSync-based implementation."
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Xorg Software AnnouncementsThe following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
Encryption Software GnuPG 2.0.2 releasedVersion 2.0.2 of GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard encryption system, is out. "This is maintenance release to fix build problems found after the release of 2.0.1. There are also some minor enhancements."
Games Snackware 0.2a releasedStable version 0.2a of Snackware has been announced. "Snackware is a project aimed to create a "competition of coders" by making different classes or functions to battle amongst themselves through the rules of a game. It's not a traditional game, anyway, since it work with no human intervention."
Graphics Inkscape 0.45 releasedVersion 0.45 of Inkscape, an SVG-based vector drawing package, is out. "Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter. Sponsored by Google's Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes, text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects to achieve the "feathered mask" effect. Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug fixes have been included." See the release notes for details.
Interoperability Samba 3.0.24 releasedVersion 3.0.24 of Samba has been announced. "This is a security release which addresses CVE-2007-0452, CVE-2007-0453, and CVE-2007-0454. This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes. Please read the changes in the Release Notes for details on new features and difference in behavior from previous releases."
Multimedia The Road to KDE 4: Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier (KDE.News)KDE.News looks at Phonon. "Like the previously featured articles on new KDE 4 technologies for Job Processes or SVG Widgets, today we feature the shiny new multimedia technology Phonon. Phonon is designed to take some of the complications out of writing multimedia applications in KDE 4, and ensure that these applications will work on a multitude of platforms and sound architectures. Unfortunately, writing about a sound technology produces very few snazzy screenshots, so instead this week has a few more technical details."
Music Applications Rosegarden 1.5.0 releasedVersion 1.5.0 of Rosegarden, an audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor, is out. "This release contains a number of new features, notably audio time-stretching support, and many usability improvements particularly in the matrix view. This is also an interesting release from a developer perspective, because the source code has been completely reorganised into a new directory structure with a far more consistent file naming and organisation scheme. Thanks to all involved with the project for their hard work on this tedious business."
Digital Photography SnapMatcher 0.1 releasedPrototype version 0.1 of SnapMatcher has been released. "SnapMatcher is an application intended for photographers, artists, or image packrats who have very large collections of digital images, some of which may be duplicates or near duplicates. By identifying images across multiple formats with the ability to filter out minor edits such as changes to contrast, brightness, color balance, resizing, or even the addition of text or borders SnapMatcher can be a valuable tool in organizing culling unwieldy collections."
Web Browsers Cross-Platform Netscape 9 to be Developed In-House (MozillaZine)MozillaZine covers the development plans for the Netscape 9 browser. "The official Netscape Blog has announced that Netscape 9 is under development. Like the current Netscape Browser 8, this release will presumably be based on Mozilla Firefox. According to the announcement, Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser (lacking components like a mail client or Web page editor) and will have tight integration with the Netscape.com website, which was relaunched as a Digg-style user-driven news and current events portal last year. A subsequent post revealed that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X."
Miscellaneous lcdtest 1.02 announcedRelease 1.02 of lcdtest, a monitor test pattern generator that is useful for finding bad pixels, is out. "Release 1.02 has no code changes, but incorporates the manual page, Makefile improvements, and Debian build information from Valerio Felici."
Announcing WasabiThe Wasabi project has announced its existence. "Wasabi is new project with the goal of creating a unified, platform independent, specification and api for desktop search engines (and later metadata services). We have worked together with several search-projects and now have a proposal ready for public evaluation. In short: we need feedback from application developers - that means you."
Languages and Tools C GCC 4.0.4 releasedVersion 4.0.4 of GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection, is out. "This release is a minor release, containing bug fixes for regressions relative to earlier releases. It is the final release from the 4.0.x series, and the gcc-4_0-branch is now closed. GCC 4.0.4 is provided for those who require a high degree of binary compatibility with previous 4.0.x releases. For most users, the GCC team recommends that version 4.1.1 or later be used instead."
GCC 4.1.2 Status ReportThe GCC 4.1.2 Status Report for February 4, 2007 is out. "Thanks to all who have helped tested GCC 4.1.2 RC1 over the last week. I've reviewed the list traffic and Bugzilla. Sadly, there are a fair number of bugs. Fortunately, most seem not to be new in 4.1.2, and therefore I don't consider them showstoppers."
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe February 6, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
JSP OpenLink AJAX Toolkit 2.1 released (SourceForge)Version 0.21 of the OpenLink AJAX Toolkit (OAT) has been announced, it adds many new features. "OAT, OpenLink AJAX Tools, is a Javascript framework for building rich browser-based user interfaces using XML/A to connect to databases."
XUL-Enhanced Web Apps (O'Reilly)Cedric Savarese explores XUL on O'Reilly. "This article presents a little-known use of XUL (Mozilla's user-interface language) and shows how to take advantage of its superior performance and accessibility over HTML while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. I will illustrate this using a proof-of-concept JavaScript library that can render UI widgets using either XUL or DHTML."
PHP PHP Manual updatesThe online PHP Manual has been updated, according to the main PHP site. "The PHP documentation team is proud to present to the PHP community a few fixes and tweaks to the PHP Manual, including: an improved, XSL-based build system that will deliver compiled manuals to mirrors in a more timely manner (goodbye dsssl), manual pages can now contain images (see imagearc() for an example), updated function version information and capture system (fewer "no version information, might be only in CVS" messages) ... and more to come!"
Tcl/Tk Tcl-URL!The February 2, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Build Tools Buildit 0.1 releasedVersion 0.1 of Buildit has been announced. "Buildit makes it easier to create a repeatable deployment of software in a particular configuration. With it, you can perform conditional complilation of source code, install software, run scripts, or perform any repeatable sequence of tasks that ends up creating a known set files on your filesystem. On subsequent runs of the same set of tasks, Buildit performs the least amount of work possible to create the same set of files, only performing the work that it detects has not already been performed by earlier runs."
Editors PDFedit 0.2.5 releasedVersion 0.2.5 of PDFedit, an editor for manipulating PDF documents, is available. The project description says: "GUI version + commandline interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in editor and almost anything can be scripted, it is possible to create own scripts or plugins. Target platform are operating systems of Unix type (Linux, BSD, ...), we are using C++, XPDF, QT3 and QSA."
Libraries TA-Lib 0.3.0 Released (SourceForge)Version 0.3.0 of TA-Lib has been announced. "TA-Lib provides more than 130 technical analysis functions for financial and trading applications. Main feature of this release is a new generated XML file to provide meta information of the interface. This facilitate integration within .NET and Java applications."
Miscellaneous Open Object Rexx 3.1.1 releasedVersion 3.1.1 of Open Object Rexx has been announced. "For the first time, binary versions are available for Mac OSX and AIX. New binaries for Windows, Linux and Solaris have been created as well with versions for Solaris pending. In addition users can download the source code of Open Object Rexx and may freely and readily build the programming language themselves. IBM donated the source code of its Object REXX product to the Rexx Language Association in December 2004 for publication and support as an open source project. With ooRexx 3.1.1 both the Rexx and open source communities can enjoy the numerous enhancements and fixes that have been incorporated into ooRexx under RexxLA stewardship."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Preview of Beryl 0.2.0 (Lunapark6)Lunapark6 has a lengthy preview of Beryl 0.2.0. "The Beryl project originally forked from the Compiz 3d desktop group around September of 2006. At the time I had a hard time understanding why we needed another 3d desktop project, but now that I have had a chance to watch Beryl develop, their decision makes a whole lot of sense. As nice as Compiz is, Beryl is the group that is really pushing the envelope of what a next generation desktop should be like."
Will Steve Jobs drop iTunes DRM in a heartbeat? (BoingBoing)Most people by now have seen Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on music" posting where he seems to be arguing for the end of DRM on music. BoingBoing has put together an interesting set of responses to that posting. A number of people point out that there are several artists and labels who would like to be able to sell DRM-free music through iTunes now, but Apple has not allowed that to happen.
Trade Shows and Conferences Fifth Southern California Linux Expo opens Friday (DesktopLinux)DesktopLinux looks forward to SCALE 5X. "SCALE 5X, the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo, opens its doors at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel Feb. 9 and will continue through Sunday, Feb. 11. The event will include about 50 seminars, 70-plus exhibitors, a high number of BoF meetings, and three days' worth of exhibits and demonstrations."
Companies Red Hat Launches Certified Service Provider Initiative (eWeek)eWeek reports that Red Hat, Inc has launched a Certified Service Provider Initiative. "The Program, which is now active in North America and will launch globally in the future, is designed to encourage the growth of open-source service practices through collaboration between Red Hat Global Professional Services and service-oriented channel partners with open-source expertise and resources."
Wind River to Support Linux on TI's OMAP2430 (LinuxElectrons)LinuxElectrons looks at Wind River's Linux support on TI's OMAP2430. ""Wind River's commercial-grade Linux and the advanced multimedia performance features in OMAP2430 processors will offer a powerful Linux platform that supports multimedia-rich, mobile applications and reduce the time and cost associated with bringing these applications to the mobile device market," said Jeff Wender, worldwide marketing manager, Software Solutions for Texas Instruments Cellular Systems Solutions. "We are excited to work with Wind River to provide high-quality, flexible, solutions for the global wireless market on the development platform of their choice, and we're pleased to welcome Wind River to our wireless ecosystem.""
Business FOSS consulting offers special advantages and challenges (IT Manager's Journal)IT Manager's Journal looks at small consultants who specialize in open source software. "A clear sign that free and open source software (FOSS) has become mainstream is the growing number of small consultants who specialize in it. Listed on local users groups or high-tech forums and working mostly by themselves, these consultants rarely make headlines, yet they represent a sizable and growing niche in small business in modern North American cities."
Linux Adoption Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil)Linux in Brazil reports on problems with a Brazilian Linux initiative. "Computador para Todos is a government project that offers special tax exemptions and lines of credit for popular (low end) computer makers in Brazil, as long as the computers are sold with Linux and an array of 26 pre-installed free software common applications, like a word processor, an e-mail client and other apps surely found in most Linux distros. The tax exemption is only valid if the PC is sold for less than R$ 1200 (about US$ 550), retail. According to official estimatives, more than 800,000 PCs were sold using these tax exemptions and lines of credit in 2006, with a wide variety of international and local brands of Linux distros installed, despite claims that roughly 73% of the customers replace the pre-installed Linux distro with unlicensed Windows XP copies, less than 4 weeks after buying the computer." (Thanks to Augusto Campos).
Russian Schools to Switch to Linux After Microsoft Piracy Case (MosNews)MosNews has a brief report on the case of a Russian school headmaster who is threatened with a jail sentence as a result of non-purchased copies of Microsoft software found on his school's systems. "Microsoft says that the incident has nothing to do with them, but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead. Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region's Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring 'license purity' in the region's schools."
Linux at Work Linux Guitar Project is not a solo act (Linux.com)Tina Gasperson investigates Mark Kett's Linux Guitar Project on Linux.com. "Recently, Kett had an idea for a travel guitar. "It would have an iPod running Linux plugged in, that would allow me to record the music that was played on it." He shared the idea with David Patrick, the proprietor of the linuxcaffe, and through some brainstorming came up with the idea for an "open source" electric guitar -- designed from the ground up by community consensus and fitted with Linux technology. "We hashed out ideas about what the ultimate guitar would be -- running a full Linux operating system and with all the capabilities of a recording studio.""
Legal Blackboard pledges no action against open source courseware (LinuxWorld)LinuxWorld covers a pledge from courseware vendor Blackboard to not enforce its patents against open source and homegrown software systems. "The pledge is intended to quell the anger and outrage which flared up last year after the Washington D.C. software vendor, the leader in course management software for education, announced it had been awarded U.S. patents for parts of its software. Course management applications are widely deployed in education; many are homegrown, and more recently, open source projects, such as that sponsored by the Sakai Foundation, are emerging."
Interviews Cyrille Berger (People Behind KDE)The People Behind KDE talk with Cyrille Berger. "In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? Up until now, I have been mostly working on Krita, and more specially on its plugins. Either on code or other stuff, like releasing KOffice 1.6. And currently, beside hacking on Krita version 2.0, I am also playing quite a lot with Qt4Ruby, but I don't know yet if something interesting will come out of this." (Found on KDE.News)
Enjoy the first FOSDEM interviewsThe annual FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) is coming up at the end of February. This year, as in past years, the FOSDEM crew is publishing interviews with the speakers. This first batch of interviews includes Jim Gettys, of the One Laptop Per Child project, ReactOS project leader Aleksey Bragin, GNOME developer and profiling enthusiast Federico Mena Quintero and Øyvind Kolås Norwegian developer and the main author of the GEGL image processing library.
Second batch of FOSDEM interviewsThe second batch of FOSDEM interviews is out. This round includes Kristian Høgsberg (AIGLX) about 3D, graphics drivers and eye candy, Ronald G Minnich (LinuxBIOS) about hardware vendors, the OLPC BIOS, and the dangers of EFI, Peter Saint-Andre (Jabber) about Jabber and XMPP, Kern Sibbald (Bacula) about the history and future of Bacula and Andrew Morton (Linux kernel) very shortly about the current state of Linux in general, and... at Google.
Resources Making Apache httpd Logs More Useful (O'Reilly)Rich Bowen discusses Apache log file analysis modules on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com. "No doubt you're already aware of the standard logfiles that Apache httpd creates for you. There's the access log, which tells you every time a request is made to your server. There's also the error log, which makes a note every time something goes wrong or something of interest happens that you should know about. There are a few things that you can do to make your access log more useful, such as using the combined, rather than the common, logfile format--but that's another article. Look at the documentation for mod_log_config for more information on that."
Linux Gazette #135The February edition of Linux Gazette is out, with articles on Nomachine NX server, Configuring IPCop Firewalls (Book Review), TCP and Linux' Pluggable Congestion Control Algorithms, Debugging WiFi and much more.
Secrets of line spacing in OpenOffice.org Writer (Linux Journal)Bruce Byfield discusses OpenOffice.org line spacing in a Linux Journal article. "The fact that OpenOffice.org Writer is more than a word processor is an open secret. Designed to write long documents, Writer is in many ways a document processor comparable to FrameMaker, suitable for designing books and dissertations while falling short of a complete desktop publishing solution. For this reason, it includes a number of tools for tweaking lines of text, including Tools > Language > Hyphenation and the tools for adjusting character width and letter space for individual characters. However, by far the least understood of these high-end tools is Writer's ability to adjust line-spacing."
Reviews Manage your media library with Data Crow (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Data Crow. "Many Linux apps let you manage your movie collection, or your book collection, or your music collection -- but Data Crow is one of the few that handles all of the above, plus software and images. It also puts a lot of import tools at your fingertips that can save you from entering information about your media manually -- including importing information directly from online services and text files, and extracting information from music files."
PyDEV uses Eclipse's power to program in Python (Linux.com)Nikos Kouremenos looks at PyDEV on Linux.com. "PyDEV is a plugin that enables developers to use Eclipse for Python and Jython development, making Eclipse a first-class Python IDE. The software offers features such as code completion, syntax highlighting, syntax analysis, automated refactoring, template system, source code quality checking, and a debugging environment."
ROX Desktop provides light, quirky alternative to GNOME and KDE (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews the ROX desktop. "The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."
Miscellaneous DRM on 9/11 Commission Report (TLF)The Technology Liberation Front grumbles about the use of DRM on the PDF version of the U.S. 9/11 Commission's report. "If I click to enter a password it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying. I could circumvent the DRM on the PDF, but then it's possible that I'd be violating the DMCA (not the way I read it, but I'd have to take the risk)." As some of the commenters point out, the developers of the free PDF readers have tended to never quite get around to implementing the "no cut-and-paste" bit.
Novell could be banned from selling Linux (Reuters)Here's a Reuters article claiming that the Free Software Foundation may block Novell from selling Linux. "'The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft,' Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday." The article is probably talking about the potential addition of language to GPLv3 to prohibit deals like the one with Microsoft.
The Worldwide Lexicon Reloaded (O'Reilly)Brian McConnell discusses web site language translation issues and the Worldwide Lexicon Project in an O'Reilly ONLamp article. "This new version of the system is much simpler, and it's based on a key insight. Any website with an audience of more than a few dozen people probably has bilingual readers. The bigger the audience, the more languages its readers will speak. Moreover, these readers are presumably interested in the content, are more knowledgeable about it (they understand its context), and are more willing to help others read it."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements EFF Tackles New Role in EuropeThe Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has opened a new office in Brussels to work with various institutions of the European Union (EU) on innovation and digital rights. "The new EFF Europe office, made possible by the generous support of the Open Society Institute and Mr. Mark Shuttleworth of the Shuttleworth Foundation, will allow EFF to have an increased focus on the development of EU law. EFF also plans to expand its efforts in European digital activism and looks forward to working with many groups and organizations to fight effectively for consumers' and technologists' interests. EFF's new European Affairs Coordinator, Erik Josefsson, will be an on-the-ground analyst, activist, and educator about critical intellectual property and civil liberties issues."
PUBPAT Challenges Patriot Scientific Microprocessor patentPublic Patent Foundation has announced a challenge to the Patriot Scientific Corp. microprocessor patent. "The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") announced today that it has filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to review a patent held by Patriot Scientific Corp. (OB: PTSC) that the company, which boasts of "primarily focusing on deriving revenue from licensing patents", is widely asserting against producers of computer microprocessors."
Commercial announcements Ampro announces Industrial Panel ComputerAmpro Computers, Inc. has announced its ReadyPanel 10 industrial panel computer. "The new ReadyPanel 10 all-in-one panel PC solution includes a standard EPIC form factor Pentium(R) processor-compatible single-board computer (SBC) and an NEC LCD 10.4-inch XGA color flat panel display module that provides 1024 x 768 resolution. The LCD, SBC, and touch screen are integrated into a compact 11" x 8.5" x 5.5" enclosure."
Bodelin releases driver for ProScope HR USB microscopeBodelin Technologies has announced the availability of a Linux-UVC driver for the ProScope HR USB digital microscope. "The ProScope HR is the second generation of the popular ProScope hand held USB microscope used in thousands of schools, universities, industrial quality control and law enforcement crime labs."
Funambol announces 3GSM World Congress demosFunambol has announced a preview of its mobile email portal at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on February 12-15, 2007. "The company will also show the world's first open source Java mobile email client for mass market phones and how its software powers the email, contacts and calendars for the popular OpenMoko mobile Linux platform."
Hifn advances open-source cryptographyHifn, Inc. has announced an initiative to support hardware security processors. "Hifn has contracted with Xelerance Inc., the recognized open source security specialists, in a major development effort to make the industry's fastest cryptographic accelerators as easy to use as graphics or sound cards. The project integrates Hifn's 795x algorithm accelerators, as well as the 7855 and 8155 security processors, with Linux and FreeBSD."
Ingres announces New Developer Bundle for Eclipse usersIngres Corporation has announced a new Ingres Eclipse DBMS Bundle for Java developers. "The new bundle contains all of the components needed to successfully build and deploy next-generation applications with Eclipse, a popular open source development framework, on Ingres 2006, Ingres's latest release of its open source database."
Microsoft announces Open XML to ODF translatorMicrosoft Corp. has announced an Open XML to ODF translator project. "Developers of the open source project to produce a translator between OpenDocument format (ODF) and Open XML document formats announced the completion of the 1.0 release of the technology. The completed Open XML Translator enables conversion of documents from one format to the other and is available for anyone to download and use at no cost. When plugged into Microsoft(R) Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format."
Novell previews new Identity and Security Management SolutionsNovell, Inc. has announced preview releases of its security and identity management solutions. "Novell today announced that it is previewing enhancements to its flagship security and identity management solutions, Sentinel(TM) 6 and Identity Manager 3.5, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Demonstrating Novell's innovation and market leadership, these product releases will showcase new features and enhanced capabilities to help customers ensure security and compliance. When deployed together, both products deliver the industry's most complete identity and security management solution for supporting compliance and IT governance initiatives."
TimeSys Introduces LinuxLink subscriptions for Intel Pentium processorsTimeSys has announced the availability of LinuxLink subscriptions for the Intel Pentium family of processors. "This LinuxLink complements the already popular LinuxLink for the Intel Pentium III (i686) family of processors. LinuxLink by TimeSys is the first commercial offering to support the majority of embedded developers who build and assemble their own commercial-grade custom Linux platforms. By delivering on-demand access to continuously updated processor-optimized Linux packages, components and tools, engineers benefit from a rich development environment and community support."
TRITON Development kit-4 announcedStrategic Test has announced availability of the TRITON Development Kit-4. "... based on the Marvell XScale PXA320 processor. The TDK-4 is supplied with both Microsoft Windows CE 6.0 and Linux 2.6.17 at a competitive price of only 2900 Euro."
UEIPAC--a complete, Linux-powered, Programmable Automation Controller.United Electronic Industries (UEI) has announced the release of the UEIPAC series of Programmable Automation Controllers (PACs). The UEIPAC-a complete, Linux-based, Programmable Automation Controller. The UEIPAC can have up to 150 analog or 288 digital I/O points all in its rugged, 4" x 4" x 6" housing.
VMware introduces Virtualization Management Bundle for small and medium businessesVMware, Inc. has announced the release of a new virtualization software bundle. VMware "... today announced a new bundle designed to provide SMBs using the free VMware Server with an easy and cost-effective way to manage their virtual infrastructure. The bundle includes VirtualCenter for VMware Server with enterprise-class support from VMware for $1,500."
New Books Rails Cookbook - O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini.
Using Samba, Third Edition - New from O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book Using Samba, Third Edition by Gerald Carter, Jay Ts and Robert Eckstein.
Resources Manualinux 6.2 is outManualinux is project that provides documentation for Linux in English and Italian. The latest version is 6.2, and its released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Contests and Awards The Mashup Contest at ETelA Telephony Mashup Contest will take place at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. The conference takes place in Burlingame, CA on February 27-March 1, 2007, submission proposals are due by February 21. "StrikeIron Inc., the leading provider of live data and business functionality over the web and O'Reilly Media, Inc. today announced the first ever Telephony Mashup Contest to take place during the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (ETel). This new contest provides a stage for developers to demonstrate their creative skills using emerging telephony technologies such as VoiceXML, SIP phones, VoIP, hosted PBX & IVR services, and Web Services. In addition to StrikeIron and OReilly, Tellme Networks, Inc. and Sylantro are sponsoring this contest with $3,000 of prizes to winning entries."
Novell and LinuxFormat will write your dream application (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop has announced a new contest. "To make sure nobody misses it, but Novell and Linux Format magazine is hosting a competition to have your dream application written for you. The competition is called Make it with Mono. To enter you just register on their site and submit a description of your dream application. The proposal with the most votes after the voting period is over (voting starts in April) will be attempted implemented with Mono."
PyWeek game programming challengeThe next PyWeek game programming challenge will take place online from April 1-8, 2007. "Entries must be developed in Python during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme decided at the start of the challenge."
Education and Certification LPI launches LPIC-3 certification programThe Linux Professional Institute has launched their LPIC-3 Certification Program. "LPIC-3 represents the highest level of distribution-neutral Linux certification within the industry and is targeted at Linux professionals providing IT services at the enterprise level. The certification consists of a single exam (LPI-301) and additional specialty certifications."
Novell launches Red Hat-to-SUSE Linux migration courseNovell has announced a new migration course. "Novell has developed a new training course to help systems administrators migrate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. The course is available both as a free download and as an instructor-led class, available at locations globally."
Upcoming Events FreedomHEC 2007The announcement for FreedomHEC 2007 has gone out; this year's event will happen May 18 and 19 in Los Angeles, immediately following WinHEC. "One hardware manufacturer devotes 150 engineers to a Microsoft Windows driver, while one person can handle the Linux driver. At FreedomHEC, you'll learn that a Linux driver is a small investment for a big gain, and you'll meet the Linux professionals who can open the door to the Linux market for you."
Annual Java Technology Conference open for registrationSun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the 2007 JavaOne Conference. The event takes place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA on May 8-11, 2007.
The 2007 MySQL Conference and ExpoThe 2007 MySQL Conference and Expo will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA on April 23-26, 2007. "The conference is poised to offer more than 110 sessions and tutorials geared to show participants how to rapidly build innovative database applications that can scale as an enterprise grows. A strong selection of MySQL users and open source experts will share their knowledge about using MySQL to power high-volume Web 2.0 sites, critical business applications, and the next generation of packaged software." The early registration discount is available until March 15.
OOoCon 2007 call for locationA call for location has gone out for the 2007 OpenOffice.org conference. "OpenOffice.org announces voting for the location for OOoCon 2007 The official international OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) brings together people who are interested in the development, promotion, and use of OpenOffice.org. Last year, members of the OpenOffice.org community gathered at the official international OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Lyon, France for a superb conference hosted by the local OpenOffice.org community."
PyCamp - a Regional Python UnconferenceThe 2007 PyCamp is in the planning stages. The event will be held in Lockhart, Texas during August, 2007. "An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance. And tossing around some names, we decided upon "PyCamp"."
Registration opens for RailsConf 2007The RailsConf 2007 will take place on May 17-20, 2007 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Registration is now open. "The four-day RailsConf 2007 program will feature the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies. Attendees will learn about the bleeding edge Rails techniques, strategies, and pitfalls in Rails adoption, as well as best practice development theory. Sessions will be offered for all levels of expertise including hands-on workshops that will show how to employ Rails in a variety of situations."
Events: February 15, 2007 to April 16, 2007The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it. Audio and Video programs Richard Stallman podcast releasedNearthwort Obtain presents a podcast with Richard Stallman. "This show features an interview with Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux. After introducing the concept of free software, Richard offers some trenchant criticism of two tech superstars: the Lord of Linux, Linus Torvalds, and Apple guru Steve Jobs. From there, we move into a discussion of the impact of free software and freedom more generally on the evolution of personal and global consciousness."
Web 2.0 podcasts (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly has released two podcasts from the Web 2.0 conference, titles include The State of the Internet, Part 3 and What GoDaddy Knows.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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![[IOtest
results]](/images/ns/iotest-results.png)
The IOtest read test simply performs random reads of varying sizes,
starting with one process and going up from there. IOtest can run a large
number of competing processes, but your editor limited it to four so as to
avoid running into Minix's memory limitations. For the curious, the ![[Unixbench results]](/images/ns/unixbench-results.png)
The UnixBench results (raw results: