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Linux in the newsRecommended 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 interviews The 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 interviews The 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 #135 The 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 |
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