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LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 15, 2007The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux
A while back, your editor stumbled across the Flickr HDR pool; some of the photos in that pool were sufficiently amazing to inspire an immediate "I wanna do that" reaction. The better part of a year later, it finally became possible to learn a bit more about the process behind those pictures. HDR (or high dynamic range) photography is a set of techniques for overcoming the limitations of contemporary hardware and, in the process, generating images which better represent a scene as viewed by the human eye - or which appear to come from a work of fantasy art. The sensors in today's digital cameras have gotten good, but they still fall short of the human eye in a few ways. In particular, the range of light levels which can be captured by the sensor is not yet up to what film can handle, and is far from what the eye can do. Anybody who has spent any time taking pictures is familiar with this problem: one can take a beautiful landscape picture, but, in the end result, the wild cloud formations are washed out completely and the shadows just go black. Being unable to capture a scene that one can see quite well can be most frustrating. The idea behind HDR, as it is used with photography, is to extend the available dynamic range by taking multiple shots at different exposure levels. For a given exposure, there will be a range of light levels which will be captured with good resolution by the sensor; everything else gets compressed at one end or the other. If one has a series of images at different exposures and a reasonable model of the camera's response curve, one can generate a composite image by using the parts of each source image which are in the good part of the curve. So, in that landscape picture, a very dark exposure can be used for the bright parts of the scene - clouds, for example - while a bright exposure yields low-light details. By mixing them together, the HDR algorithm can produce an image with full sensor resolution across a much wider dynamic range. As an example, consider the photograph below, taken from your editor's dining room:
(Larger versions of the images are available.) In the original, parts of the plant in the foreground are entirely lost in the shadows. Meanwhile, the breathtaking view of Colorado suburbia (with mountains in the distance) is washed out entirely. The HDR version brings all of that detail back. HDR is not applicable to all situations. It has a tendency to turn people into cartoon characters. Beyond that, the need for multiple exposures generally implies setting up a tripod and taking some time for the entire process. It is thus not well suited to changing scenes, sports photography (though baseball, perhaps, can be expected to stand still for the requisite time), etc. It can work well for relatively static scenes: landscapes, buildings, the SCO case, and so on. Most of the people playing with HDR seem to be using proprietary plugins for a proprietary image manipulation program running under a proprietary operating system. That is, needless to say, not your editor's preferred mode of operation. Thus your editor began a search for tools which would perform HDR processing under Linux. It turns out that there are a few such tools around; there is no need to use proprietary software for this task.
HDR generationThe first step is to look for a way to represent HDR images - normal image formats are not up to that task. Linux.com ran a reasonable article on HDR formats late last year; the end result appears to be that the OpenEXR format is the way to go. The OpenEXR package comes with the libraries needed by other applications and the deeply painful "exrdisplay" image viewer. The pfstools package adds a set of pipeline-oriented tools for working with HDR images; it is a necessary part of any HDR hobbyist's toolkit.Next, one should come up with a set of source images. Ideally, these images are taken with a tripod-mounted camera and cover a range of at least two f-stops above and below the nominally "correct" exposure. Varying the exposure time is preferred over changing the aperture; if nothing else, this ensures that all of the images will have the same depth of field. One can start with images taken without a tripod, but it will be necessary to register them before continuing. Your editor did not get into that aspect of the task; tools like hugin and hdrprep can be used for this job. These tools may be a good topic for your editor's attention in a future article. One can also apply HDR techniques to a single image, especially if it is in the camera's raw format, but multiple exposures give much better results. With the images in place, one can look at combining them into an HDR image. This is a two-stage process (two user-visible stages, at least): creating a set of response curves and using them to map the images together into a single dynamic range space. The response curves are a mapping between some sort of real-world light levels and the resulting sensor values on all three color channels. When combined with information on the relative exposure times of two (or more images), the response curves allow the HDR program to map pixels from all of the images into the same space. The response curves can be generated directly from the source images; they don't normally change, so they can be saved and reused later.
The good news is that actually using this plugin is easy. One selects "bracketing for HDR" from the File->New from menu, then selects the set of source images from a simple dialog. The plugin will then import them. There is no provision for obtaining the relative exposure information from the image files themselves; instead, the plugin sorts the images by brightness and applies an assumed (adjustable) exposure difference between them. It attempts to feed each image to dcraw for decoding, but your editor was not able to get raw images to work despite the fact that dcraw supports his camera just fine; it looks like the raw import plugin was written for an older version of dcraw. That problem is likely to be easily overcome; your editor just didn't want to spend much time on it. So TIFF files were used instead. Once the images are in, the user can check the exposure values, then hit the "compute response" button. That yields the two plots shown in the screenshot. By messing around with the buttons, one can look for the reference image which yields the smoothest set of response curves - or one can just accept what the plugin does by default. Then a click on the "generate HDR" button creates the final product, which can then be saved out in the OpenEXR format. Your editor set out to take some amazing pictures for this article. The area in which your editor resides is widely held to be beautiful, but, frankly, Colorado is not at its best in early March; perhaps this article should have been written in June. Nonetheless, the effort was made. Below is a rather mediocre shot of the Boulder foothills in original and HDR (with cinepaint) forms (larger versions available).
The HDR image above shows a halo effect (the bright sky above the mountain) which is characteristic of some tone mapping algorithms; we'll get into tone mapping shortly. An alternative approach is PFScalibration, a command-line HDR generation utility based on pfstools. These tools work as a netpbm-like pipeline; their use requires a fair amount of typing, though much of the work can be scripted. The steps are the following:
Here's an example generated from a series of pictures of your editor's
As a general rule, HDR images generated with cinepaint and PFScalibration tend to look identical. The generation of HDR is not where the real magic lies, so the results should be close.
Said image appeared in a display window; like exrdisplay, this window can only show the image in full resolution. Your editor, lacking a 7 megapixel monitor, was thus unable to view the entire image at once. Even worse, qtpfsgui is one of the family of (generally KDE-based) graphical tools which feels the need to implement its own window manager. The display window lives within the larger qtpfsgui window; it cannot be resized with the usual shortcut your editor is used to. In summary, qtpfsgui gets the job done, but writing a simple script around PFScalibration seems like an easier way to go.
Tone mappingWhile the tools above will generate a fine HDR image, one problem remains: the dynamic range in that HDR image far exceeds the range of your editor's monitor (or printer). Turning that image into something which can be displayed requires a step called tone mapping. This is where the serious magic comes in: somehow the vast amount of information in the HDR image must be scaled back in a way which does not compromise the image quality that was the whole point of this exercise in the first place. Several tone mapping algorithms exist, and most of them have a number of mysterious knobs to tweak. While the generation of HDR can be mostly automated, tone mapping inherently requires experimentation and human judgment. The bulk of the action appears to be in the pfstmo package, which implements several tone mapping algorithms as separate, standalone filters. One can use pfstmo with the rest of the pfstools package to construct pipelines which generate tone-mapped images. Given the iterative nature of the task, however, it would be nice if there were a better way.
A different set of tone mapping operators is supplied with the exrtools distribution. Your editor tried them all; each one is a cumbersome, multi-step process. It can take a long time to process an image, only to find that the parameters need quite a bit of tweaking. The tools seem like they will do quality transformations, but they just cry out for a qpfstmo-like interface which allows experimentation with smaller-size images and comparison of results. For what it's worth, here's a shot taken from the hill above your editor's house mapped with the exrtools non-linear masking method:
See the larger versions for more detail. Doubtless one could get good results from these tools with enough effort, but your editor found it easier to get quality images with psftmo.
ConclusionFor the generation of HDR images, your editor found cinepaint to be faster and simpler to work with. This does not count, however, the long and frustrating experience of building the HDR plugin on a Fedora Rawhide system; one gets the sense that the plugin's author uses a rather older, less picky version of g++. Longer-term, however, the PFScalibration suite may prove to be the way to go. It is far more compact and easy to install on a new system; why lug the weight of cinepaint if one is not going to use its other features? A bit of scripting will easily turn PFScalibration into a single-command HDR generation tool. It's worth noting that there are a couple of other HDR generators for Linux out there. MakeHDR is where a lot of it started; one of its authors is Paul Debevec, who did much of the early research in this area. The code was last touched in 1999, however, and it comes with a "educational purposes only" license. One can also look at HDRgen, but it is a binary-only, free-beer tool. Your editor did not actually try either one of them; given that the free tools do the job so well, there didn't seem to be any point. For tone mapping, pfstmo (and qpfstmo) are the best tools at this point. It is hard to be entirely satisfied with the state of the art in this area, though. Tone mapping will always be an exercise in compromises, so it's not surprising that the results are rarely perfect. There is likely to be room for improvement - in both the algorithms and the interface to them - for some time to come. As is the case in many areas, Linux has the tools one needs to play with high dynamic range imagery. One just has to work a little harder to get started than on some other systems. HDR has found its way into your editor's photographic toolkit; look for the results in the reporting from some conference in some exotic part of the world. When playing with this stuff, your editor is far from grumpy.
Java cryptography and free distributionsThe problem first came up in February: the Red Hat Directory Server developers would like to include the Java Security Services module in the Fedora distribution. The code, it seems, is free, but there is still a problem: the Java virtual machine requires that all Java Cryptography Extension providers (of which JSS is one) to be signed with a Sun-approved key. If an application tries to use a JCE module which lacks the requisite signature, the whole thing comes crashing down - an experience which probably differs from what the user had in mind. In practice, this limitation means that users either use the signed version obtained from Sun, or do not use JSS at all.Warren Togami recently posted a couple of possibilities for how Fedora might be able to ship JSS. They were:
The first option, at first blush, would appear to work. Fedora would be able to build its own module and ship the source. It falls down, however, as soon as a Fedora user tries to make a change; that user will not be able to rebuild the patched module in a way that will actually work. Derivative distributions would run into the same problem. As a result, it would appear that Fedora stopped considering this option fairly quickly. Not signing the module at all has obvious problems as well. It seems likely that many potential JSS users have their own applications in mind. If those applications do not work, they will rightly see Fedora as not having support for the features they are looking for. Other alternatives have been considered; one is to emphasize the use of the GCJ compiler and try to steer users away from Sun's virtual machine. That approach would certainly offer a higher degree of freedom, at the cost of not really providing what many Java users appear to want. Additionally, not everybody is convinced that GCJ has achieved the level of maturity that many users would expect. In an interesting way, this is really just the Tivo problem under a different guise. Locked-down hardware refuses to run software which lacks the expected signatures. In this case, we have virtual hardware, in the form of the Java virtual machine, which is doing the same thing. The result is the same as well: the software is available and nominally free, but the users of that software cannot create their own versions and expect to be able to run them. If Sun follows through on its desire to move to GPLv3, and if that license retains its requirement that any needed signing keys be distributed with the source, Sun may find itself in an interesting position. It is hard to see how the current policy would be compliant with the new GPL's requirements. The upcoming GPL Java release would appear to be the best hope for distributors trying to deal with this situation. Once the code is free, distributors can patch it to make the whole of Java distributable as free software. So the real solution to shipping JSS with a distribution which insists on freedom would appear to be to wait for a free Java.
Security Intrusion detection for the browserWebsites with malicious content are a growing problem, so tools to detect this content and alert the user to its presence are quite welcome. A plugin for Firefox called Firekeeper uses the ideas behind intrusion detection systems (IDS) and applies them to web traffic. Firekeeper uses some of the rule syntax and pattern matching code from Snort, the venerable open source IDS, providing it with a solid foundation.
As with any IDS, the basic function of Firekeeper is to inspect the traffic
that it sees, applying some pattern matching smarts and a set of rules to
determine what actions it takes. The possible actions are to alert the
user and allow them to decide what to do, stop processing the HTTP response
without user interaction or to accept and continue processing, also without
consulting the user. Alert rules can also provide extra information
Firekeeper can do pattern matching on three different parts of the HTTP or HTTPS response: the URL, headers and body. The simplest form matches literal strings in the various pieces of the response, but there is also a Perl compatible regular expression (regexp) engine that can be applied to each piece as well. The documentation warns of serious performance implications from having too many regexps, especially ones that do not contain a literal rule to narrow the search space; good advice for most applications that use regexps. Firekeeper can be downloaded from the project site and it installs flawlessly if one is willing to add the site (hosted at mozdev.org) to the list of trusted plugin locations and ignore the unsigned nature of the code. The source is available from the site as well so those with concerns about the security bypasses can build their own version. It comes with a handful of default rules and a test page to try them out as well. Visiting various sites with Firekeeper enabled while working on this article did not noticeably slow down the browser for the author and, other than the tests, did not trigger any rules. Any IDS is an invasive program and has access to all sorts of information one probably wants to keep private, particularly decrypted network data. This makes IDS programs high profile targets for exploitation. If an attacker can send a packet or series of packets that can subvert the IDS, they can potentially eavesdrop on all network traffic, even encrypted traffic. Because Firekeeper has access to the decrypted HTTPS traffic, there is reason to be concerned that the plugin could be subverted via the same kinds of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that have impacted Snort, a recent example is here. Firekeeper implements a small subset of the Snort functionality, which should make it less likely, but users of the plugin should be aware of the possibility. An IDS is only as good as the rules that it uses, and newer exploits (and so-called 0-days) will not yet have rules available, leaving a window of vulnerability. Firekeeper does have provisions for loading rule files from external sites (which, of course, has its own set of security issues) that would help propagate new rules quickly, at least for users who restart their browser frequently. Firekeeper is certainly not for less technical users and probably never will be. There is too much knowledge and understanding of web protocols and security threats required to understand the alerts and too many false positives to turn the alerts into blocks. And like many security tools and techniques, this is no panacea; it will not stop all browser-targeted attacks, but it does have its uses. An alert that a site has tried to exploit a browser bug, even one that does not affect the browser version being used, is still useful information which can help users to avoid dodgy sites.
Brief items A second remote hole for OpenBSDVisitors to the OpenBSD site will notice that it now reads "Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!" That's one more than it had a little while ago. The details can be found in this Core Security advisory: it seems that the problem was in the IPv6 code. It's amusing to read the timeline - the OpenBSD folks were apparently not enthusiastic about accepting the existence of a remotely exploitable vulnerability. They did accept it, though, and their record over many years remains impressive.
New vulnerabilities amarok: remote code injection
kdelibs: denial of service
ktorrent: incorrect validation
mplayer: buffer overflow
silc-server: denial of service
xen, qemu: information disclosure
xine-lib: arbitrary code execution
Updated vulnerabilities acroread: multiple vulnerabilities
apache: cross-site scripting
bind: denial of service
bluez-utils: hidd vulnerability
bugzilla: multiple vulnerabilities
busybox: insecure password generation
clamav: directory traversal, denial of service
cpio: arbitrary code execution
vixie-cron: privilege escalation
cscope: buffer overflows
cscope: buffer overflows
Cyrus-SASL: DIGEST-MD5 Pre-Authentication Denial of Service
dovecot: index cache file handling error
ekiga: format string vulnerability
elinks: arbitrary file access
fail2ban: denial of service
fetchmail: password disclosure and DOS
ffmpeg: buffer overflows
Mozilla stuff: multiple vulnerabilities
freeradius: several vulnerabilities
freetype: integer overflows
gcc: file overwrite vulnerability
gd: buffer overflow
gdb: buffer overflow
gdm: improper file permissions
gedit: format string vulnerability
gnupg: stack overwrite
GnuPG: unsigned data injection vulnerability
grip: buffer overflow
gv: stack-based buffer overflow
gzip: multiple vulnerabilities
horde-kronolith: local file inclusion
ImageMagick: buffer overflows
imlib2: arbitrary code execution
java: multiple vulnerabilities
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kdelibs: cross-site scripting
kernel: 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: denial of service
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
krb5: uninitialized pointers
krb5: local privilege escalation
mod_python: information disclosure
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
mod_jk: stack overflow
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: multiple vulnerabilities
php: buffer overflows
phpbb2: missing input sanitizing
phpbb2: multiple vulnerabilities
postgresql: insufficient verification
postgresql: SQL injection
quake: buffer overflow
rpm: arbitrary code execution
samba: several vulnerabilities
Mozilla: multiple vulnerabilities
shadow-utils: mailbox creation vulnerability
slocate: information disclosure
smb4k: multiple vulnerabilities
snort: remote arbitrary code execution
spamassassin: denial of service
STLport: buffer overflows
sun-jdk: arbitrary code execution
tcpdump: denial of service
ulogd: buffer overflow
unzip: long file name buffer overflow
util-linux: information disclosure
w3c-libwww: possible stack overflow
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
wordpress: cross-site scripting
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 prepatch remains 2.6.21-rc3. About 250 patches have found their way into the mainline repository since -rc3 was released; -rc4 will likely come out shortly after LWN is published this week.There are two current -mm trees, differing only in their inclusion of one patch set: 2.6.21-rc3-mm1 (which includes the RSDL scheduler) and 2.6.21-rc3-mm2 (which does not). The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.20.3, released on March 13 with a couple dozen fixes. 2.6.20.2 was released on March 9 with a full 100 patches. For older kernels: 2.6.16.43 was released on March 8. 2.6.16.44-rc1 is out with a number of fixes, including a couple of security patches.
Kernel development news Quotes of the week
-#define ARRAY_SIZE(x) (sizeof(x) / sizeof((x)[0])) +#define ARRAY_SIZE(arr) (sizeof(arr) / sizeof((arr)[0]) \ + + sizeof(typeof(int[1 - 2*!!__builtin_types_compatible_p(typeof(arr), \ + typeof(&arr[0]))]))*0)
Rusty, that's a work of art.
However, I would suggest that you never show it to anybody ever again. I'm sure that in fifty years, it will be worth much more. So please keep it tightly under wraps, to keep people from gouging their eyes out^W^W^W^W^W^W^W make a killing in the art market.
Kernel events without keventsThe long story of the kevent subsystem has appeared on this page a number of times. Kevents are designed to give applications a single system call which they can use to wait for any events of interest: I/O, timers, signals, and more. While quite a bit of work has been done on this code, its path into the kernel has been long. A number of developers are still unconvinced that the interface is needed, and, if it is, that the proposed kevent API (which would have to be maintained forever) is the right one. Now there is a competing approach which may prove easier for the community to accept.Davide Libenzi is the creator of the epoll_wait() system call; it is a version of poll() which is intended to be scalable to large numbers of file descriptors. This API seems to be well regarded for what it does, but it is limited to waiting on file descriptors. Many of the things that kevents address are not associated with files, and so cannot be handled through the epoll interface. Kevents fix that shortcoming with the creation of a new subsystem and user-space API. Davide has now shown up with a different strategy: make a way for applications to request delivery of events via a file descriptor. Consider, for example, the case of signals. Signals tend to be tricky for applications to handle; they are asynchronous events which are delivered to a special signal handler function, but that function is seriously limited in what it can do. In response, application developers have resorted to tricks like writing a byte to an internal pipe so that the signal can be handled in the main event loop. Davide has proposed a new system call named signalfd() which can help developers avoid much of the hassle of working with signals:
int signalfd(int ufd, const sigset_t *mask, size_t masksize);
If ufd is -1, this call will create (and return) a new file descriptor. The signals described in mask will be caught and returned to the process by way of that file descriptor. It is pollable, allowing signals to be handled in an event loop based on select(), poll() or epoll_wait(). When signals are available, they can be read from the descriptor as data; the signalfd_siginfo structure returned by read() has the signal number and all of the related information that comes with it. If ufd is set to an existing signal file descriptor, the signalfd() call will change to the new mask. It is worth noting that reading from this file descriptor competes with normal signal delivery for queued signals; there is no way to predict whether the signal will be delivered in the usual way or will be read from the file descriptor. This situation can be avoided by using sigprocmask() to block normal delivery of the signal(s) of interest. There is a similar interface for timer events:
int timerfd(int ufd, int clockid, int timertype,
const struct timespec *when);
Once again, ufd is -1 to create a new file descriptor, or an existing timer file descriptor which is to be modified. The clockid parameter describes which clock is wanted: CLOCK_MONOTONIC or CLOCK_REALTIME. The type of timer is described by timertype: TFD_TIMER_REL for a time relative to the current time, TFD_TIMER_ABS for an absolute time, or TFD_TIMER_SEQ for a repeating timer at a given interval. The when structure contains the requested expiration time. Once again, this file descriptor can be polled. Reading from it yields an integer value saying how many times the timer has fired since the last time it was read. Evgeniy Polyakov, the author of the kevent patches, has not been sitting still while these patches have gone around. His proposal is called eventfs; it is a special filesystem which offers the ability to bind events to file descriptors. The first version of the patch only handles signals, via a system call named (yes) signalfd():
int signalfd(int signal, int flags);
This call creates a new file descriptor for the given signal (a separate file descriptor is required for each signal in this scheme). In the current code, if flags is nonzero, the signal will only be delivered through eventfs and will never go into the signal queue. The file descriptor is pollable, but there is no way to read any information from it. So any associated signal information is lost; multiple deliveries of the same signal between polls will also be lost. One assumes that Evgeniy's patches could be improved over time, but Davide's version seems to be ahead in terms of features, coverage, and community review. Davide has also avoided the need to create a new filesystem to back the whole thing up. So if bets were being taken on which approach might make it into the kernel, Davide would seem to be in the lead at the moment. There are certainly things to be said for this approach. It brings Linux toward a single interface for event delivery without the need for a new, complex API. It also reinforces the role of the file descriptor as a fundamental object for interaction with the kernel. On the other hand, the poll interfaces do not provide a way for applications to receive events without the need to call into the kernel - a feature which has been requested by some interested parties. There are also event types (asynchronous I/O completion, for example) which are not yet covered. So, if things do go this way, it would not be surprising to see patches trying to fill in those gaps in the near future.
paravirt_ops considered harmful?As flame wars go, this one was somewhat more technical and inscrutable than most. It was, however, still a flame war. The core issue was this: is the addition of the paravirt_ops layer, now beginning to be used to support running Linux under hypervisors, a good thing or a long-term maintenance disaster for the Linux kernel?It all started with a patch added to the -mm tree; it seems that some work on the new clockevents code broke the VMI virtualization layer. So the developers at VMware put together a fix, but that fix did not sit well with the core clockevents developers. In their view, it took much of the older time-related code, which they had worked so hard to get rid of, and shoved it back under the VMI layer. Thomas Gleixner did not like this solution:
This is ugly as hell. NO_HZ enables the dyntick functions in
idle(), irq_enter() and irq_exit() so the clockevents code is
actually invoked. I have not looked close enough why this does
work at all.
I have the feeling that "working fine" means something like "does not
explode".
The right solution, according to Thomas, is for all of the people who are working on hypervisors and Linux to get together and come up with a single timer interface based on clockevents. This should not be all that hard of a job, in his opinion. The VMI hackers may well be willing to do that over time, but they don't see that as something which can be done in the near future. Their current code works, and, besides, they are on the verge of a product release and would rather not thrash things up at this time. "On the verge of a product release" is not an excuse which flies far on linux-kernel. This is doubly true in this case, where some of the people involved feel that the VMI developers should have seen clockevents coming and developed for that interface over the last year. They see the current VMI timer code as being the beginning of a long-term maintenance nightmare. Ingo Molnar widened the discussion to the problems he sees with paravirt_ops in general. The posting is long, but the core point seems to be this: every hypervisor connection implemented with paravirt_ops becomes an ABI that the kernel must then maintain forever. The paravirt_ops interface itself is supposed to insulate the kernel from changes, and that API can change. But each hypervisor interface done through paravirt_ops must continue to work into the future, meaning that certain sorts of fundamental design changes cannot be made. Maintaining compatibility with several hypervisors will be hard, and Ingo sees bad things when one inevitably breaks:
And it doesn't matter whether we think that it was VMWare who messed
up. Users/customers _will_ blame us: "v2.6.25 regresses, it wont
run under ESX v1.12 anymore". Distro will yield and will undo
whatever change breaks backwards compatibility with older
hypervisors. (most likely it will be undone upstream already)
Backwards compatibility acts as a very heavy barrier against
certain types of paravirt_ops design changes.
There have not been a whole lot of others supporting this point of view, though. The current abuses are seen as things which can be fixed, people seem to be sanguine about the ability to maintain compatibility in the paravirt_ops interface code, and, most likely, many people simply tune out of virtualization discussions. Linus suggests that Ingo point out specific problems (and fix them if he desires) rather than complaining about general problems. Ingo's response is that hypervisor interfaces should be treated like system calls, and added with the same degree of care and deliberation. In the end, it is not clear that anything will change. There is a high level of interest in getting hypervisor support into the kernel, and that process is unlikely to stop. So expect to see some more serious squabbles about what is done in hypervisor interfaces in the future. If we are lucky, that process, while noisy, will result in the evolution of the paravirt_ops code toward something which proves to be maintainable over the long term.
RSDL hits a snagIn last week's episode, the Rotating Staircase Deadline Scheduler (RSDL) had appeared out of the blue and was busily impressing testers left and right. One person even called for it to go straight into 2.6.21. In reality, the replacement of something as fundamental as the CPU scheduler was never going to be an entirely smooth operation. So it's not all that surprising that the RSDL has run into an obstacle or two.The biggest snag would appear to be this workload reported by Mike Galbraith. Mike is trying to run some CPU hogs (MP3 encoding, in particular) in the background while watching some interactive eye candy. It's a load that works with the current scheduler, but it becomes sluggish when running under RSDL. There have been a couple of other reports of a visible interactive slowdown when serious computation is going on - though others have reported better results. There is little surprise in the appearance of behavioral regressions for certain workloads. Few people would have expected RSDL to be perfect within a week of its first posting. The real difficulty, instead, is that RSDL creator Con Kolivas has reacted in a somewhat defensive manner, refusing to see the behavior as a regression:
Your expectations of what you should be able to do are simply
skewed. Find what cpu balance you loved in the old one (and I
believe it wasn't that much more cpu in favour of X if I recall
correctly) and simply change the nice setting on your lame encoder
- since you're already setting one anyway.
We simply cannot continue arguing that we should dish out unfairness in any manner any more. It will always come back and bite us where we don't want it. We are getting good interactive response with a fair scheduler yet you seem intent on overloading it to find fault with it. Con's position is that the scheduler should strive to provide fairness and low latency; any further expectations about interactive response should then be addressed by playing with nice levels. The interactivity estimator built into the current scheduler is just too difficult to work with; the kernel should not be in that particular business. The problem is that this approach conflicts with how Linux users have come to expect things to work. As soon as one looks at improving RSDL for these situations, one gets into the same old discussions on improving interactive response in general. Linus pointed out that RSDL's way of scheduling is not quite as fair as it could be, since it does not always account for work in the right place:
And the problem is that a lot of clients actually end up doing
*more* in the X server than they do themselves directly. Doing
things like showing a line of text on the screen is a lot more
expensive than just keeping track of that line of text, so you end
up with the X server easily being marked as getting "too much" CPU
time, and the clients as being starved for CPU time. And then you
get bad interactive behaviour.
There are a couple of ways of handling problems like this. One is to just favor the X server, either by somehow marking it as the core of interactive behavior or by simply raising its priority. Con has been in favor of the latter approach; to that end, he has posted a separate patch which is aimed at improving latencies for all processes, even when they are not all running at the same priority levels. There have not been any follow-up results reported as of this writing. This difficulty may well not keep RSDL out of the mainline kernel. The advantages inherent in dumping the interactivity heuristics are large, and RSDL does seem to improve life for a number of users. Noticeable performance regressions for some workloads are a problem, though; nobody wants to field a bunch of "2.6.x turned my response to crap" messages from unhappy users. So expect some iterations on this project yet - and, perhaps, an additional kernel cycle or two before it can be merged.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Filesystems and block I/O
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Virtualization and containers
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials CentOSThe CentOS development team has announced the first beta release of CentOS 5 for i386 and x86_64. See the release notes for more information about the beta.According to the CentOS website, "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free." The prominent North American vendor is Red Hat, but the Red Hat legal department defends the Red Hat trademarks and requires that all mention of that trademarked name be absent from the CentOS site and software. However, it's no coincidence that CentOS releases follow closely after those prominent EL releases. Of the various EL clones that showed up a few years ago, CentOS has done an exceptional job of attracting developers and users and keeping up with its upstream parent. Security advisories are posted regularly to the centos-announce mailing list. CentOS supports i386 and x86_64 hardware and there are mailing lists available in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. Looking down the road a ways it looks like there is some possibility for collaboration between Fedora and CentOS. See this thread on centos-devel which looks at the Fedora EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) project. This project is still quite young but some packages are available for download and testing. The epel-devel-list is available for EPEL development discussion.
New Releases Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0: The desktop you were waiting forMandriva has announced the launch of the beta program for Corporate Desktop 4.0. "Ergonomic, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and to administer: by consulting its corporate clients and by exploiting its experience in the desktop area, Mandriva developed Corporate Desktop 4.0, a distribution that can be installed in less than 10 minutes and extensively customized thanks to a new post-installation tool."
RHEL 5 releasedIt's official: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is available. See the list of features to learn more about what's new.
Distribution News The new Debian etch release scheduleThere is an update from the Debian release team: "You might not remember who the release team is, but we still want to inform you about the final leg of the etch release cycle. Our original schedule did not work out due to problems with the kernel and the slower than expected reduction of release critical bugs." The new schedule calls for some aggressive bug fixing and a final release at the beginning of April.
Debian VotesThe Debian Project Leader election is still in the campaigning period. The IRC debate was held recently and the logs have been posted.Debian developers have until March 18 to vote on this General Resolution. "The Debian project resolves that Debian developers allowed to perform combined source and binary packages uploads should be allowed to perform binary-only packages uploads for the same set of architectures."
Alioth goes MercurialDebian's Alioth team has announced the availability of Mercurial for source control. "Alioth can now host your Mercurial repositories in pretty much the same way as it can host your CVS, Subversion, Arch/Bazaar, Bzr and Git repositories."
Gentoo fights flamewars and bad behaviour!The Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users. The draft version of the Code of Conduct is currently being discussed on the Gentoo-dev mailing list. "The Code of Conduct will be voted upon by the Gentoo Council Thursday, March 15th; implementation will be immediate upon final approval. The Code of Conduct describes what the Gentoo Council has deemed acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It also describes the punishment that will be enforced if the Code of Conduct is breached."
SUSE Linux 9.3 security support discontinued soonSUSE Security has announced that SUSE Linux 9.3 will be discontinued soon. "Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 9.3 after April 15th 2007 will not be fixed any more for this product. We expect to release the last updates around April 30th 2007."
Ubuntu beta freeze imminentThe Ubuntu beta freeze is scheduled for March 15, with the beta release happening one week after on March 22.
Google Summer of Code 2007Several distributions have announced that they will be participating in the 2007 Summer of Code. Debian is looking for proposal ideas and mentors and has two wiki pages set up collect them. Mandriva has this announcement with links to a wiki page for ideas and another page for mentors. Ubuntu is also participating and looking for project ideas, mentors and students.
New Distributions pg_live announcementPg_live is a free Linux Live CD community project. It is an enhanced adaptation of one of the Ubuntu family of distributions, known as Xubuntu, and has been designed and optimized expressly for the PostgreSQL Database administrator and enthusiast.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly News - March 13th, 2007The Debian Weekly News for March 13, 2007 covers spring list cleaning, GIF patent has expired, Second Life runs on Debian servers, the release status of the Motorola 680x0 port, handling of inactive Debian accounts, One Laptop per Child Software on Debian, Google's Summer of Code 2007, and much more.
Fedora Weekly News Issue 80The Fedora Weekly News for March 12, 2007 looks at 2 Million Fedora Core 6 Installs, Fedora Core 6 Linux Eclipses 2M User Mark, Talking points for Fedora 7 release, Fedora Infrastructure needs your help!, Fedora 7 and the wireless world, Ambassadors Report: Chemnitz LinuxTag, Review: Fedora 7 Test 2, and several other topics.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for March 5, 2007 covers the Opengear donation of two CM4008, Xfce becomes an official project, Developer of the Week (nightmorph), FOSDEM, Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, Linuxforum 07, and several other topics.
Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #30The Ubuntu Weekly News for February 28, 2007 covers New Team: Ubuntu Scribes, Feisty Fawn Herd5 Released, No Beryl or Compiz for Feisty, Weekly Quiz Update, Changes in Feisty, Upcoming meetings and events, and much more.
Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #31The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for March 10, 2007 looks at Linspire now based on Ubuntu, Statistics of Ubuntuforums, Ohio US Team approved and official, Weekly Quiz Update, Upcoming meetings and events and several other topics.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 193The DistroWatch Weekly for March 12, 2007 is out. "Twenty news announcements on the main page of DistroWatch turned last week into the busiest one so far this year, but things are unlikely to slow down much in the coming days either. The new GNOME 2.18, whose bits and pieces are slowly starting to appear on some mirrors, will be followed by the much awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 later this week, while new development releases from Mandriva Linux (2007.1 RC1) and openSUSE (10.3 alpha 2) are also expected shortly. In other news: How OpenBSD and an old IBM laptop saved a construction project in a Central American jungle, an introduction to Conary - a package management system done right, and a brief comparison between Linux Mint and Freespire - two distributions with similar goals and identical base systems. The feature story of this week's issue looks at the deepening management crisis at Gentoo Linux."
Newsletters and articles of interest Candidates for Debian Project Leader sound off (Linux.com)Linux.com talks with some DPL candidates. "Once again, the Debian project is gearing up to elect a new project leader, with voting set to begin late this month. As we did last year, we asked the DPL candidates to sound off on some of the issues that will face the Debian Project in the next year. Out of nine candidates, six took the time to respond to our questions via email. Steve McIntyre, Sven Luther, and incumbent DPL Anthony Towns failed to respond in time for this article. We received responses from Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Simon Richter, and Raphaël Hertzog." Update: Sven Luther has withdrawn his nomination, leaving only eight candidates.
Mandriva moves in on business Linux desktop (DesktopLinux)DesktopLinux covers the release of Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 beta. "For its desktop environment, Corporate Desktop 4.0 features the X.org 7.1 window manager and the KDE 3.5.4 desktop environment. While GNOME 2.16 is also included, this distribution is optimized for KDE. It also includes a new tool to set KDE user rights from an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory, to complement directory-based authentication."
Distribution reviews Linux Mint freshens Ubuntu's palate (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Linux Mint. "Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards."
Dual-licensed Linux router distro ships v2.0 (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices looks at Vyatta Subscription Edition 2.0 (VS2). "Vyatta two weeks ago released Vyatta Community Edition 2.0 (VC2), which featured a move to a full Debian Linux undercarriage, for enhanced user serviceability. Vyatta does not specify whether VS2 is also based on Debian; however, it seems likely that the two platforms are similar, except for their licensing terms."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development Mirage: a fast and simple image viewerMirage is a relatively new image viewing application which has been designed with speed in mind:
Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer. Because it depends only on PyGTK, Mirage is ideal for users who wish to keep their computers lean while still having a clean image viewer.
The project was started in March, 2006 according to the CHANGELOG file. Mirage has undergone rapid development since then, with fifteen releases so far.
Your editor stands by his original claim: xv, even after nine years of absolutely no development, is still superior to any of the free alternatives. No other tool provides the same ease of use, speed, features, and quality of results.
Nothing has changed in regards to xv development, but xv is still the standard that other viewers are judged against. Let's see how Mirage stacks up. Here are some of the features offered by Mirage:
Some of the features that your author has come to depend on in xv, but are not available in Mirage include:
Some of these missing functions, such as image grab and convert, can be handled by external commands. Perhaps that is in line with the Mirage lightweight design philosophy, but the omissions come at the cost of user inconvenience. Your author tried out version 0.8.1 of Mirage on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft system, for the most part, the application behaved as advertised. There was a slight problem starting up the slideshow mode, when the application was opened up with a *.jpg command line option, the slideshow button was grayed-out until several images were first viewed manually. A repeat slideshow option would also be useful if the application were to be used in an unattended mode. Mirage has a nice look and feel, for the basic job of viewing large collections of images, it performs quite well and your author will keep it on his machine. The Mirage source code and packages are available for download here.
System Applications Database Software pg8000 1.02 releasedVersion 1.02 of pg8000 has been released. "pg8000 is a Pure-Python interface to the PostgreSQL database engine. It is one of many PostgreSQL interfaces for the Python programming language. pg8000 is somewhat distinctive in that it is written entirely in Python and does not rely on any external libraries (such as a compiled python module, or PostgreSQL's libpq library). pg8000's name comes from the belief that it is probably about the 8000th PostgreSQL interface for Python." This version adds support for DB-API 2.0, and a few more features.
MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 has been releasedVersion 5.0.37 of MySQL Community Server is available. "This is our second full (source and binary) release of the MySQL Community Server since we made the split between the Community and Enterprise Version. It includes all bug fixes applied to up to and including the MySQL 5.0.36 Enterprise Server. This release also resolves a crashing bug that could be exploited as a potential local Denial of Service attack".
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe March 11, 2007 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Embedded Systems The Free ECB_AT91 V1 SBCOpen Collector notes the release of the Free ECB_AT91 V1 single board computer. "The design of the ECB_AT91 Single-Board Computer is free. It already runs Debian, OpenEmbedded (Angstrom Distribution) and Buildroot. You can buy one or more, or download the design and build your own. The board is powered by an Atmel AT91RM9200 processor, which features an ARM9 core clocked at 180MHz. It supports up to 64MB of SDRAM, has one SD/MMC slot, 2 MB of serial flash, one 10/100 Ethernet interface, USB host and two serial ports."
LDAP Software Linbox Directory Server 1.1.3 availableVersion 1.1.3 of Linbox Directory Server, an identity and network services management system, is out with new features and bug fixes.
Networking Tools IPCop 1.4.14 released (SourceForge)Version 1.4.14 of IPCop has been announced. "IPCop is a friendly firewall solution protecting networks running on linux. It will be geared towards home and SOHO users. Interface is task based. Hardware requirement could be very minimal and grow with services used. This release update timezone to support US daylight saving time occuring March 11 and mainly update squid and snort. You are encouraged to update from previous releases once some bugs introduced in 1.4.14 are fixed on 1.4.15."
Seagull 1.5.0 released (SourceForge)Version 1.5.0 of Seagull is out. "Seagull is a multi-protocol traffic generator. Especially targeted towards IMS, Seagull supports Diameter (RFC3588 and all applications) over TCP/SCTP and IPv4/IPv6 , TCAP (over SS7 or Sigtran), XCAP over HTTP and Radius."
Web Site Development Midgard Weekly Summary #69: March 8th 2007The March 8, 2007 edition of the Midgard Weekly Summary is out with the latest news about the Midgard web content management system.
Release of remo 0.1.3 alphaVersion 0.1.3 alpha of Remo is out. "Remo stands for "Rule Editor for ModSecurity". It's a project, attempting to bring easier configuration to ModSecurity, an apache application firewall. The second and goal is to make a whitelist/positive security model feasible for ModSecurity deployments. This new release brings support for query string arguments and cookies. Additionally, every request parameter can be optional or mandatory."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ardour at the Google Summer of CodeThe Ardour multi-track audio recorder project has applied for participation in the 2007 Google Summer of Code. "So, my own personal ideas for projects are: Scripting support, Batch command support, Graph-based connection UI, MIDI interface (perhaps on top of the midi support from last years GSoC?? perhaps!), Video tracks, YOUR IDEA HERE".
Data Visualization Asymptote 1.22 released (SourceForge)Version 1.22 of Asymptote is available. "Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text. Problems with loading LaTeX packages and slide presentations were fixed. Non-static variables in every loop iteration are now allocated anew. Formatting under locales with nonperiod decimal separators was fixed, along with logarithmic tick labels near the machine epsilon..."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.18 releasedThe announcement has gone out: GNOME 2.18 is available. See the release notes for an introduction to the new features in this version of the GNOME desktop environment.
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
Dropped network-manager-applet from GNOME 2.18.0The GNOME 2.18.0 release will apparently be missing the network-manager-applet. "The GNOME Release Team has dropped network-manager-applet from GNOME 2.18.0, as no releases were ever made. It can be proposed again for inclusion in 2.20".
KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News)The March 11, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "The Oxygen iconset is moved from playground to kdelibs, changes made throughout KDE to support the new icon names specification. The Crystal iconset is moved from kdelibs to its kdeartwork retirement home. More work on the Oxygen widget style. Security fixes in KTorrent. Initial work on "uninstall" functionality for the KDE Windows installation utility. New "Snowish" theme for the Kamion user information migration utility. Continued graphics improvements across kdegames. Improved wireless network encryption support in Solid. Further work on the Amarok 2.0 porting, with particular attention to the Music Store integration elements. KPilot is to make a surprise return for the KDE 4.0 release."
Draft KDE 4.0 release roadmapA draft KDE 4.0 release roadmap has been posted for comments. Should the current schedule hold, we should expect the 4.0 release to happen toward the end of October (of this year!). "KDE 4.0 will not contain all features announced nor promised: these will come during the lifetime of KDE 4. We can probably switch quickly to a KDE 4.1 release if there are major subsystems ready for merging soon after the KDE 4.0 hits the streets."
The Road to KDE 4: Oxygen Artwork and Icons (KDE.News)KDE.News looks at Oxygen in the Road to KDE 4 series. "One of the big visual changes just happened in KDE 4, the transition of kdelibs to the Oxygen Icon set. This transition is still in progress, and it includes a massive icon naming scheme change that affects thousands of files. But, the Oxygen artwork project much is more than just an icon set, it's a unified way to do artwork for KDE 4. SVG an essential part of Oxygen, so many applications that are now capable of SVG display are also using Oxygen styled artwork."
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 2.0.3 releasedVersion 2.0.3 of GnuPG, an encryption application, has been announced. "This is bug fix release. There are also some minor enhancements."
OpenSSH 4.6 releasedVersion 4.6 of OpenSSH has been released with bug fixes and: "sshd now allows the enabling and disabling of authentication methods on a per user, group, host and network basis via the Match directive in sshd_config."
Financial Applications SQL-Ledger 2.6.26 releasedVersion 2.6.26 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, is out with one change: "added check password check in admin.pl when called with wget or similar commandline utilities".
Games Bullet Physics SDK 2.45 released (SourceForge)Version 2.45 of Bullet Physics SDK is available with a number of new capabilities. "Bullet is a state-of-the-art 3D Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library for games. ZLib license, free for commercial use, including Playstation 3. Supports COLLADA Physics."
Kimboot 1.00 releasedVersion 1.00 of Kimboot, an arcade-style game, has been announced on the PyGame site. Changes include: "Major code cleanup; some parts were rewritten from scratch. This release uses OpenGL for drawing. Theme support: you can make your own graphics and sounds, and then just choose your custom theme in Options. Background image support (theme-dependent). New graphical effects. New kinds of enemies (Drunken, Genius, and Boss). Enemies are now animated."
GUI Packages wxWidgets 2.8.2 releasedRelease 2.8.2 of wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI toolkit, has been announced. "This is mainly a bug fix release; please see changes.txt for details."
Interoperability Wine Weekly NewsletterThe March 12, 2007 edition of the Wine Weekly Newsletter is online with coverage of the Wine project. Topics include: NetTunes, GDIPlus, Cairo Winelib Port, DirectX 10 For SoC?, Developing For Fun While Under a Contract, Winetricks and Lotus Notes Printing Regression.
Multimedia The Road to KDE 4: Amarok 2 Development is Underway (KDE.News)KDE.News continues on the Road to KDE 4 with a look at Amarok 2. "This week we'll take a brief look at some of the many features that are making their way into Amarok 2, which is the development branch for Amarok in KDE 4. The features discussed are all in progress features which have reached varying stages of completion. Read on for information about Amarok's engines (including Phonon), UI changes, changes to the Magnatune music store, OS X support, and more."
Dissent 0.1 announcedVersions 0.1 of Dissent and the associated Dissent-Gstreamer are available. "The Dissent Project attempts to be a full featured multimedia application that can play audio and video files as well as internet radio streams by using powerful media engines such as GStreamer. It also has robust functionality for both RSS feeds and Podcasts which can be viewed in the built in web browser. The Dissent Project aims to tightly integrate services from various organizations such as Amnesty International."
Music Applications Csound 5.05 announcedVersion 5.05 of Csound, a language for music synthesis, is out. "This largely a maintenence release, but as usual there are some new opcodes and facilities. This is the first release to include a French manual".
MMA 1.1 announcedVersion 1.1 of MMA (Musical MIDI Accompaniment) is out with several new features and bug fixes.
Digital Photography UFRaw 0.11 releasedVersion 0.11 of UFRaw, a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras, is out. "The highlight of this release is the new handling of image highlights, which takes care of both highlight restoration and highlight clipping."
Web Browsers Firekeeper - IDS for Firefox availableThe Firekeeper project has been launched. "Firekeeper is an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Firefox. It is able to detect, block and warn the user about malicious sites. Firekeeper uses flexible rules similar to Snort ones to describe browser based attack attempts. Rules can also be used to effectively filter different kinds of unwanted content."
Miscellaneous Pytables 2.0 beta 1 releasedVersion 2.0 beta 1 of Pytables, a package for managing hierarchical datasets, has been announced. "The PyTables development team is very happy to announce the public availability of the first *beta* version of PyTables 2.0. Starting with this release, both the API and the file format have entered in the stage of freezing (i.e. nothing will be modified unless something is clearly *wrong*), so people can use it in order to begin with the migration of their existing PyTables 1.x scripts as well as start enjoying the new exciting features in this major version ;)"
Languages and Tools C ACC 0.5 releasedACC 0.5, a version of the GCC compiler aimed at aspect-oriented C programming, has been released. "Besides some new features, the ACC 0.5 release also includes a set of experimental weave adapters that help integrate aspeCts in the build process of large C-based software projects." Should be an interesting release for people into new approaches to programming languages.
OSELAS.Toolchain launchedRobert Schwebel has sent in an announcement for the launch of the OSELAS.Toolchain. "... we came to the conclusion that, with PTXdist, we already have most of the infrastructure we need for building toolchains: a staging model (get, prepare, extract, compile, install, targetinstall), a Kconfig frontend for easy configuration, autogenerated dependencies, a clean patch management system. So we tried it out and the result is OSELAS.Toolchain(). It is now able to build a full suite of gcc-4.1.2 toolchains for many different arm platforms, including big endian, iwmmxt etc., for mips, powerpc and x86."
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe March 13, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Haskell Haskell Weekly NewsThe March 12, 2007 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online. This week we see the 2007 Haskell Workshop announcement, Haskell.org's participation in the Google Summer of Code gets underway, and of course, new libraries!
Ruby Ruby Weekly NewsThe March 11th, 2007 edition of the Ruby Weekly News takes a look at the latest discussions on the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.
Tcl/Tk Tcl-URL!The March 14, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Emulators DOSBox 0.70 has been released (SourceForge)Version 0.7.0 of DOSBox, an x86 emulator which can be used for running DOS games, is available. "There were a lot of changes since the last version and here is a short list of the larger changes: - Faster dynamic core for certain games. - Improve the cycle guessing code and make it default! - Foreign keyboard layout support."
Libraries GUASI 0.17 releasedStable version 0.17 of GUASI has been announced. "The GUASI library implements a thread based generic asyncronous execution engine, to be used to give otherwise syncronous calls an asyncronous behaviour. It can be used to wrap any syncronous call, so that it can be scheduled for execution, and whose result can be fetched at later time (hence not blocking the submitter thread). The GUASI library can be used as complement to standard event retrieval interfaces like poll(2), select(2) or epoll(4)."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Internet Radio on Death Row (Linux Journal)Doc Searls looks at Internet Radio. "Internet Radio has been sentenced to death. In a move that recalls the Vogons' decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won't be inconvenienced by something it doesn't know, like or understand."
FSFE reaches out with new Freedom Task Force (NewsForge)NewsForge looks into the Free Software Foundation Europe's Freedom Task Force. "In the United States, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has reached out to the community with advocacy campaigns and the consultation process on the next version of the GNU General Public License. By contrast, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is focusing much of its community outreach on the creation of a group it calls the Freedom Task Force (FTF). Although relatively new, the FTF is already starting to make its mark on free software in Europe in the fields of education and compliance, and with its unique approach to the problems of copyright."
Trade Shows and Conferences FSF looks to 2007 as the year of GPLv3 (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch looks forward to the Free Software Foundation's annual associate member and activist meeting. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) holds its annual associate member and activist meeting at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., on March 24. This year's conference theme is the "Year of the Update." The update in question is the upcoming GPLv3, the latest version of the GNU General Public License."
PyCon 2007 Wrapup (O'ReillyNet)Jeremy Jones reports on PyCon 2007. "I recently attended PyCon 2007. It's interesting to look back on the previous year when trying to figure out where to focus my attention in the next year. In organizing my thoughts, I hope to give you some useful information on what's coming. I also had the pleasure of sitting down with Guido van Rossum, Python's creator and benevolent dictator for life. This is the first time that backward compatibility is an issue, and Guido addresses what you need to do to prepare, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the new conversion tool, and points out the benefits of several new language features (for example, full support for Unicode strings). He also discusses the controversy and misunderstanding some of these changes have caused in the Python community, and how they're being resolved."
Companies If you think selling Linux is easy, why not beat Dell to it? (Guardian)This Guardian article argues that selling Linux-installed systems is not as easy a thing for Dell to do as one might expect. "Cost savings also come directly from Microsoft and Intel in the form of discounts and cooperative advertising support for the use of logos, and so on. These schemes don't exist for Linux. But will the tens of thousands of Linux supporters 'Digging' the idea on IdeaStorm ever turn into paying customers? I can't speak for Dell on this, but I suspect very few will. Worse, those few are mostly the sort of buyer no-one really wants."
Psst. Wanna hear about Novell's secretive virtualization company buyout? (LinuxWorld)LinuxWorld covers Novell's acquisition of RedMojo. "Novell in November quietly acquired a company whose resource virtualization software is being used to bolster the data center automation capabilities of Novell's ZENworks management package. The company acquired RedMojo for $9.72 million, though chose not to make an official announcement at the time."
Red Hat hopes to solidify lead with new Linux (ZDNet)ZDNet looks forward to the release of RHEL 5. "Red Hat will permit up to four virtual machines to run atop RHEL 5 Server, but it's adding a new product called RHEL Advanced Platform that supports unlimited virtual machines and includes the company's Global File System software."
Linux Adoption FAA May Ditch Microsoft's Windows Vista (InformationWeek)InformationWeek reports that the US Federal Aviation Administration is not planning to make the move to Windows Vista. "March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft's public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google's new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware."
Japan may migrate 400,000 Windows school desktops to Linux (DesktopLinux.com)DesktopLinux.com reports on a possible large-scale Linux migration effort in Japan. "Japan's public broadcasting network, NHK, reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry plans to introduce Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future, according to Japanese non-profit educational website Gyaku. Japan has been considering Linux for use in its schools since 2004, Gyaku noted. An investigation conducted in Spring 2006 found that more than 400,000 computers at schools in Japan were running on Windows 98 or Windows ME -- systems no longer supported by Microsoft."
Tories want open source Whitehall (BBC News)BBC News reports on an effort to use more open-source software in the UK government. "The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated. George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill. He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government." (Thanks to Richard Stevens).
Interviews Three Minutes With IBM's Linux Leader (PC World)PC World talks with IBM VP Scott Handy. "Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and went on to sales, marketing, and strategy positions covering large accounts, channels, small and medium business, and IBM products for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and OS/2 Warp. Now, as vice president for Linux and open source, he is one of the main public faces articulating IBM's open-source strategy. IDG News Service Senior Writer Elizabeth Montalbano caught up with Handy at the sidelines of the recent LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York. He talked about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open-source initiatives."
Resources Debug your Web code with Firebug (Linux.com)Mayank Sharma explores Firebug on Linux.com. "Developing Web sites isn't as straightforward a task as it used to be at the turn of the century. With an influx of new tools, technologies, and development methodologies, a Web page is no longer a string of plain ol' HTML, but instead a complex mix of stylesheets, markup languages, and scripts. Debugging this complicated blend is no easy task. Firebug is an open source add-on to the Firefox Web browser that lets you edit and debug everything from simple CSS and JavaScript templates to complex AJAX applications."
Remote kernel debugging in FreeBSD using serial communication (developerWorks)IBM developerWorks takes a look at debugging a FreeBSD kernel. "Explore how to remotely debug a FreeBSD kernel that is running on a target machine without affecting system performance. In this article, examine setting up the debug environment using serial communication port, compiling modified kernel code, debugging, and troubleshooting tips."
A dozen tips for testing free software (Linux.com)Linux.com has some tips for software testers. "One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester."
Reviews K3b enters new era with approaching 1.0 release (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews K3b. "One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors."
Thunar file manager - versatile and impressive (Linux On Desktop)Linux On Desktop reviews the Thunar file manager. "Thunar is a file manager that is shipped by default with XFCE and is a integral part of XFCE desktop environment. Thunar is developed by Benedikt Meurer and has been named after the god Thor of Norse mythology. It is similar to Nautilus but uses much less resource as compared to Nautilus, and in fact one of the goals of creating Thunar was to create a file manager that was fast, clean and easy to use." (Found on GnomeDesktop)
Tiny surveillance camera has Linux smarts (Linux Devices)Linux Devices takes a look at the Nuvation IP camera. "Nuvation is demonstrating an ultra-compact, Linux-powered, intelligent IP camera reference design, at the TI Developer Conference in Dallas this week. The engineering consultancy firm says its camera can encode and stream D1 (720x480) video over Ethernet at 30fps. The Nuvation design measures just 3.25 x 1.7 x 1.8 inches (79 x 43 x 47mm), yet it incorporates a full 300MHz ARM9 processor capable of running Linux or another embedded OS, according to the company."
Zabbix: State-of-the-art network monitoring (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at Zabbix. "Zabbix is a server-agent type of monitoring software, meaning you have a Zabbix server where all gathered data is collected, and a Zabbix agent running on each host. Note that you can have more than one Zabbix server installed, but you cannot consolidate data from multiple servers in one single central server. All Zabbix data, including configuration and performance data, is stored in a relational database -- MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle -- on the server. Zabbix server can run on all Unix/Linux distributions, and Zabbix agents are available for Linux, Unix (AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD), Netware, Windows, and network devices running SNMP v1, v2, and v3."
Miscellaneous Australia's LinuxChix unite to form AussieChix (Linux.com)Melissa Draper discusses the launch of the AussieChix group on Linux.com. "Following discussions at the Linux.Conf.Au conference in Sydney in January, members realised that a national group would better serve the country. Last month the groups united to form AussieChix, a new nationwide chapter that makes the group more accommodating to women from across Australia, whilst also improving the communications between the members of the previous chapters."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements EFF Kills Clear Channel PatentThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a press release on its role in successfully challenging a patent being asserted by Clear Channel. "The patent covered a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances. Clear Channel claimed the bogus patent created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings and threatened to sue those who made such recordings. This locked musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocked innovations by others."
EFF: Who controls your television?The EFF has published a report on the workings of the Digital Video Broadcasting project, which is creating television standards for much of the world outside of the Americas. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of DRM involved. "Consumers would never choose this future, so Hollywood will try to force it on them by regulatory fiat. DVB's imprimatur may put restrictive standards on the fast-track to becoming legally-enforced mandates, and existing laws already limit evasion of DRM even for lawful purposes. In effect, private DRM standards will trump national laws that have traditionally protected the public's interests and carefully circumscribed copyright holders' rights."
OLPC systems available for developersWe have received a note from the One Laptop Per Child project saying that the current build of beta-test systems is going well - well enough that they have some systems available to expand their developer program. If you have a project which you think might help out the OLPC folks and would like a cute green laptop to run it on, have a look at the OLPC Developers Program page and let them know what you are thinking.
OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letterThe OpenOffice.org project has sent an open letter to Dell in support of installing their software on Dell's systems. "Let's have a conversation about how we could build an 'OpenOffice.org supplied by Dell' product to give your customers what they are asking for. We'd also be happy to accept any financial contribution that Dell might offer to help ensure that OpenOffice.org continues to evolve in the future."
Commercial announcements Centric releases Centric CRM 4.1Centric CRM has announced the release of Centric CRM 4.1, a Customer Relationship Management system. "Centric CRM 4.1 introduces Action Plans, a new tool that allows a company to quickly establish workflow best practices, as well as expanded support for a total of eleven leading database systems".
Announcing CrossOver 6.0.1, a bug fix releaseVersion 6.0.1 of CrossOver has been announced. "This version is entirely a bug fix release. Notably, it contains a fix so that time sensitive applications will continue to work correctly after the new Daylight Savings Time switch. It also contains a few bug fixes for Outlook and handling multiple CD installers, as well as a range of other minor issues."
Funambol and db4objects enable complex data for mobile devicesFunambol and db4objects have announced Funambol Connector for db4o. "The Funambol Connector for db4o makes it easy for software developers to store and manage complex information in an embedded database on mobile devices such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs. The combination of Funambol and db4o eliminates the need to write extensive code to manage and extract data from complicated data structures and gives users a wide range of mobile devices to access complex data while on the go."
NetBeans Community announces support for Ruby and JRubySun Microsystems, Inc. and the NetBeans(TM) Community have announced an early release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack. "The NetBeans plug-in offers developers added support for dynamic and scripting languages and includes editing features for both Ruby and JRuby -- a 100% pure-Java(TM) implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs on the Java(TM) Virtual Machine. The NetBeans Ruby Pack goes beyond basic editing, syntax highlighting, navigation outline, project support and unit test execution to provide developers with a rich set of features to enhance productivity."
NetXen announces Linux Sockets AccelerationNetXen, Inc. has announced the availability of their Linux Sockets Acceleration product. NetXen "... introduced Linux Sockets Acceleration(tm) (LSA), a solution that delivers far higher network performance while greatly reducing host CPU overhead. It is the first network acceleration solution for Linux that requires no modifications to the kernel, host TCP stack or applications, and can offload both user- and kernel-mode applications. NetXen's LSA is also the first solution to support NIC and offload modes simultaneously."
OpenVZ software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5The OpenVZ project has announced the availability of its operating system server virtualization software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. ""This provides a great base with solid device support and code stability, which we will use as the basis for future OpenVZ software," said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. "We continue to keep in step with the latest Linux releases to serve users in the open source community.""
Open-Xchange to build next generation open-source collaboration suiteOpen-Xchange Inc. has announced the Open-Xchange Community project. "Open-Xchange and the world's leading web-hosting company, 1&1 Internet, recently announced the availability of MailXchange, 1&1's hosted email and collaboration solution based upon Open-Xchange Inc.'s award winning Smart Collaboration(TM) technology. Open-Xchange today is releasing the source code of 1&1 MailXchange server components under General Public License (GPL) and the AJAX-based user interface under Creative Commons License "Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5"."
Oracle becomes an Eclipse Foundation board memberOracle Corporation has announced its joining of the Eclipse Foundation board of directors. "Oracle today announced it will extend its participation in the Eclipse Foundation by becoming a Board Member and Strategic Developer. An Eclipse member since its inception, Oracle's increased role further demonstrates the company's efforts to help drive open source innovations and furthers its commitment to the developer community. Oracle's increased role in the Eclipse community also includes a new proposal to open source its Oracle(R) TopLink technology, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, through the Eclipse Foundation."
Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse FoundationOracle Corporation has announced its plans to release Oracle TopLink as open-source software. "Today, at the EclipseCon Conference, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), a newly appointed Eclipse Board Member and Strategic Developer, announced it will donate its award winning Java persistence framework, Oracle(R) TopLink, to the open source community. In addition, Oracle announced the proposal of a new Eclipse project to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform based on the contribution of Oracle TopLink, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, source code and test cases."
Palamida adds Python support to compliance libraryPalamida has announced the addition of Python language support to its compliance library. "Palamida(TM), the leader in software intellectual property management solutions and audit services, today announced that it has expanded its extensive compliance library to include over 6,200 new open source projects while adding support for the popular Python programming language."
Paradigma Software announces Valentina Server Beta 1Paradigma Software has announced the release of a free beta version of Valentina Server for Linux. "Valentina is a pioneering database system that, built on a unique object-relational model, outperforms almost all commercially available database servers disk based or RAM based. Recent customer provided data compares equivalent search operations with mySQL server at five minutes to complete, down to five seconds with Valentina Server."
SLES with Xen available for SAP NetWeaver and mySAP Business SuiteNovell, Inc. has announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with integrated Xen* virtualization technology for the SAP NetWeaver and mySAP Business Suite.
STMicroelectronics unveils two new System-on-Chip ICsSTMicroelectronics has announced two new SPEAr family configurable System-on-Chip ICs. "The dual-core SPEAr Plus600, complemented with a single-core variant, SPEAr Head600, represents a market-unique solution that enables printer, fax, point-of-sale (POS) and other equipment manufacturers to develop complex yet flexible digital engines at a fraction of the time and cost required by a full-custom design approach. Additionally, the possibility to choose between a single- and a dual-processor device with the same footprint and architecture will enable manufacturers to address different market segments for the same application."
Sun Microsystems announces open source of online game technologySun Microsystems, Inc. has announced plans to release the online game server platform Project Darkstar as open-source code. "Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced plans today at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to open source Project Darkstar, a ground-breaking online game server platform written entirely in Java(TM) technology, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The company also announced the opening of registration for the Darkstar Playground, which will enable developers to create a wide variety of games that can be provisioned through a single server platform."
New Books Ajax on Java - New from O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book Ajax on Java by Steven Douglas Olson.
Resources FSFE NewsletterThe March 13, 2007 edition of the FSFE Newsletter is online with the latest Free Software Foundation Europe news. Topics include: Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa, FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows, FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium), Ciará¡n O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland), End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli, System administration murphy weeks and Get Active: Join the SELF project!
Summer of Code Mentoring HOWTOFederico Mena-Quintero has published a Summer of Code Mentoring HOWTO document. "The Summer of Code, initiated by Google, is a wonderful opportunity for students to learn how to contribute to free software in a short time, while making a nice chunk of money in the process. Each participating student gets a mentor, who is normally a member of an existing free software project. This document intends to give some advice to mentors, so that they'll be able to help their students to complete their projects successfully."
Contests and Awards EFF announces Pioneer AwardsThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2007 Pioneer Awards: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Schneier.
Second Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration AnnouncedThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced that nominations are open for the 2007 Mellon Awards. "The Mellon Awards, in values of $50,000 and $100,000, honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. More information on the awards, including a listing of last year's winners and the 2007 online nomination form, is available at http://matc.mellon.org."
PyWeek #4 in AprilThe fourth PyWeek Challenge has been announced, it will take place from April 1-4, 2007. "The PyWeek challenge: 1. Invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team, 2. Is intended to be challenging and fun, 3. Will hopefully increase the public body of game tools, code and expertise, 4. Will let a lot of people actually finish a game, and 5. May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)"
Mainsoft, Novell, IBM and DevX announce 'Race to Linux 2.0'Mainsoft Corporation has announced the Race to Linux 2.0 challenges, to be held in March and April, 2007. "The 3-series Race to Linux 2.0 challenges Visual Studio developers to experiment with .NET 2.0-to-Linux porting options. DevX will announce the target applications at the beginning of each race. More than 100 developers have registered to date. The first developer to deliver the application running successfully under SUSE Linux on an IBM System x will win a Nintendo Wii and games package."
XMMS2 Logo competition 2007An XMMS2 logo contest has been launched. "XMMS2 Team officially announced it's graphic competition today. The competition goal is for the popular media player to gain a new look and to increase awareness of the project. The competition will be split up in two parts: the first will be for a new logotype. The second part, which will be launched after the conclusion of the first, will aim for a new look for the wiki with reusable elements for client authors to use. First prize in both competitions is an Amazon.com gift certificate valid for $400."
Surveys Dell: what sort of Linux systems would you like?Dell has decided to follow up on requests for Linux-installed systems by running a survey on just what people would like. Questions cover the types of systems, which distributions, etc. There is, however, no question on whether customers want systems with 100% free software. The survey is open through March 23.
Education and Certification LPI offers discounted certification exams at LinuxWorld BelgiumThe Linux Professional Institute will offer discounted certification exams at LinuxWorld Belgium on March 21 and 22, 2007.
TimeSys expands educational webinar seriesTimeSys Corporation "... is adding more sessions to its popular series of educational webinars for embedded Linux developers. Running through March and April, the new topics cover best practices for embedded Linux development through an examination of project risk and the benefits of a common toolset. Later sessions in the series look at technology choices for developers building devices with a graphical interface and an in-depth look at the QEMU processor emulator."
Calls for Presentations Black Hat USA CFPA call for papers has gone out for the Black Hat USA security conference. The event takes place at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV on July 28 - August 2, 2007. Submissions are due by May 1.
DeepSec IDSC 2007 Europe/Vienna CFPA call for papers has gone out for the DeepSec In-Depth Security Conference. The event will take place on November 20-23, 2007 in Vienna, Austria. Proposals are due before June 10.
GUADEC 2007 call for papers deadline extendedGUADEC 2007 call for papers deadline has been extended until March 15.
Upcoming Events GUADEMY: GNOME+KDE Hackmeeting (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org has announced the GUADEMY GNOME+KDE Hack-meeting. The event will be held in Coruña, Spain on March 23-25, 2007. "KDE will be represented by Aaron Seigo, Larrosa, Astals and Rafael Fernandez, and from GNOME, Rodrigo Moya, Álvaro del Castilo, Álvaro López Ortega, Carlos Garnacho, Andrés Gómez and Iago Toral will be there."
The 2007 JavaOne ConferenceSun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the 2007 JavaOne Conference. The event will take place in San Francisco, CA on May 8-11, 2007.
Linux Installfest workshop in Davis, CAThe Linux Users' Group of Davis will hold the next Linux Installfest in Davis, CA on Saturday March 31, 2007.
The 2007 MySQL Conference and ExpoThe 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo will take place in Santa Clara, California on April 23-26, 2007. "This year's program promises to be the most exciting ever, offering more than 110 sessions and workshops for every type of user -- from experienced database administrators and programmers to MySQL beginners. Attendees who register by March 14 will save $200 off the standard fee. Other discounts are also available that may be used in conjunction with early registration for additional savings."
Perens to rain on Novell's paradeBruce Perens has announced a press conference during the Novell Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City, UT during the week of March 19. "The topics will be: The Microsoft-Novell agreement, GPL version 3 and how it will impede Novell from making use of new innovation by the Free Software community and Software patents vs. Free Software."
Samba eXPerience 2007Some of the Samba eXPerience 2007 speakers have been announced. "The organizers are happy to welcome Howard Chu (Chief Architect of OpenLDAP) as the keynote speaker. Other topics include: talks from the WINE project and OpenChange to show the link to other projects, a talk regarding Samba and GPLv3 reflecting current legal discussions and, of course, developers, users, and vendors fill out the rest of the program with 25 talks in two days."
SciPy07 dates announcedThe dates for the 2007 Scientific Python conference have been announced. "According to www.scipy.org, The SciPy 2007 Conference will be on August 16-17 this year; tutorials and sprints will run on the 14th, 15th, and 18th. I wont be able to attend (new baby), but Id like to organize a half-day or one-day session to update and extend the Software Carpentry notes. Lots of modules need writing, both on Python-specific stuff and on general software engineering skills for scientists and engineers."
Events: March 22, 2007 to May 21, 2007The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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In 2004, LWN's Jon Corbet wrote
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