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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Moglen: 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3' (Groklaw)Groklaw has posted a transcription of a talk that FSF attorney Eben Moglen gave to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law on June 26. "The theme is the connection between GPLv3, mathematics, and the sharing of human knowledge. As a jumping off point, he asks us to imagine a world in which arithmetic has become property. Even stating that diminishes it, actually."
That Which Survives (TuxDeluxe)Jeremy Allison writes about the impermanence of proprietary data formats. "I think proprietary record formats will present a problem for historians. Perhaps not in the short-term, but certainly in the medium to long term (and remember I'm talking about hundreds if not thousands of years now). Imagine that some historian in 500 years time discovers Vice President Cheney's "undisclosed location" and finds his secret laptop computer. "Finally," the historian thinks, "we will know who advised this administration about energy policy!" as he swims back to the surface of the ocean above the Washington monument. Unfortunately it turns out the data was written in the "Word-mangler for Windows 2002" format, for which no specifications were ever published, and which was deliberately designed to be difficult for the competition to read."
Trade Shows and Conferences aKademy 2007: The First Impression (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the beginning of the aKademy 2007 conference. "aKademy 2007 has started! Saturday, the first day of the conference, brought us many talks about various topics, ranging from very technical to more practically oriented. These talks are so content-rich that our coverage of the user conference will require several consecutive articles. Read on for the first aKademy 2007 Report, the First Impression."
aKademy 2007 coverage continuedKDE.News continues its coverage of the aKademy 2007 conference with a look at the Keynotes and the Tracks. "Saturday opened with Lars Knoll, talking about KDE from the perspective of a troll. Trolltech employs over 50 full-time developers on Qt itself, accompanied by an assortment of testers and support personnel. Following the ideas behind 'extreme programming', Qt employs extensive code reviews and an incremental design." The official KDE Conference Press Brochure [PDF] is also available.
Day one at the Ottawa Linux Symposium (Linux.com)Linux.com covers the first day of the Ottawa Linux Symposium. "The opening day of the 9th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) began with Jonathan Corbet, of Linux Weekly News and his now familiar annual Linux Kernel Report, and wrapped up with a reception put on by Intel where they displayed hardware prototypes for upcoming products."
Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007 Day 1 (excess.org)excess.org reports on some talks at OLS. "The ninth annual OLS has begun in Ottawa's sweltering summer heat. There are as many as three different talks and two different tutorial topics being presented in each time slot. This is a summary of the talks I attended in day 1." These talks include The Kernel Report - Jon Corbet, KVM: The Kernel-Based Virtual Machine - Avi Kivity, Kernel Support For Stackable File Systems - Josef Sipek, and more.
Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007 Day 2 (excess.org)excess.org covers day two of the Ottawa Linux Symposium. "OLS topics on day two including Linux Kernel Development, EXT4, Cell Broadband Engine, Debugging Google clusters and LinuxBIOS."
OLS 2007 Day 3 (excess.org)Excess.org continues its coverage of the Ottawa Linux Symposium with this summary from the third day. "OLS topics on day three including Lguest, SMB2, Large memory allocations and Concurrent Pagecache."
Linux contributor base broadens (LinuxWorld)LinuxWorld covers a talk by Greg Kroah-Hartman at OLS. "As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday."
Companies Google Desktop reaches Linux PCs at last (Tech.co.uk)Tech.co.uk notes the availability of Google Desktop for Linux. "Google's popular search application that indexes data on a computer, rather than online, is now available for Linux machines after the company's latest beta release. The Linux version of Google Desktop joins a fully complete Windows program and a Mac version that is currently also in beta. It features all the indexing and searching features seen on other platforms but lacks some of the frills of the Windows application."
Red Hat beats estimates and doubters (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch reports on Red Hat's latest financial results. "The big Linux-business question of the latest financial quarter was: Would Red Hat be battered by Oracle? Knocked around by Microsoft and its new Linux partners, Novell, Xandros, and Linspire? Daunted by a Sun revival? Or would the Raleigh, NC-based Linux company turn in a great quarter? And, the answer is, with total revenue of $118.9 million, an increase of 42 percent from the year ago quarter and up 7 percent from the prior quarter, Red Hat is back to kicking rump and taking names in business Linux."
Red Hat CEO says he talked patents with Microsoft (eWeek)eWeek reports on licensing talks between Red Hat Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "Red Hat Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said his company last year held talks with Microsoft Corp. over a patent agreement that broke down before the software giant signed a deal with Red Hat rival Novell Inc. The developer of Linux software, has yet to sign such a deal which could see Novell, its biggest rival, woo customers away from Red Hat and work on product development and sales with the world's No.1 software maker."
Interviews What's new in the Ruby World: rocaml (Linux Journal)Linux Journal features an interview with Mauricio Fernandez. "Last week, Mauricio Fernandez announced a new Ruby to OCaml bridge that hes working on, called rocaml. With the growing interest in functional languages in the Ruby world, this seemed like the sort of thing I needed to talk to him about, so I sent off a quick set of questions, and this is what I heard back."
Resources The Power of Google Gears (Part 1) (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly presents part one of a series by Jack Herrington on Google Gears. "Web applications are great, that is until you go off the grid. As more and more Ajax-driven tools are created that mimic desktop applications through web interfaces, the ability to use those applications once the Wi-Fi signal is lost becomes more important. Jack Herrington gives us an introduction to Google Gears, a tool that allows just that kind of functionality."
Troubleshooting Linux Audio, Part 1 (Linux Journal)Dave Philips presents part one of a Linux Journal series on troubleshooting Linux audio systems. "I have a friend who has had nothing but nightmares result from his attempts at setting up the fabled low-latency high-performance Linux audio system. In sympathy with his plight I present here a primer in three parts for troubleshooting common and uncommon problems with the Linux sound system. Parts 1 & 2 will present programs used to analyze and configure your audio setup. Part 3 will list the most frequently encountered problems along with their suggested solutions."
Linux Gazette #140Issue #140 of the Linux Gazette has been published. Articles include: A Router With Just One Ethernet Port, Custom Hobbit Monitoring Using SNMP, Away Mission: Sem-Tech 07 Conference, Setting up an Encrypted Debian System, Encrypted Storage with LUKS, RAID and LVM2, Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up?, HelpDex, Ecol, The Geekword Puzzle and The Linux Launderette.
Cookin with Ruby on Rails - Designing for Testability (O'ReillyNet)Bill Walton works with Ruby on Rails in an O'Reilly article. "Paul and CB are back, and this time CB wants Paul to convince the Boss to try a new approach to testing, one that leverages the powerful tools Rails can offer. In the latest installment of Bill Walton's monthly series, you'll learn how to build effective testing into your Rails projects."
Reviews AMD applies make-up to the face of its Linux Control Centre (the Inquirer)the Inquirer reviews a new release of the ATI Control Panel. "NINE MONTHS ago I wrote with surprise about how ATI's Linux Mobility drivers "didn't suck" yet how the Control Panel sucked. AMD has surprisingly made my complaints obsolete. The latest Catalyst for Linux package on AMD's ATI/Linux support page at the time of this writing is version 8.38.6, a 51MB+ download released six days ago, and which I have been running so far for five days with my testing workhorse, the Gateway 7422 notebook which sports one ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 chipset with 64MB of video memory."
Options in OpenOffice.org Calc (Linux Journal)Linux Journal takes a look at the options in OpenOffice.org Calc. "Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to OpenOffice.org's habit of sharing code between applications, some of the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org applications. Others are unique to Calc and the business of spreadsheets. Either way, the more you know about Calc's options, the more you can take control of your work."
Miscellaneous Massachusetts Lowers its Standards (Groklaw)Groklaw notes that the state of Massachusetts has added Ecma-376 Office OpenXML to the list of potentially acceptable "open formats". "OpenXML doesn't belong on any list of usable standards until it is one, a real one, where the playing field is even. Instead, I gather from Weir's description that it's like traveling to a new town and asking for a map, but the directions are written in such a way that only longtime dwellers can read and follow them. You as a newcomer have no way to understand them and hence find your way around. If the directions say, "Go right when you get to the road where Nellie used to live until she married that musician and moved to Memphis," you don't know Nelly or where she lived before."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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