Linux in the news

European Union Researches the Benefits of Open Source Software (O'Reilly Network)

O'Reilly reports on the research project "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study", funded by the European Union, which explores the reasons behind the widespread use and support of free software. "This is, to my knowledge, the first large-scale, rigorous study concerning any aspect of free software. It involves interviews with thousands of developers and hundreds of businesses, with carefully-chosen questions and a correlation of results."

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Building the underground computer railroad (Salon)

Here's a Salon article on anti-globalization groups which are fixing up old computers and sending them off to developing countries. "If you just look at their specifications, the systems the activists are building here seem almost worthless, Pentium 100-class machines with about a gigabyte of hard drive space and 80 megs of RAM. The sort of computer that went for thousands in 1996, but that wouldn't fetch $50 on eBay today. But if you wipe Windows off these systems and replace it with a Linux-based operating system, and if you just plan to use them for the Web and e-mail, they can be quite useful..." Nobody seems to see any irony in installing a globally-developed operating system on computers and sending them around the world as a way of fighting globalization.

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UnitedLinux might not be very GPL-friendly (NewsForge)

NewsForge has an article about the UnitedLinux closed-beta NDA's compatibility with the GPL. "Is UnitedLinux down with the idea behind software libre, or are they just trying to become a Red Hat killer and Linux oligopoly in order to make some fast bucks?"

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A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Lawrence Lessig suggests new methods for dealing with spam, and also looks at copyright issues. "But at least with the spam problem, there is a much simpler solution that, so far, Congress has failed to see. Imagine a law that had two parts—a labeling part and a bounty part. Part A says that any unsolicited commercial e-mail must include in its subject line the tag [ADV:]. Part B says that the first person to track down a spammer violating the labeling requirement will, upon providing proof to the Federal Trade Commission, be entitled to $10,000 to be paid by the spammer."

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Less RMS, more freedom - FSF pitches to wider audience (Register)

The Register looks at the changing role of the Free Software Foundation. Quoting Bradley Kuhn: "Of course, I love the Free Software community and am an active member of it. However, there was always one aspect of our community that didn't sit right with me: the idea that you had to 'prove your hacker credentials' to be taken seriously."

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Jumpy Caldera needs vision correction (ZDNet)

This editorial goes through the business history of Caldera, suggesting where they have gone wrong in the past, and where they are going wrong in the present. "It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to imagine what the investors, including Ray Noorda, have been pushing for at recent Caldera board meetings: ditch Linux, and stick with the Unix cash cow. Oh, and change the name, just for good measure."

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Ballmer: We'll outsmart open source (ZDNet)

ZDNet is carrying Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's latest comments about Linux. "'Linux is not about free software, it is about community,' he said. 'It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money--it started off bankrupt, in a way.'"

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MS design switch thwarts Xbox mod chips (Register)

Accordint to the Register, Microsoft has modified the hardware for its Xbox game platform, which will thwart the porting of Linux to the platform. "Microsoft has made some modifications to the internal design of Xbox in the name of security, the most immediate upshot being apparently that existing mod chips won't work with the new design. According to a posting last week on the Xboxhacker BBS (reproduced here, the first of the new designs have been spotted in Australia."

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Red Hat 8.0 To Launch This Month (TechWeb)

TechWeb reports that Red Hat Linux 8.0 will be released with a large emphasis on the desktop. "Red Hat has never been a major advocate of Linux on the desktop, but version 8.0 will demonstrate a change of heart. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company, whose namesake Linux distribution is the de facto standard in the United States, maintains Linux is not geared for the typical consumer or business secretary but does have practical use for a select group of corporate and technical users"

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Open-source group gets Sun security gift (News.com)

CNET has a few more details about Wednesday's announcement that Sun gave elliptic curve cryptography to OpenSSL. "The deployment schedule is on the order of several years to a decade unless something comes along in the interim. I would conjecture that by 2010 or so, this will be widely used."

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Sun's Linux PC cheaper, McNealy boasts (News.com)

CNET has published a nice summary of Sun's Linux initiatives. "Sun Microsystems will get into the PC business next year, selling Linux-based desktops that will cost less than half to own and operate than comparable systems running Windows, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said Wednesday."

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Sun releases Liberty Alliance tool (News.com)

Here's a brief News.com article on Sun's first Liberty Alliance release. "Sun executives say the Java-based tool is the first open-source implementation of the Liberty Alliance standard and a prototype of Sun's forthcoming server software, called Identity Server 6.0, which will manage computer user's access and authentication."

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CEO of Raleigh, N.C.-Based Red Hat Speculates on Future of Technology (Nando)

The Raleigh, N.C. News & Observer takes a look at what keeps Red Hat CEO up at night. "It has nothing to do with Wall Street investors and analysts who are still waiting for Red Hat's big pop -- some sort of return on the traction the alternative Linux operating system is getting in the marketplace."

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Practical Matters Rule IBM's Tactics with Competitors

The Seattle Times has an interview with Steve Mills, head of IBM's software division. "The reality is the world is very heterogeneous; it's not Windows-only and the overwhelming majority of business transactions in medium and large businesses are not running on Windows. They're running on a wide variety of Unix systems and IBM mainframes. It's a very complex world, and that world's not going to change very quickly."

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Open source haunts Microsoft (ZDNet)

ZDNet interviews the program manager of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft's answer to Open Source. "The fact is that Linux is now competing with Windows. That is good because it is spurring us on and making us compete better, but equally, it is difficult for us to say Windows has better management tools than Linux because all of a sudden people say we are attacking open source."

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At the center of the patent storm (News.com)

News.com talks with Danny Weitzner, chair of the W3C patent policy working group. "The open-source community has played a really important role at the W3C because, clearly, royalty-bearing standards create a fundamental problem for open-source software. But the need for royalty-free standards would exist even if there were no open-source solutions."

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Building a Linux Minicluster using commodity components (LinuxDevices.com)

The Embedded Reasoning Institute of the Sandia National Laboratories recently constructed a 4-node Linux cluster based on commodity PC/104 modules and other related components. The system was designed for use in parallel programming tutorials, demonstrations, and displays, and was showcased at the Supercomputing 2001 Conference (Denver, CO) and at the Embedded Systems Conference 2002 (San Francisco, CA). This LinuxDevices.com article by two key members of the project team describes the overall project and provides information on how the system was constructed.

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Using MPICH to Build a Small Private Beowulf Cluster (Linux Journal)

This Linux Journal article shows how you can build a small Beowulf cluster using MPICH. "Our new Beowulf cluster consists of a private network of eight systems dual-booting between Windows 2000 Professional and Red Hat 7.1. Each computer has a single AMD 1.4GHz Athlon processor, 512MB RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a 64MB NVIDIA video card and 100Mb Ethernet with switching hub (did I say that our administration and school board were kind to us?). We are using the current version of MPICH (1.2.2.3) as our MPI library."

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Introducing YAFFS, the first NAND-specific flash file system (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices.com introduces YAFFS (yet another flash file system), an open source project working on a NAND-specific flash file system. "Hard disks are not a viable storage option for many embedded and handheld systems because they are too big, too fragile and use too much power. For some years now, people have been using common-old NOR flash for file system storage. JFFS and JFFS2 do an excellent job of this for Linux. For storage applications NOR flash is not that great because it is not very dense (i.e. not much storage per chip), is costly and is slow to write. NAND flash, on the other hand, is low cost, dense, and writes fast; but it has other limitations."

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Anatomy of a Read and Write Call (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal dissects the anatomy of a read/write call. "As it turned out, the gcc benchmark was the one that everyone seemed to be improving on the most. As we analyzed what the benchmark was doing, we found out that basically it opened a file, read its contents, created a new file, wrote new contents, then closed both files. It did this over and over and over."

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Using Logical Volume Management (Linux Journal)

Here is a Linux Journal article about Logical Volume Management. "Last December, I set up my Linux workstation. Since I didn't really know how I would use the machine over the next few months, I decided to install LVM - I was trained in IBM AIX LVM, so I knew what it could do. I also chose to create my filesystems using ReiserFS, which turned out to be a huge benefit. Four months later, I filled the /home filesystem. Traditionally, I would have been forced to move stuff around, and make a bunch of symlinks to use the space on another file system, or repartition, reformat and reload my data. In this case, /home was 100% full, but my /share and /tmp filesystems had several gigabytes of unused space on them. The LVM HOWTO descibes a classic scenario like this one that illustrates exactly why LVM is an excellent tool."

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devfs for Management and Administration (Linux Journal)

Philip Streck illustrates the installation and use of devfs in a Linux Journal article.

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Linux Orbit reviews OEone HomeBase DESKTOP

Linux Orbit has a review of the OEone HomeBase DESKTOP. "The Linux desktop is certainly getting a lot of media play these days. Sun is on the verge of some major desktop announcements, Red Hat 8.0 promises to be another interesting wrinkle, and let's not forget Lycoris, Lindows and the upcoming release of Xandros. Not to be forgotten, OEone recently announced that their HomeBase DESKTOP product is now compatible with Red Hat 7.3. Since that is the current Linux distribution that I run, I thought I'd give their product a test drive."

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Gwana-gwana landslide buries Sun Linux (Register)

Here is the Register's take on Sun Linux. "Sun's Linux Desktop turns out to be prime-time Gwana-gwana. Sun will release a distro at some point in 2003 - can't say when; and it'll be competitively priced - can't say how much, but it will be cheaper than whatever we reckon Windows costs. Er, that's it for now."

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Jabbering along with tkcJabber (Open For Business)

Open For Business reviews TkcJabber a Jabber client that runs on the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. "TkcJabber, which is produced by Rancho Santa Margarita, California-based theKompany, Inc., is a client for the Free Software instant messaging system known as Jabber. Jabber works in much the same fashion as better known protocols such as AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, allowing you to have real-time conversations with others. Unlike the others, however, Jabber does not have a central server like those services, but instead uses a decentralized system similar to the way e-mail works."

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uClinux: World's most popular embedded Linux distro? (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices.com looks at the uClinux distribution from both technical and historical points of view. "Despite claims to the contrary, uClinux may well represent the world's first, most mature, and most commercially successful embedded Linux distribution. While other embedded distributions rely on upscale processors to get reasonable performance, uClinux uses solid code, a firm guiding hand, and actual product experience with deeply embedded systems. The results are smaller code, better performance, and lower cost -- all of which is applicable to both MMU-less and MMU-enabled systems."

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United Linux Readies Open Beta Release (TechWeb)

TechWeb covers the upcoming beta release of United Linux. "UnitedLinux, a group of Linux providers building a common, enterprise-ready release of the open source operating system, said Wednesday it will let loose with a free beta of its source code Sept. 23."

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UnitedLinux defends open-source roots (ZDNet)

ZDNet delves deeper into United Linux, and the "closed beta" that comes with a non-disclosure agreement. ""Since nearly all of the volunteers from the Free Software community (your fellow developers) did not receive a copy of the so-called 'closed beta', we ask that in a show of good faith, you make available at least the terms of distribution you used for that product," [FSF director Bradley] Kuhn said in the letter. "Even as you release your new product to the public, the past situation must be clarified."" Conectiva has made the full text of the NDA available in response.

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Lab to sample Linux for weapons work (News.com)

News.com reports on a new Linux-based supercomputer that is being deployed at LANL for nuclear weapons simulation. "The lab has been a pioneer in building inexpensive supercomputers made out of ordinary computing components and the Linux operating system. Thus far, however, LANL's nuclear weapons simulation software runs on more expensive systems from SGI and Hewlett-Packard such as HP's $215 million "Q" now under construction. A $6 million price tag may sound like a bargain in comparison, but software must be reworked to run using less expensive clusters of Linux machines."

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We are the west, we are the IP (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers the work of an international group, The Commission on Intellectual Property Rights. "A distinguished group of academics, government representatives and businesspeople this week came out with a set of recommendations which, if taken seriously by governments around the world, could have a drastic effect on the software industry. The proposals, by the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, would also have a drastic effect on the lives of millions of people in the developing world. All areas of intellectual property are addressed in the Commission's report--including health, as well as agricultural and genetic resources and traditional knowledge."

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