Linux in the news

The Lessons of the $100 Laptop (eWeek)

eWeek reports from Nicholas Negroponte's LinuxWorld keynote. "'I have come to a conclusion that every new release of software is distinctly worse than the other. Why? It's because the fat lady can't sing. There's a natural tendency to add stuff,' Negroponte said. 'Suddenly it [becomes] like a very fat person - uses most of their energy to move the fat. We've gotten to the point where we have to completely rethink.'"

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Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register)

The Register reports on Microsoft's virtualization announcements. "Microsoft today lobbed three massive bombs into the server virtualization market. First off, it will now support - wait for it - Linux, when the OS is running on top of its Virtual Server product. Secondly, Microsoft has made Virtual Server free. And, in a move few thought possible, Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware."

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LinuxWorld: Motorola reports on its experiences with Linux phones (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports from LinuxWorld, where a Motorola manager discussed that company's experience with putting Linux in its phones. "Still unresolved, Vandenbrink says, is a common understanding of what it means to be a 'good GPL citizen.' Hardware and software vendors disagree, leaving different pieces of the stack at different levels of 'openness.' Motorola's stance is that a commitment to openness is critical; it learned that during its first generation of Linux phones."

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The Open Source Legal Landscape, by Brendan Scott (Groklaw)

Groklaw covers a talk by Brendan Scott at LinuxWorld, Sydney. "Brendan Scott, who heads up Open Source Law, just gave an interesting talk, "The Open Source Legal Landscape," at LinuxWorld in Sydney on Wednesday, and he has given me permission to share it with you on Groklaw. I think you'll find it very helpful, particularly if you are a company thinking of using GPL'd or other FOSS code, or if you are involved in a project that is trying to decide how to license your project. If you prefer, you can download it as a PDF. He explains a number of things, including why you should not get your legal advice from your engineers."

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Penguin Day Seattle employs FOSS for good works (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports from Penguin Day Seattle. " Free and open source software can help save the world. That was the point of Seattle's Penguin Day, which brought together nonprofits and FOSS advocates looking to support this other community. The event, held last weekend, drew organizations from around the country and around the globe, including Maryland, New York, Ohio, Texas, Washington, D.C., Canada, the UK, and Turkey."

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The End to the Trademark Tale (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports that SCO has failed in its attempt to obtain the UNIX SYSTEM LABORATORIES trademark. "The USPTO denied the application, as you can see in their letter of final denial dated September 12, 2005. They had six months to respond to the letter, and if they failed, that would usually be the end of the process. That deadline came and went on March 13, 2006. According to the USPTO website, SCO did not file any response. What normally happens next? The application would be marked "Abandoned.""

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IBM offers bounty for Exchange customers (ZDNet)

IBM is paying customers to dump Microsoft Exchange, according to this article on ZDNet. "IBM upped the stakes in an ongoing contest over corporate e-mail software with a program that offers business partners up to $20,000 to dump Microsoft's Exchange in favor of IBM's Lotus software on Linux. Dubbed "Migrate to the Penguin," the latest IBM incentive plan, to be announced later on Thursday, is an expansion of its Move2Lotus program, which is aimed at winning over third-party consultants and software resellers that work with Microsoft's Exchange."

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Linux to be top Oracle platform within a year (CBR)

Computer Business Review reports on a survey done by the International Oracle Users Group claiming that Linux will become the top platform for Oracle databases within the next year. "By next year, respondents say those numbers will change to 44% Linux, 43% Solaris, followed by 37% Windows Server 2003 and, not surprisingly, a marked drop to 21% for Windows 2000. What's interesting is that the survey implies that migration to Linux will come, not only from Solaris, but Windows as well."

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Tradeware trades Solaris for Red Hat (NewsForge)

NewsForge finds another business that is replacing proprietary Unix with Linux. "Tradeware Global is a financial services company that allows securities brokers to provide direct market access to their clients. It currently handles 5% of all transactions in the New York and American stock exchanges. Tradeware is about halfway through with an infrastructure migration that is moving the company's 100+ servers off of Solaris and onto Red Hat Linux."

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Justices question eBay patent arguments (Yahoo)

Yahoo has a Reuters article on the Supreme Court hearing of the eBay patent case. "'You're talking about a property right, and the property right is explicitly the right to exclude others,' Justice Antonin Scalia told eBay's lawyer. 'That's what a patent right is ... give me my property back.'"

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A lawyer who is also idealist - how refreshing (Guardian)

Glyn Moody talks with Eben Moglen about the GPLv3 effort in this Guardian article. "In the year 2006, the home is some real estate with appliances in it. In 2016, the home will be a digital entertainment and data processing network with real estate wrapped around it. The basic question then is: Who has the keys to your home? You or the people who deliver movies and pizza? The world they are thinking about is a world in which they have the keys to your home because the computers that constitute [your home's] entertainment and data processing network work for them, rather than for you."

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Setting up Linux compatibility on FreeBSD 6 (NewsForge)

NewsForge has an article on running Linux applications under FreeBSD. "In this article I will cover the steps necessary to enable and configure Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD 6. I'll also share a couple of my own experiences with getting some well-known desktop Linux applications to run on FreeBSD 6."

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The Gemcutter's Workshop: Many Developments in the Ruby Community (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal recaps news, events and releases in the Ruby world. "The past couple of weeks have been huge in the Ruby world. A number of major releases of popular Ruby packages were made, and several interesting posts were made to blogs and the Ruby mailing list. Let's now take a quick look at the bi-week that was."

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Speed your code with the GNU profiler (developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks covers the use of the GNU profiler. "The performance needs of software vary, but it's probably not surprising that many applications have very stringent speed requirements. Video players are a good example: a video player is not much use if it can only play a video at 75 percent of the required speed. Other applications, such as video encoding, are lengthy operations that are best run "batch" style, where you start a job and leave it running while you go do something else. Although these types of applications don't have such hard performance limits, increasing speed will still bring benefits, such as being able to encode more videos over a given period and being able to encode at a higher quality in the same time."

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What Is Wireless Security (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet looks at security in wireless networks. "Network security in a wireless LAN environment is a unique challenge. Whereas wired networks send electrical signals or pulses through cables, wireless signals propagate through the air. Because of this, it is much easier to intercept wireless signals. This extra level of security complexity adds to the challenges network administrators already face with traditional wired networks. There are a number of extremely serious risks and dangers if wireless networks are left open and exposed to the outside world. This article covers the types of attacks wireless networks encounter, preventive measures to reduce the chance of attack, guidelines administrators can follow to protect their company's wireless LAN, and an excellent supply of online resources for setting up a secure wireless network."

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My sysadmin toolbox (Linux.com)

Linux.com has another installment of the sysadmin toolbox. "I'm a librarian by trade, and while this tool may be a little specialized for general sysadmin work, if you're a librarian who's ever had to deal with Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records, then the MARC Record Translation Program (MRTP) is for you. MRTP will take a file of MARC records and turn them into legible, readable records that are editable by hand or with Perl. Comparable in some respects to MarcEdit, this program is more of a scripting program than a GUI-based app. It's really only useful for a specialized market, but if you need it, you need it."

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Windows Linux DualBoot Tutorial (Howto forge)

Howto forge presents a tutorial on setting up a Windows/Linux dual-boot system. "This tutorial was written to help set up a dual boot on a SATA drive but it will also work for PATA so continue forward and I will let you know if you need to skip something. In order to have a fully functional dual boot system it is preferred that Windows be loaded first. After that you can load Linux and easily dump the boot configuration on Windows NTLDR file (comparable to Linux boot file)."

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A look at GNOME 2.14 (Ars Technica)

Ars Technica reviews GNOME 2.14. "The GNOME team recently announced another excellent release. GNOME 2.14 includes a variety of spiffy enhancements, bug fixes, improvements, and new features that make it the best GNOME desktop environment ever. Already available in Ubuntu Dapper and the recently released Fedora Core 5, GNOME 2.14 awaits your use and abuse. I've poked and prodded it and now I'm ready to talk about it." (Found on GnomeDesktop)

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My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Linux audio players. "My test system is a Toshiba Tecra 9000 laptop with an Intel 82801CA-ICH3 sound card. I use Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.04, GNOME, and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Dapper Drake is still a beta release of Ubuntu, which may have led to some of the instability I witnessed. I confined myself to looking at the audio players I could find included within the Ubuntu APT software repositories."

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Gregarius aggregator succeeds with feeds (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Gregarius. "Gregarius is written mainly in PHP, and available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In order to run it you need a Web server, SQL database, and PHP with the appropriate extensions for accessing the database of your choice. Apache, with the mod_rewrite module, is the preferred Web server for Gregarius, although you can use other Web servers as well. The program supports MySQL and SQLite databases, and PostgreSQL support is on the way for an upcoming version."

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Low-cost all-in-one remote access server runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices takes a look at Opengear's Linux-powered, remote access server. "The CM4001 is the lowest-cost model yet in Opengear's CM4000 line of remote access servers based on uClinux and other open source software. The new model is meant primarily to help IT departments support small branch offices, but can also be used by consultants and software vendors to support small clients, or by mobile users to access their office systems via Microsoft's RDP (remote desktop protocol) or via open source VNC (virtual network computing) software, Opengear says."

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Is Linux Voice over IP Ready? (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at VoIP on Linux. "Linux generally has two types of sound architecture: the older Open Sound System or OSS, which works with every UNIX-like system, and the newer Advanced Linux Sound Architecture or ALSA, which has better support for Linux, as the name indicates. One application may support OSS and another, ALSA. When you have a choice, we advise you to select the use ALSA option in VoIP programs. Select ALSA or OSS settings for sound and recording levels accordingly in your distribution's volume control panel. We tested four applications, based on popularity. We tested all of them on Fedora Linux."

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Binghamton University and STOC Launch Linux Collaboration Center (LinuxElectrons)

LinuxElectrons mentions a new Linux Technology Center that is being launched in Binghamton, NY. "The Linux Technology Center (LTC) will focus on improving basic and applied research in Linux-based and open-source applications by drawing together key competencies from the University and industry leaders, IBM and Mainline Information Systems, Inc. The center is expected to enhance research capabilities and expand the Linux knowledge base, fostering job creation and economic growth in the Greater Binghamton community and New York State."

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