Linux in the news

Linux team tells VMware and Xen to get their acts together (Register)

Here's an article in The Register about the process of getting virtualization technology into the Linux kernel. "Xen, by contrast, wants to make the most of its open source ties and create the tightest possible bonds with Linux. Behind closed doors, some Xen backers say that Sun, Microsoft and Novell will refuse to support VMI. Such political manoeuvering shows how seriously Xen backers take this debate."

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Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill (News.com)

Here's a News.com report on the latest attempt to expand copyright law in the U.S. "Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. 'If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we'd all be violating this expanded definition,' Litman said." The law would also bring civil forfeiture to copyright enforcement.

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Day one at the Desktop Linux Summit (NewsForge)

Joe Barr reports on the Desktop Linux Summit. "The Desktop Linux Summit (DLS) 2006 kicked off yesterday in the Manchester Grand Hyatt in downtown San Diego. The summit, now in its fourth year, was created by Linspire, but it has outgrown its uni-distro roots, with sponsors and speakers coming from competing Linux vendors such as Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. An opening day crowd of more than 600 attendees heard a range of speakers reflecting that diversity."

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Beyond Plug & Play (Linux Journal)

Doc Searls writes about his talk at the Desktop Linux Summit. "When I gave the organizers that title [Plug & Pray], I was still laboring under the assumption that Linux was still a little bit behind in the desktop area. Since then I have been assured by Kernel Hackers of the First Water that this is not so -- that in fact this assumption belongs among the collection of myths and lies about Linux (which Greg Kroah-Hartman will detail at the July 2006 Linux Symposium in Ottowa)."

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MySQL CEO offers mixed view of Oracle (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers a talk by Martin Mickos at the MySQL Users Conference, with an emphasis on his comments about Oracle. " The InnoDB 'storage engine,' which remains open-source software, is firmly in Mickos' plus column. 'We renewed our contract with Oracle for several years,' he said. In the minus column are the no-cost database products such as Oracle's Express Edition or IBM's DB2 Community Edition, which Mickos labeled as 'crippleware,' designed to hook customers on full-featured but expensive versions."

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Group plots Desktop Linux printing improvements (DesktopLinux.com)

DesktopLinux.com covers the recent Desktop Linux Printing Summit. "The meeting was attended by about 40 developers from printer vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lanier, and Lexmark; to operating system distributors like Apple Computer, Debian, and Novell; to those two Linux desktop powers, GNOME and KDE; and more. Their job? To nail down exactly what's wrong with printing and Linux, and to work out ways to resolve these problems once and for all." See Kurt Pfeifle's report on LWN for more information.

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Scott McNealy steps down as Sun CEO (Mercury News)

Mercury News covers a change in Sun leadership. "Sun Microsystems announced Monday that its longtime chief executive Scott McNealy is stepping down from the helm and will be succeeded by the struggling computer and software company's No. 2 executive, Jonathan Scwhartz." (Thanks to Biju Chacko)

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Software's 'stack wars' (ZDNet)

ZDNet considers the latest corporate buzz, providing "stacks" of software that include the operating system, middleware and user applications. "Just this week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the Financial Times that he would "like to have a complete stack." Oracle makes billions of dollars selling databases and business applications. In recent years, the company has bought up many other companies, including rivals like PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. "We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux," Ellison told the newspaper."

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Linux in China to grow five-fold (iTWire)

iTWire reports on the expected expansion of the Chinese Linux market. "According to technology research group IDC's latest research, China Linux 2006-2010 Forecast and Analysis, China's Linux market revenue reached just $11.8 million in 2005, up 27.1% over 2004. However, 2005 saw a steady growth in the China Linux market, brought about mainly by the huge volume of government procurements and large-scale SCO Unix replacement by major banks and industrial projects such as Telecommunication and Internet cafes. Along with the growing acceptance of Linux in the China market, IDC also noted that Linux servers were adopted for high-end, mission critical support applications in some industries and Linux desktops were able to withstand the competition of pirated Windows to hold its market share."

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Italian provinces seek international FOSS partners (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers Free Software in Rome and throughout Italy. "The plan of the province of Rome is ambitious. Time will tell how much of it will be implemented and become the norm in all of Italy. However, digital innovation has already proved to be a successful factor of local development, which, just like FLOSS, starts small but eventually arrives inside national administrations. Again like FLOSS, direct cooperation among among cities, even of different countries, can lead to far-reaching, unexpected results."

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People Behind KDE: Frans Englich (KDE.News)

KDE.News introduces this People Behind KDE interview with Frans Englich. "In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? As with most other KDE developers I do a little bit of each. I try to help the KDE-artists with technical issues, have been involved with Free Desktop's icon naming spec (seconded by the Tango project), and written parts of kdelibs' KUtils library, for example. Occasionally, I stir the water with an article or two."

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Canonical's Jane Silber says upcoming Ubuntu Linux to be enterprise-ready (ComputerWorld)

ComputerWorld talks with Jane Silber, chief operating officer at Canonical. "Our mantra throughout this development cycle was 'rigid and boring.' Someone would say, 'This feature is really shiny and cool; let's put it in,' and I'd say, 'Nope, we need to be rigid and boring.'"

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Danger: Authenticating e-mail can break it (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at the ups and downs of authenticating email systems. "There are two main ways of authenticating e-mail: Sender ID and DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM. Backed by Yahoo and Cisco Systems, DKIM relies on public key cryptography. It attaches a digital signature to outgoing e-mail, so recipients can verify that the message comes from its claimed source. Sender ID is further along in adoption than DKIM. It requires Internet service providers, companies and other Internet domain holders to publish SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to identify their mail servers. This usually does not require new hardware or software; the most arduous part is doing an inventory of mail servers and the subsequent maintenance of that record."

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Test It Out: Early Access Book Programs (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at some beta book programs. "I've been working with technical books for quite a while now, as a reader, a reviewer and an author. I've also been working with Linux and other free software for a long time. Often, I've wondered how publishers could take advantage of the testing that software receives as it goes through alpha and beta cycles. Recently, several publishers have begun to take advantage of that testing cycle for their books. Here, I take a look at how they're doing. I'm not involved in any of these books, so what follows is completely an outsider's view."

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Network your music with DAAP for Linux (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Linux digital audio access protocol (DAAP) implementations. "The more music you have, and the more computers you use, the bigger the hassle it becomes to try to synchronize everything. Without a simple sharing solution like DAAP, the easiest way to manage a centralized music collection for multiple PCs is keep all the files together on a central server, shared through Samba or NFS. DAAP accomplishes the same goal with far less administrative overhead, and provides interesting features like smart playlists at no extra cost."

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Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration)

Debian Administration has a comparison of filesystems running on Debian Etch. "There are a lot of Linux filesystems comparisons available but most of them are anecdotal, based on artificial tasks or completed under older kernels. This benchmark essay is based on 11 real-world tasks appropriate for a file server with older generation hardware (Pentium II/III, EIDE hard-drive)."

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How to configure a low-cost load-balanced LAMP cluster (Linux.com)

Linux.com has a howto article on setting up a load-balanced LAMP cluster. "The ubiquitous Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) combination powers many interactive Web sites and projects. It's not at all unusual for demand to exceed the capacity of a single LAMP-powered server over time. You can take load off by moving your database to a second server, but when demand exceeds a two-server solution, it's time to think cluster."

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Linux System Administration: First Tasks (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at Linux system administration in different environments. "Regardless of your environment, you will find that some tasks are common to all system administration functions. For example, monitoring system services and starting and stopping them takes on a role of its own. Your Linux box might appear to be running smoothly while one or more processes have stopped. A Linux server might seem happy on the outside, for example, while the database serving Web pages has failed."

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Running .Net applications on Linux with Mono (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at running .Net applications on Linux using Mono. "With Mono, Monodevelop, and XSP in place, you can throw away Microsoft Visual Studio and you can throw away Windows, and you don't have to throw away the valued experience of your .Net programmers."

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My sysadmin toolbox (Linux.com)

Linux.com presents another edition of the toolbox with a focus on networking tools. "Tripwire is a great tool for checking to see whether files have been created, deleted, or modified. Tripwire stores a snapshot of your files in its database, and you can compare your files against the snapshot to discover any changes that might indicate a compromise. Tripwire's main feature is file integrity checking, and it's capable of checking VFAT filesystems and verifying installed RPMs."

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Optimizing DSPAM + MySQL 4.1 (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge shows how to optimize mail setups that use DSPAM and MySQL 4.1. "DSPAM is a scalable and open-source content-based spam filter designed for multi-user enterprise systems. It's great at filtering out spam but on busy mailservers the pruning of the MySQL databases takes way too long time ... The default purge-4.1.sql script provided with DSPAM can be heavily optimized by adding indexes to the database and using the indexes properly when pruning."

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Use Thunderbird like a pro (NewsForge)

Dmitri Popov explains some Thunderbird mail client tricks in a NewsForge article. "Even if you use Thunderbird on a daily basis, you probably don't know it inside out. There are still quite a few 'hidden' features not covered in the online help that can significantly improve your emailing habits. And since Thunderbird's functionality can be expanded via extensions, you can add some clever features to it too."

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LSB 3.1 unifies Linux desktop standards (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at the upcoming Linux Standard Base 3.1 release with desktop application support. "The first LSB 3.1 certified desktop distribution is expected to come from Xandros, on May 1st. Other major Linux distributors such as Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, the DCC Alliance members, and others also plan to certify their versions of Linux to LSB 3.1, [Free Standards Group] added."

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OpenDocument group 'optimistic' on certification (ZDNet)

The OpenDocument Format may become an ISO standard, according to this article on ZDNet. ""The ODF Alliance is now actively supporting adoption of the OpenDocument Format as a worldwide standard of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)," the group said in a statement. "The ODF Alliance and its members have contacted various national voting entities recommending approval and are optimistic of a positive outcome.""

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KDE at the Cambodian New Year Parade (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KDE demonstration at the Long Beach, California Cambodian New Year Day celebration. "The day started out with Aaron Johnson bringing the equipment and Daniel Dotsenko setting up the booth. This being the first time that a Free Software booth was setup in Long Beach, there was bound to be glitches. The main problem was that the organisers were not able to provide the power that was promised in order to run the computers. That left the fallback of providing software and flyers. On hand were some Kubuntu install and Knoppix live CDs. However, there were not enough and within two hours, all the CDs were gone, as were the flyers."

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