Linux in the news

Firefox snaps at Microsoft's heels (Telegraph)

The Telegraph looks at the Mozilla Foundation, with an emphasis on its finances. "Despite its success, however, Mozilla's fans are becoming increasingly concerned that the organisation is moving away from its altruistic roots and becoming a fully fledged money-making operation. The company makes no secret of the fact that it turns a profit. Firefox uses Google as its preferred search engine partner. When a user carries out a search via the browser's built-in search facility, about 80 per cent of the advertising revenue from any associated hits goes back to Mozilla."

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Macro virus for Staroffice discovered (Techworld)

Techworld is reporting that a macro virus for StarOffice (and thus, presumably, OpenOffice.org) has been found by our old friends at Kaspersky Lab. "The Stardust virus is contained in a StarOffice document that uses macros and then infects a global template. If a user opens a document infected with Stardust, every StarOffice text document, with a '.sxw' extension, or document template, with a '.stw' extension, will be infected..." There is no mention of whether it can propagate through ODF files.

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Day one at FreedomHEC (NewsForge)

Steve R. Hastings covers day one of the FreedomHEC conference on NewsForge. "This morning's activities started with a discussion to set the schedule for the day. Presentations included a lightning overview of SysFS and Udev, presented by Greg Kroah-Hartman; a session on how the kernel development community works, presented by Randy Dunlap; a question and answer session on the Linux SCSI layer with James Bottomley, the kernel maintainer of the SCSI layer; open source rocketry using Linux; and a question and answer session with Kroah-Hartman on how to get a driver added to the stock Linux kernel."

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Report from FreedomHEC (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports from the first FreedomHEC conference. "The final session of the first day was a question and answer session with Kroah-Hartman on getting drivers accepted into the Linux kernel. It was a lively session, touching on many areas of kernel development. Kroah-Hartman assured the attendees that kernel developers are interested in their drivers. 'People always say, 'Oh, they won't want my driver; we only ship a few hundred devices per year that use it.' I always tell them that we have device support in the Linux kernel for hardware with only one or two known users. Really, we'll take your driver!'"

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Telling Stories at JavaOne (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly covers the 2006 JavaOne conference. "JavaOne 2006 left attendees with an incomplete answer to the big question: will Sun open source Java? The answer was better than a definite maybe, but not by much. Daniel Steinberg looks back at the conference, its mixed message, and its many successes outside of the general sessions."

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First Day KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting (KDE.News)

Jos Poortvliet reports on day one of the KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting. "In the rainy Netherlands, eighteen KDE hackers have been working in the Annahoeve on Multimedia for the fourth incarnation of KDE. This report outlines the meeting topics, and the results of interesting presentations and explains how KDE developers outbid each others marshmallow records."

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Second Day Multimedia Meeting (KDE.News)

KDE.news reports from the second day of the KDE 4 multimedia meeting. "This article will report on the progress the hackers made yesterday, including the 'why' and 'what' of redesigning and speeding up amaroK, work on the KIO slaves and Phonon."

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The Python "Need for Speed" Sprint

Sean Reifschneider has sent us coverage of the Python "Need for Speed" Sprint in Reykjavik, Iceland. "We started the week with the Python 2.5 alpha 2 release candidate being around 10% slower than 2.4.3, the previous stable release. Largely, this slowdown is due to newly added features, particularly a change in the object type of exceptions which is showing a 60% slowdown."

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Google Releases Picasa for Linux (Slashdot)

Slashdot has an announcement for Google's release of Picasa for Linux. "Today I'm pleased to announce that we're making Picasa, our photo management application, available for Linux. This is a pre-beta labs release and since we're still learning on how to best make software for Linux, we're asking that you submit your bugs as you find them. Picasa for Linux uses Wine internally; this shows a bit in the interface, but it works even better than we had hoped." Picasa is not open-source software, see the End User License Agreement for details.

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Novell sells Celerant, focuses on Linux (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch notes Novell's sale of its Celerant Consulting management consulting branch to Caledonia Investments. "Now that Celerant is sold, Novell will be better able to focus on its core businesses of Linux and open source; systems, security and identity management; and its renewed interest in workgroup computing. In particular, Novell is looking forward to a summer launch of the next-generation of its SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 for Novell server and desktop systems."

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Novell, NCR offer Linux on NCR POS Platforms (CIOL)

CIOL.com covers a partnership between NCR and Novell. "NCR and Novell today announced a global agreement to offer Novell Linux Point of Service on NCR RealPOS retail point-of-sale (POS) terminals. This agreement makes available a software platform and hardware combination for retailers deploying Linux-based POS solutions. NCR's future plans call for offering Novell Linux Point of Service on NCR easypoint kiosks and NCR fastlane self-checkout."

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Japan to develop and deploy open source "Secure VM"

The Japanese National Information Security Center (NISC) has announced plans to develop an open-source secure virtual machine. "Data breach (especially information leak via virus-infected P2P file-sharing programs) has been a social problem in Japan for these two years, and it seems that to solve it is one of the project's goals. They say it will not just be a research project, but will also be deployed in production environments of governmental organizations. Both Linux and Windows are planned as its guest OSes, but apparently they are assuming that Windows will continue to be used mainly, because they say that they chose to develop "Secure VM" (instead of switching to an open source desktop) "in order to improve security while keeping the existing client environment/UI as much as possible.""

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U.S. PTO smashes JPEG patent (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch reports on the rejection of the JPEG patent. "Another attempt to tie down a standard with a patent has gone down in flames. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a patent that Forgent Networks was asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts Group, better known as JPEG, images standard. In the reexamination proceeding initiated late last year by the PUBPAT (Public Patent Foundation), The PTO Office Action released yesterday a finding that the prior art submitted by PUBPAT completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (the '672 Patent)."

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Could more Eolas-like open source benefactors hurt Microsoft, others? (ZDNet)

Here's a ZDNet blog entry by David Berlind on software patents and free software. "After losing to Eolas, Microsoft, was forced to remove important plug-in functionality from Internet Explorer. Firefox, on the other hand was not. Eolas has turned out to be an open source benefactor, allowing open source developers access to its intellectual property. In other words, in an extremely unusual twist of fate, a patent worked against commercial software and in favor of open source software to the point that the open source software had a distinct usability advantage over commercial alternatives."

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Interview: Mark Shuttleworth (451 Group)

The 451 Group (an analyst operation) has done an interview with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth; the first part of that interview has been published, liberally annotated with comments from the analysts. "For example, in the consumer space, people are very protective about the desktop, but they're not at all protective of the smart phone. So consumer adoption of Linux on the smart phone is enormous - people are absolutely willing to accept the idea that they might use new tools, new pieces of software, new user interfaces and so on, as long as you don't threaten certain key applications that they're comfortable with, that they know and trust."

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Interview: Red Hat's open source scholarship challenge (NewsForge)

NewsForge interviews Venkatesh Hariharan about an open-source scholarship challenge in India. "There is no dearth of IT talent in India, but for a country that churns out thousands of IT students every year, the number of Indian contributors in the open source software (OSS) world is disproportionately low, due in part to a lack of proper mentoring. To encourage more students to go into OSS development, the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay partners with Red Hat for an open source scholarship challenge each year. Participants, mentored by OSS leaders, get the opportunity to work and collaborate to solve a real-world problem, and the winners get a share of the Rs. 10 lakh (about $22,000) prize."

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Create your own distribution torrents (Linux.com)

Mayank Sharma shows how to distribute an ISO image with bittorrent on Linux.com. "The BitTorrent protocol has revolutionized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. It works by enabling users to download fragments of a large file from other users simultaneously, rather than waiting for one file to complete, thus speeding the download process. As a result, many popular Linux distributions have started releasing their ISOs through torrents, many of which you can find at LinuxTracker. But if your favourite distro doesn't offer a release torrent, why not make your own?"

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Runit makes a speedy replacement for init (Linux.com)

Mark Alexander Bain looks at Runit on Linux.com "runit, a Unix init scheme with service supervision written by Gerrit Pape, is a complete replacement for SysVinit. Its key benefits include improved boot speed and ease of use. In the time that it takes you to read this article, you could move from init to runit. In a recent article covering the use of cinit to implement a parallel boot process, I managed to turn a booting time of 2 minutes 54 seconds into 2 minutes 3 seconds -- a massive saving of 51 seconds. By converting the same Linux machine to runit, I was able to reduce booting time to 55 seconds."

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Building a Self-Healing Network (O'ReillyNet)

Greg Retkowski writes about self-healing networks on O'Reilly. "Wouldn't it be nice if your network services could detect their own failures and gracefully restart? Sure, you could have cron or FAM jobs always checking them, but that's so unrefined. Instead, consider Greg Retkowski's solution: building a small Cfengine and NAGIOS combination to detect and recover from failure."

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OpenSUSE 10.1 Is Versatile, but Uneven (eWeek)

eWeek reviews OpenSUSE 10.1. "In the past, we've found that SUSE distributions have lagged behind Red Hat and Debian-based distributions in the all-important area of software installation and management. OpenSUSE 10.1 has made some strides in this area, but the system's software management story remains murkier than we'd like."

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Google Summer of Code KDE projects (KDE.News)

KDE.News has announced the KDE projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. "KDE is happy to announce the selection of 24 student applications for the Google Summer of Code 2006. This year, Google received a total of 6400 applications worldwide spread across 102 different Open Source organisations. "It looks like we've got some very interesting projects for KDE as a whole, and a good number of projects for KOffice", said Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer for Krita, celebrating the selection of 4 KOffice student proposals."

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Beyond the Open-Source Hype (Foreign Policy)

Here's a Foreign Policy column arguing that open source software has, perhaps, been oversold. "However, it is misleading to say that open source empowers people in ways proprietary software does not. Both open source and proprietary software allow you to change the behavior of a software program in significant ways without touching the program's source code. The truth is that software authors, whether they work for a large software firm or no one at all, want users to adapt their product to specific locations and needs. Microsoft makes a living out of making its software customizable while still closely guarding its source code." (Thanks to Sami Juvonen).

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