Linux in the news

Windows will beat Linux threat, say academics (TechWorld)

TechWorld covers a study authored by two Harvard faculty members. "The two based their research on a simplified economic model attempting to recreate the dynamics of Windows' competition with Linux, where Windows has market share and profitability on its side, while Linux benefits from a faster development cycle and lower cost. Casadesus-Masanell and Ghemawat found, to their surprise, that Linux's advantages by themselves didn't mean Linux would ultimately oust Windows, because of Windows' initially dominant market share."

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What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at the pros and cons of running 64-bit Linux. "So you just bought and assembled a brand-new AMD64 workstation. The only decision that remains is whether to install a 64-bit Linux distribution, or stick with comfortable, tried-and-true IA-32. If you are seeking an easy answer to that question, I can't help you. Running 64-bit Linux has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, a lot of the cons are out of your hands -- but they're not really Linux's fault, either."

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Ohio LinuxFest 2006: Plans, presentations, and penguins (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks forward to the Ohio LinuxFest. "Linux and open source software users in the Buckeye State who want to network with several hundred of their colleagues will get the chance when Ohio LinuxFest 2006 gets underway later this month. The one-day conference, to be held on Saturday, September 30, at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, features presentations, exhibits, an after-conference party, and a special appearance by some live penguins."

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YAPC::EU 2006 - Day 3 (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly covers day three of the YAPC::EU 2006 Perl conference. "Another early start of course, and I could definitely see a dilemma in the eyes of some attendees. On one hand the previous night’s conference dinner and the subsequent late night drinking session was encouraging them to stay in bed and miss the first couple of talks. But on the other hand, the first talk in the morning was Tatsuhiko Miyagawa talking about Plagger. I’ve raved about Plagger here before, but for those who don’t know, it’s a fully modular system for dealing with web feeds. "

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SCO's red ink disgorge persists (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at SCO's 3rd quarter financial results. "Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2006 was $7,421,000 as compared to $9,353,000 for the comparable quarter of the prior year. The net loss for the third quarter was just over $3.5 million or 17 cents per diluted common share, as compared to a net loss of just over $2.3 million or 13 cents per diluted common share, for 2005's comparable quarter. "The decrease in revenue and increase in net loss were primarily attributable to continued competitive pressures on SCO's Unix products and services from Linux," SCO CFO Bert Young said in a conference call."

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IBM wins hybrid supercomputer deal (ZDNet)

ZDNet reports that IBM has won a contract with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to build a Linux-based 16,000 processor supercomputer that will boast a performance of around 1 petaflop. "the machine, dubbed Roadrunner, uses a hybrid approach that combines a conventional cluster of Opteron servers with Cell chips that handle some of the calculating grunt work. Each Cell chip, originally designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, includes eight special-purpose engines that can rapidly perform physics calculations."

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Sun, Ruby, and Java: An Interesting Turn of Events (Linux Journal)

Pat Eyler covers Sun's new JRuby hires. "Wow! Sun has hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby full time. This is a pretty momentus event, and is already sending shockwaves around the Ruby world."

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XenSource, anyone? (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch covers the release of XenEnterprise 3.0 from XenSource. "For all of our talk about Xen virtualization and Red Hat and SUSE, we've been overlooking that one of XenSource's goal was to create a standalone virtualization program. Well, we don't have to wait any longer. XenEnterprise 3.0 is finally here."

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Jim Bublitz Talks About PyKDE (KDE.News)

KDE.News interviews PyKDE maintainer Jim Bublitz. "PyKDE allows you to access most of the essential classes and methods of kdelibs from Python. I use it myself because it allows me to develop good-looking graphical applications that are KDE compatible, and allows me to do it from Python, which I find to be a much quicker and easier development environment than C++."

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Richard Stallman on Kerela's desktop Linux adoption (DesktopLinux.com)

DesktopLinux.com interviews Richard Stallman about the migration to Linux in India's Kerela state schools. "Q: Was it difficult to convince them to make the change, or were they already leaning in that direction? A:The previous government gave lukewarm support to free software; they began a partial migration, but had not made a firm decision to take it all the way. FSF India has worked for several years with both the main parties, and won the firm support of the (then) opposition leader. He is now the chief minister (equivalent to the governor of a state in the U.S.), and we both spoke at a free software event in Trivandrum two weeks ago. So I think the FSF India people deserve some of the credit for building the support that made this decision happen."

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Tip of the Trade: Bastille Linux (ServerWatch)

ServerWatch looks at using Bastille Linux for hardening a Linux system. "Every wise old system and network administrator knows that security is a multilayer process. You have your firewalls and other border security, perhaps some internal network segmentation, and application and operating system security. However, locking down the operating system is probably the most crucial link in this chain. An excellent utility to help you probe, assess, and harden your Linux system is Bastille Linux."

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Create your own book cover art with open source software (Linux.com)

Dmitri Popov shows how to create a book cover with open-source tools. "Print-on-demand sites like Lulu allow you to create and publish your own book. If you're primarily a writer, you might be tempted to hire a professional designer to create a cover for your book. Before you do that, consider creating a simple yet elegant book cover using the open source Kooka scanning software and the Inkspace vector drawing application."

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Open scientific software (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at a few scientific programs of general utility. "Linux is used on supercomputing clusters, embedded scientific equipment, as a programming environment for scientific programming and a myriad of other uses. Scientific Linux is a clone of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and is a baseline Linux distribution for a variety of physics laboratories around the world."

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How To Fight Spam Using Your Postfix Configuration (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge has a tutorial on spam filtering with the Postfix MTA. "In this guide you will learn how to tweak your virtual Postfix setup to better combat SPAM by stopping the mail before it hits SpamAssassin, using RBL (Realtime Blacklists) and RHBL (slightly different), greylistings and Helo Checks."

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Tracking and charging for printing with PyKota (Linux.com)

Frank Tuzi shows how to install PyKota in a Linux.com article. "PyKota is a robust Linux-based open source print quota and print accounting system that runs via LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL on the back end and CUPS and Samba on the front end. At our school, we have found it to be a powerful application capable of managing printers, users, groups, and accounting information using any currency."

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Making wireless work in Ubuntu (Linux.com)

Linux.com presents an excerpt from The Official Ubuntu Book. "One of the greatest new features for laptop users in Ubuntu is network-manager. With this shiny new application it is finally easy to connect your Ubuntu system to any wireless network. Where previously you had to jump through hoops to do WPA or 802.1x authentication, network manager makes this completely transparent."

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Unit Testing Your Documentation (O'ReillyNet)

Leonard Richardson writes about testing the recipes in the Ruby Cookbook. "Thanks to the test framework, on a good day I could proofread, debug, and verify the correctness of 30 recipes. I worked faster and with greater confidence than I could doing everything by hand. I was also able to incorporate the test results into the general "confidence score" calculated for each recipe on my unofficial Ruby Cookbook homepage: a visible, though somewhat vague, metric of quality."

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A review of the Glom graphical database front-end (Xaprb)

Xaprb.com has a review of Glom. "Glom is an interesting graphical database front-end I’ve been meaning to try out for some time. Someone asked about graphical database front-ends on the #mysql IRC channel recently, and that prompted me to install Glom and learn how to use it. My overall impressions? It lands squarely in the middle of its target audience’s needs, but still has a quirk here and there. With a bit of polish it will be a fine product, and it’s already a winner over Microsoft Access and Filemaker, two similar programs with which you might be familiar. In this article I’ll walk through installing and configuring Glom, a simple database design, a quick peek under the hood, an archaeologist’s experiences using it, and give my opinions about Glom in detail."

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CLI Magic: Kismet sniffs out Wi-Fi access (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Kismet for discovering access points and diagnosing problems. "For example, while configuring your own access point, you can use Kismet to see which channels are being used in your area. Start Kismet and let it run for a few minutes with channel-hopping enabled, so Kismet can scan the entire range of Wi-Fi channels, and it will find all the access points within range. You can then set your access point to an unused channel, thereby minimizing potential interference from all the other ones. Once your wireless network is configured, Kismet can check that you're on your chosen channel and that encryption is working."

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The Linux killer app: KDE's Konqueror (DesktopLinux)

DesktopLinux takes a look at Konqueror. "One of Konqueror's curious and powerful traits is that it is at once both a file manager and a web browser. You could think of it as a computer navigation device. It will quickly take you to any folder and file on your hard drive, or to anywhere on the Internet. It does either one, or both of those, so seamlessly that I marvel at how the KDE people did it."

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Review: Linspire Mini Koobox (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews a Linspire powered Koobox. "A few weeks ago, I finally got my hands on a Linux-based Koobox Mini PCs. The Mini is a full PC in a very small, quiet package, and well worth a look. Linspire sent me the top-of-the-line Koobox, which includes a Pentium M 725 1.6GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, slot-loading DVD/CD-RW drive, two USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port, a 60GB hard drive, DVI video out, and 10/100 Ethernet. The video and chipset is an Intel 915GM that uses 8MB of shared memory, so you actually have 504MB of dedicated system memory. The sound chipset is also from Intel, and the system has one line-in and one line-out port for audio -- so the system sound is OK, but you're not going to have surround sound or anything like that."

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Linux4Kids: Tools and toys for all ages (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers Linux4Kids. "Linux4Kids is a collection of more than 80 GPL-licensed "edutainment" games and educational software available to download for free from the FileGate File Distribution Network. Linux4Kids applications include flashcard creators, basic and scientific calculators, typing tutors, and an assortment of other useful programs. VBuilder, a vocabulary skills testing tool, is ideal for students learning a new language, while Wikindx is a browser-based index card system useful for organizing research notes and bibliographic information."

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FreeDOS finally hits 1.0 milestone (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers the release of FreeDOS version 1.0. ""FreeDOS 1.0 is a major milestone that has finally been released. By now, we have a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement," the project team said this week. Recent improvements to the package include long file name support in several applications, including a free CD-ROM driver, FAT32 file system support within the kernel and most other applications, and improved stability within the HIMEM device driver and EMM386 memory manager."

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