Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Where ODF stands in the EU (NewsForge)
Tom Chance looks at the state of EU Open Document Format adoption in a NewsForge article. "A key presentation on the ODF day came from Dr. Barbara Held, who is the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission Program for Interoperable Delivery of pan-European eGovernment Services to Public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC). Got that? Right. The IDABC basically exists to smooth over the technical problems within the European Union caused by the 25 member states exchanging data. The existence of multiple, incompatible file formats poses a formidable problem for the EU, so the IDABC was tasked with developing a strategy to overcome this."
Interview with Bernard Leach (iPodLinux) (LinuxInterviews.com)
LinuxInterviews.com talks with Bernard Leach about the iPodLinux project. "Nowadays, having an iPod is like having a car. Everybody has one. You can see them on the street: those cute little white headphones, mouth muttering the words of a song, head moving on the rythm of the tune. But who sais iPods are stuck with proprietary firmware? The iPodLinux Project is offering an alternative: run Linux on your iPod. Run games, movies on a Nano or turn older generation iPods into... something more. Let's take a look at what iPodLinux can do and what the main developer (Bernard Leach) has to say in this interview."
Companies
Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch considers the effects of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux distribution on Red Hat. "Oracle, however, can afford to undercut Red Hat's support prices, which puts the Linux giant in a very precarious position. The lion's share of Red Hat's business is far from just the enterprise database customers that make Oracle its billions, but the enterprise has increasingly been an important part of Red Hat's income. In short, this move hurts Red Hat a lot. In fact, I think Red Hat would have been better off if Oracle had started its own Linux, or bought Ubuntu or some other company. In either case, Oracle would have had to fight to win Linux market share even from its own customers. With this move, Oracle simply rips off Red Hat's mind-share, while promising a cheaper price."
With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)
Here's an InfoWorld weblog entry reacting to Oracle's announcements. "Oracle, longtime partner to Red Hat, is rolling out the next phase of its Unbreakable Linux program, designed to kill Red Hat and Novell. With partners like Oracle, who needs competitors?" Included are a few of Larry Ellison's slides; it is interesting to see that he is using the SCO lawsuit as a reason to worry about the lack of indemnification from Linux vendors.
Mark Shuttleworth on Oracle
The 451 CAOS Theory weblog talked with Mark Shuttleworth about Oracle's Red Hat support announcement. "Fundamentally, though, this is still free software in a proprietary wrapper. The pricing may be different, but its still old-school thinking. I dont think anybody who will consider jumping to Ubuntu from Red Hat will pause very long on the Oracle option."
Linux at Work
Tapping Linux as an application framework for consumer electronics (EDN)
Benoit Schillings writes about the advantages of using Linux for a consumer electronics platform in an EDN article. "Independent research company Venture Development Corp has forecast that the market for embedded-software services for Linux-based devices will continue on an upward trend through 2007. In a recent report, VDC notes several factors, including demand from developers for access to and control of source code, which the open-source software model permits, helping to drive demand for Linux in the embedded-system market. VDC also notes developers' demand for royalty-free runtime software."
Interviews
People Behind KDE: Hamish Rodda (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced the latest interview in its People Behind KDE series. "Tonight in the People Behind KDE series of interviews we feature an Australian core hacker. He is very motivated in programming but his social life is as important. He focuses mainly on programming tools but works for core parts like kdeui too. We are talking about KDE star Hamish Rodda."
Linux start-up takes path to profits (ZDNet)
ZDNet interviews Mark Shuttleworth. "Ubuntu has been a phenomenon in the desktop Linux niche. But Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth, who founded the project, has his eyes on the more lucrative server market. Despite abundant rivals, Ubuntu has risen to prominence within the Linux niche, but that's just a means to an end. Canonical plans to become profitable by 2008 by extracting revenue from the same server market that Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell specialize in."
Resources
CLI Magic: Command-line contact management (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at setting up a simple address book. "There's an ancient Unix practice of keeping a system-wide phone directory in /usr/share/ with one-line entries containing name, location, and number, and a shell script named something like phone or tel that calls grep to output lines that match whatever arguments you give. You can improve on that method to create a personal contact manager with surprising speed and power."
How to install Linux on an eMac (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at installing Linux on an eMac. "The eMac is a fine machine, but it has always been a little slow, due primarily to the fact that it has only 128MB of RAM. That shortage of RAM kept me from upgrading to a later version of OS X several months ago: the latest version would install only on machines with 256MB. I didn't want to give Jack a machine that he would immediately need to spend several hundred dollars on in order to bring its operating system up to snuff, so I decided to see if I could install Linux on it."
LDAP Series Part III - The Historical Secrets (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal looks at the origins of LDAP. "The origins of LDAP begin with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based in Geneva. ITU began setting email standards which required a directory of names (and other information) that could be accessed across networks in a hierarchical fashion not dissimilar to DNS. The result of their work resulted in the X.500 series of standards which defined DAP (Directory Access Protocol), the protocol for accessing a networked directory service."
Manipulating lists in OpenOffice.org Calc (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal covers list manipulation using OpenOffice.org Calc. "When asked to explain the purpose of spreadsheets, most people think of calculations first. And it's true that spreadsheets like Calcs have hundreds of different functions for performing calculations. However, probably the most common tasks in spreadsheets is manipulating lists."
Pointers and memory leaks in C (developerWorks)
IBM developersWorks covers pointers and memory leaks in C. "Ask anybody working with C what bothers them the most about C, and many of them will probably answer Pointers and memory leaks. These are truly the items that consume most of the debugging time for developers. Pointers and memory leaks might seem to be deterrents to some programmers but, once you understand the fundamentals of pointers and associated memory operations, they will be the most powerful tool you posses in C."
More on Ruby Implementations (Linux Journal)
Pat Eyler's Ruby blog has lots of pointers to Ruby implementations. ""Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything -- I think he's right. Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius. He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon."
Reviews
Lightweight fnord serves HTTP admirably (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews fnord. "I was looking for a lightweight Web server to run on my ARM-based Linksys NSLU2 network storage device in order to share a few custom packages I've built for Debian and Arch Linux among the systems on my home network. After playing around with Apache, LightTPD, and thttpd, I tried fnord and never looked back."
Krita 1.6: State of the art (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews Krita. "The KOffice raster image editor Krita reached version 1.6 along with the rest of the office suite earlier this month. But don't be misled; although Krita comes bundled with KOffice, it is not a second-tier productivity accessory like Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Krita is a fully-loaded raster graphics workhorse that stands on its own."
A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)
Linux.com has run a comparison of Krita 1.6 and GIMP 2.2. "Adding another wrinkle to the difficult task of a direct comparison are two readily available incarnations of the GIMP with additional features. CinePaint forked from the GIMP several stable releases ago, and supports high bit-depth images and color management. If you need to retouch high dynamic range photos, neither Krita 1.6 nor the GIMP 2.2 has the magic combo of 16-bit-per-channel color and dodge/burn tools, but CinePaint does."
Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects (LinuxWorld)
LinuxWorld looks at the CM1 and the software it will run. "A network of developers who work on much of the most commonly used software on Linux is passing up multi-core monsters with gigabytes of RAM to target their code to a design of which only 500 prototype boards now exist: the "Children's Machine 1" from the One Laptop Per Child project. OLPC aims to put machines that function as a textbook collection and as a writing, drawing and music tool into the hands of schoolchildren, through large sales to national ministries of education."
What's New in Python 2.5 (O'ReillyNet)
O'ReillyNet looks at Python 2.5. "This article provides a rundown of the new and important features of Python 2.5. I assume that you're familiar with Python and aren't looking for an introductory tutorial, although in some cases I do introduce some of the material, such as generators."
Visualization of Ruby's Grammar
Nick Sieger looks at Ruby's grammar on his blog. "As part of the momentum surrounding the Ruby implementer's summit, I have decided to take on a pet project to understand Ruby's grammar better, with the goal of contributing to an implementation-independent specification of the grammar. Matz mentioned during his keynote how parse.y was one of the uglier parts of Ruby, but just how ugly?" (Found on Linux Journal)
SUSE Linux goes 'real time' (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch takes a look at Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time (SLERT). "SLERT enables the use of Linux for real-time applications such as online stock trading, process control and operation, and telecommunications. SLERT does this by adding real-time technology from Concurrent Computer Corporation to SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10. SLERT offers support for 32-bit and 64-bit processor architectures, including AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, predictable interrupt response time of less than 30 microseconds, high-resolution timer support for enhanced scheduling, user-level control of simultaneous multithreading, and processor shielding."
Zotero: A seriously useful research tool (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews Zotero. "If you spend most of your time doing research on the Web, you need Zotero, a Firefox extension that helps you manage research sources. With Zotero installed, Firefox is not confined to the Web, and you can use it as a standalone application for all sorts of online and offline research."
Miscellaneous
Brazilian government faces challenge over proprietary tax software (NewsForge)
NewsForge covers a campaign in Brazil, spearheaded by the Free Software Foundation - Latin America. "The Free Software Foundation - Latin America (FSFLA) is campaigning against the Brazilian government's regulations that some citizens must use non-free software for paying taxes. Referring to the software as "Softwares Impostos," a term that puns in Portuguese on "taxes" and "imposed," FSFLA has launched a letter-writing campaign against the requirement, arguing that it is both contrary to current social policies and a violation of the Brazilian constitution."
Geekcorps: A Peace Corps for the rest of us (NewsForge)
NewsForge takes a look at the Geekcorps. "Freelance software consultant Renaud Gaudin longed to parlay his passion for free and open source software into something that would help developing countries access and use technology. In March, he joined Geekcorps. Now he brings information and communication technology (ICT) into communities, helps them get hardware and software up and running, and then teaches local users the technical skills they need to sustain their new equipment for the long-term."
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