Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Save the BBC from Windows DRM! (Linux Journal)
Glyn Moody looks at technological choices made by the British Broadcasting Corporation. "The BBC has a long and glorious past as a technological innovator. Throughout the history of broadcasting, it has often been the first to develop and promote new technologies. Sadly, it seems now to be teetering on the brink of making technical choices that will not only damage its own reputation as a world-class institution, but which will also have serious knock-on consequences for free software."
IDC: Linux Ecosystem Worth $40 Billion by 2010 (internetnews.com)
internetnews.com covers a prediction by IDC on the future value of the Linux ecosystem. "At the Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit, which kicked off today in New York, IDC analysts detailed where they see the Linux ecosystem today and where it is headed by 2010. For 2006, Al Gillen, research vice president of system software at IDC, told an early morning audience that the research firm has pegged the Linux ecosystem that includes servers and software to be worth $18 billion. By 2010, Gillen said, the market will be worth $40 billion."
Building an Relationship Economy (Linux Journal)
Doc Searls discusses the relationship economy in his Linux Journal blog. "Is there something new that open source development methods and values can bring to the economy? How about something old? I think the answer may come from the developing world, where pre-industrial methods and values persist and offer some helpful models and lessons for a networked world that's less post-industrial than industrial in a new and less impersonal way."
Trade Shows and Conferences
The ACCURATE meeting
Ping reports on his touch screen voting software development and the ACCURATE meeting. "I'm excited to say that this new version fits in 400 lines of straightforward, readable Python. However, this version doesn't contain a verifier yet; included among the 300 lines of last year's software was a verifier for the ballot definition to ensure that, once the ballot is successfully loaded, the program cannot crash. After i add a verifier to the new version, it will probably weigh in somewhere between 500 and 600 lines. Still, not bad. I was aiming for under 1000, as a reasonable limit for the number of lines one could expect to review and verify with some confidence. (For comparison, the Diebold AccuVote TS-X software is over 31000 lines of C++.)"
LinuxWorld New York: a longer name for a smaller show (Linux.com)
Linux.com covers the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. "IDG's East Coast Linux gathering is now officially called the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit (LWOSS). The inaugural 2007 version of the renamed conference was held February 14 and 15 in the conference area of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Manhattan, not in a huge convention center. Despite the longer name, it was such a cute little conference that I kept wanting to pat it on its head. But sometimes smaller is better, and in many ways this 600-person LWOSS was more fun and more informative than its larger Boston and New York predecessors."
KDE at SCALE 5x (KDE.News)
KDE.News reports on all things KDE at SCALE 5X. "KDE was once again well represented at the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 5x), demonstrating to show-goers why it is the most popular Linux desktop. There were talks, demonstrations from KDE developers and and thank yous in return. Read on for the full report."
Volunteers make Vancouver PHP Conference work (Linux.com)
Linux.com covers the Vancouver PHP Conference. "More than 225 developers attended the second Vancouver PHP Conference at the University of British Columbia's Downtown Campus in Vancouver Canada this week. Organized by the Vancouver PHP Users Group, the conference attracted many of the best-known names in the PHP world, including Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski, Damien Seguy, and Zak Greant. The result was a well-rounded conference that shows what an experienced group of volunteer organizers can accomplish."
Companies
Dell users demand more Linux options (ZDNet UK)
ZDNet UK looks at what people are saying at Dell's Ideastorm website. "Nearly 40,000 users have used the Dell Ideastorm website to promote the suggestion that Dell should: "Offer the three top free Linux versions [Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu] for free pre-installation on all Dell PCs". It is now the most popular suggestion on the site."
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com)
internetnews.com looks into development issues with Adobe's Flash Player 9 for Linux. ""In general we chose the standard but we really just want it to work," Huang said. "Our wish list is for more consistency of libraries across the various Linux distributions, which would enable wider support." The problem revolves around the fact that there really isn't such a thing a standard Linux desktop. Efforts like the Linux Standard Base (LSB), which aims to provide standardized API's for the Linux desktop, fall short for Flash."
Linux Adoption
Cuba to migrate to open-source software (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports that the Cuban government is migrating its computers to open source software. "A Cuban academic, Hector Rodriguez, is supporting the migration to open source by heading up a development program within one of the largest Cuban universities. Cuba's customs service has already migrated to Linux, while the ministries of culture, higher education and communications are planning to do so, Rodriguez told the conference."
EBS chooses Linux for IT consolidation project (siliconrepublic.com)
siliconrepublic.com reports on a Linux deployment by Ireland's EBS Building Society. "The building society, which is the fifth-largest credit institution in the country, has chosen SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from Novell as the foundation for the consolidation project. This will involve hosting IBM WebSphere applications and SLES will support more than 1,000 users within EBS in 2007. EBS has been able to save on software licensing and hardware costs as a result of the project. It has also benefited the firms disaster recovery strategy, as this is now easier to perform backups from a single mainframe than on many distributed machines."
Interviews
The last set of FOSDEM interviews
The last set of interviews with FOSDEM speakers has been posted; featured this time are Jeremy Allison, Keith Packard, Miguel de Icaza, Paul Everitt, Pete Herzog, and Simon Phipps. "The benefit for [Sun] in opening up Java is that it will allow the market to grow even more. And a bigger market leads to more innovators and more opportunities. I know that can sound suspicious... But in our view a big community leads to big markets, which lead to big profits."
LinuxWorld: Samba's Jerry Carter talks Samba's future (SearchOpenSource.com)
SearchOpenSource.com presents an interview with Jerry Carter from the Samba project. "Following his session on user authentication and Samba 3.0 at the LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit, Jerry Carter answered a few questions on Samba's future and its role with Microsoft."
Web 2.0 Podcast: A Conversation with Jonathan Miller (O'ReillyNet)
O'Reilly presents a podcast with Jonathan Miller, an accompanying textual transcription of the interview is included. "One year ago AOL CEO Jonathan Miller told Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle that the new AOL would be truly open. At the Web 2.0 Summit 2006, Miller talks about the changes over this past year and what it has meant for revenues."
Inge Wallin - People Behind KDE
The latest interview in the People Behind KDE series features Inge Wallin. "Q:In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? A:Since I come from a games background - I was a long time contributor to GNU Go - I started out in kdegames. I fixed a number of bugs in KPoker, KReversi, KPat, Konquest and for some time was the maintainer of KReversi. Then I drifted over to kdeedu and helped out a little there. For some reason I started to work with KOffice and since KChart was abandoned I fixed a number of bugs there and then took over maintainership of that application. I also did some work on KSpread."
Resources
CLI Magic: Linux troubleshooting tools 101 (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at command line tools for troubleshooting your system. "When something goes wrong with your Linux-based system, you can try to diagnose it yourself with the many troubleshooting tools bundled with the operating system. Knowing about these tools, and how to effectively use them, can help you overcome many of the common problems on your system. Here's a list of some of the weapons in your arsenal against Linux problems."
Hardware Versus Software Firewalls (O'Reilly)
Chris Swartz and Randy Rosel compare various firewall implementations in an O'Reilly article. "How do the freeware firewalls compare to expensive, all-in-one firewall solutions such as the Cisco PIX? The goal for this project, then, is to compare the Cisco PIX with two freeware firewalls."
Run Your Own Webradio Station With Icecast2 And Ices2 (HowtoForge)
HowtoForge sets up an an audio streaming server with Icecast2. "This tutorial describes how to set up an audio streaming server with Icecast2. In order that Icecast2 can stream audio to listeners we install Ices2. Ices2 is a program that sends audio data to an Icecast2 server to broadcast to clients. Ices2 can either read audio data from disk (Ogg Vorbis files), or sample live audio from a sound card and encode it on the fly. In this article we will let Ices2 read .ogg files from the local hard disk."
Improved ways to suspend and hibernate a laptop under Linux (Linux.com)
Linux.com revisits suspend and hibernate. "Last June I wrote about suspending and hibernating laptops under Linux. Since then a few things have changed -- thankfully, for the better -- so it's time to revisit the subject. Also, a few readers have responded offering suggestions for improving the suspend shell script I wrote back then, and I've incorporated these suggestions in a new version; unfortunately most of the comments are anonymous, so I can't give proper credit to their authors. The most important change since the last article is that laptops with multi-core CPUs are now the de facto standard. Intel Core Duo and Core2 Duo processors not only offer Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) functionality to mobile users but also consume less power, and thus produce less heat, than their predecessors."
Set up remote access in UNIX through OpenSSH (developerWorks)
IBM developerWorks covers system administration using OpenSSH. "Use OpenSSH to provide a secure environment for running a remote terminal. The basics of OpenSSH and terminal usage are quite simple but, in this article, examine additional elements that allow automatic login to remote hosts, methods for running remote applications, and how to securely copy files between hosts."
Reviews
The Pillars of KDE 4: Decibel Definitions and Benefits (KDE.News)
KDE.News looks at the definitions and benefits of Decibel. "In part 1, we gave a general overview of Decibel. In part 2, we cover everyone's favorite section - the definitions! Well, at least we hope that the definitions will be informative. Part 3 will describe some benefits for developers while part 4 deals with benefits for users."
IBM unveils servers for Linux consolidation (Reseller News)
Reseller News covers the latest IBM server offerings, introduced at the Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit in New York. "The highest end of the three new offerings, the IBM System p5 560Q, includes advanced virtualisation features, such as IBM's Advanced Power Virtualisation, which runs multiple partitions per processor. This allows a customer to consolidate 320 x86-based Linux Web servers on to just one rack of five of the new servers, Handy says."
RPM development on the road to revival (Linux.com)
Linux.com takes a look at RPM development. "The RPM Package Manager (RPM) package format and utilities are the backbone of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora Core, SUSE, and Mandriva Linux distributions, a host of smaller distros, and the Linux Standard Base. For years, the RPM utilities and specification were maintained by Red Hat. That changed in 2006 when, following a lengthy period of uncertainty, the company relaunched rpm.org as an independent hub for RPM development."
A look at Slackware's package utilities (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at Slackware's no frills approach to package management. "Unlike packages made for repository based solutions, like Debian's apt-get and Fedora's yum, Slackware packages were not designed to be dependency-aware -- and hardcore Slackware users would have it no other way. Installing dependencies by hand does have an advantage. It allows an administrator to remain in control of the libraries and programs installed on the system. But being one of the oldest distributions has its advantages. Thanks to its faithful bunch of developers, Slackware has perhaps the largest collection of package management tools. Let's look at some of them."
Xfce 4.4: The best lightweight desktop environment (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews Xfce 4.4. "For years, the lightweight Xfce has been a popular desktop environment for Linux distributions running on older hardware, thanks to its lower demand on resources as compared to KDE and GNOME; it's an ideal desktop for machines with less than 256MB of memory. Until recently, however, using Xfce was a little laborious, but with its latest release last month, Xfce is a much more usable desktop environment."
Zero Install: An executable critique of native package systems (Linux.com)
Bruce Byfield looks at Zero Install on Linux.com. "Zero Install is one of the more promising alternatives to native package systems for Linux distributions, such as RPM and Debian's dpkg. Originally developed by Thomas Leonard, a professor in the Department of Electronics and Computing at the University of Southampton, it begins with a criticism of existing package systems the difficulties of using them, and is built to provide an answer to the problems raised by the critique. However, like other alternative package systems, it faces the problems of winning acceptance from the major distributions and fine-tuning its features."
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