Linux in the news

How an Accident of Hardware Design Encouraged Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet delves into computing history. "Back in the early 1970s, the hardware engineers at Digital Equipment Corporation made a decision about how their new computer, the PDP-11, would address memory. I believe their decision had the unintended, butterfly-effect consequence of helping to bring the open source software movement into existence."

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Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox (Inc)

Inc. magazine has published a lengthy look at the Mozilla project. "Unlike other open-source ventures, which tend to be niche products embraced by techies who become fiercely loyal to and dependent on the software, Firefox is a mass-market, consumer-oriented product that can easily be replaced should it fail to offer distinct advantages over the competition. That means Mozilla has to move faster and be more innovative and marketing-oriented than its open-source cousins."

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KDE Storms First Day of FOSDEM 2007 (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports on the KDE project at FOSDEM. "The first day of the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting in Bruss[]els was very busy for the KDE team: attending talks by other talented hackers, hosting KDE related talks in the developer room, representing KDE at the booth, mingling with other hackers, bug hunting and work on new features. KDE had a strong presence this year, at least twice as many KDE people attended including a very strong showing from the Amarok developers. Speakers in the KDE developer room included Jos van den Oever, Stephan Laurient, Flavio and Sander Koning."

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A Wonderful Second FOSDEM Day (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers day 2 at FOSDEM. "The second day of FOSDEM 2007 was as busy, if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used, first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two."

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Google revamps Summer of Code for 2007 (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at the 2007 Google Summer of Code. "According to Leslie Hawthorn, open source program coordinator at Google, the biggest change for 2007 is the increased preparation time. While in previous years the program has started taking applications in April and started in late May, this year the program was announced in February, with mentor organizations applying to participate from March 5-12 and students from March 14-23. Successful applicants will be announced on April 9, and the program will officially begin on May 28."

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Big Debian Linux Payday For HP (InternetNews)

InternetNews reports that HP is making money with its Debian support offerings. "HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat."

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Ten Leading Open Source Innovators (Earthweb)

Earthweb has an article on ten open source companies which it finds interesting. "Although still in stealth-mode, Qumranet has generated enough buzz in the open-source community that its future product offering is already coming into focus. The company will deliver virtualization solutions developed around a kernel-based approach that allows the software to be smaller and more efficient than competing solutions." The site could benefit from a severe Greasemonkey script, however.

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Red Hat and McKesson Offer 'Enterprise Healthcare Platform' (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews notes that Red Hat, Inc. is branching into the health care business. "More signs of legitimacy of FOSS in medicine with this press release: 'McKesson has joined with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, to introduce the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, a cost-effective open source information technology (IT) solution with services designed to meet the mission-critical demands of healthcare."

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Etherboot's leaders are breaking new ground (Linux.com)

Linux.com features an interview with two Etherboot developers. "Etherboot is an open source project that gets little public notice, but is essential to almost any other open source project that relies on thin clients or network booting. Here's a lightly edited log of an IRC conversation with Etherboot project leader Marty Connor and primary Etherboot developer Michael Brown."

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The Faces of KDE 4 (Canllaith.org)

Canllaith.org talks with some KDE4 developers. "It's been close to 2 years since the gargantuan task of porting KDE3 to Qt4 started in May 2005, with SVN commit number 411284 by Stephan Kulow. Many thousands of commits later, we're still a long way from any kind of user-accessible preview of KDE4 - but that doesn't mean a lot of work hasn't gone into the code base as it now stands. In this stage of development it's a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It's a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here's a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE." (Found on KDE.News)

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Make your own packages for Debian-based systems (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier details the process of making Debian packages in a Linux.com article. "For the uninitiated, creating Debian packages is a mysterious process that looks much harder than it really is. To make it a little less mysterious, let's take a look at two methods of building Debian packages: using standard Debian packaging tools and the CheckInstall utility. I've used the tools described in this article to create packages on Debian and Ubuntu systems, but they should be suitable for other Debian-derived distros, such as MEPIS, Xandros, Linspire, and Freespire."

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Ruby Performance (Linux Journal)

Pat Eyler looks at Ruby performance. "Antonio Cangiano posted a Ruby Implementation Shootout on his blog last week. While it's an interesting piece (and will likely be more interesting over time), it's still very premature."

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A Vista vs. Linux Matchup - Part 4 (DesktopLinux.com)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols compares the MEPIS distribution to Microsoft Vista in part four of an article series. "In the last episode, the question was how each operating system would work, or not, with the hardware on my HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n PC. The answer was that neither OS worked perfectly with the computer, but Ubuntu/MEPIS -- yes, the Linux system -- actually worked better with the PC than did Vista. In no small part, that was because Vista's built-in DRM (digital rights management) gets in the way of viewing or listening to high-quality video or music." Dare we say: "Hasta la Vista®, Baby"?

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Next Fedora release delayed, new design theme selected (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at the upcoming Fedora 7 release. "The Fedora Project Board met this week to discuss issues surrounding the upcoming release of Fedora 7 (F7). Though originally scheduled for release on April 26, that date has now been moved back to May 24, dashing the development team's plan to debut the final release at this year's Red Hat Summit. One thing that Summit attendees will see, though, is the artwork that has been selected as Fedora 7's new theme."

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Recent GNOME panel apps (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at some GNOME panel applications. "The basic set of GNOME panel apps ranges from the practical, such as clocks and system monitors, to the mildly amusing, but apparently too traditional to dispense with, such as Fish. However, in the last few years, an increasing number of GNOME applications are being designed to fit into the panel. Since many of these recent apps are interesting but too minor to rate a full-length review, here's a roundup of some that have caught my attention. Although all of them are in early release, each hints at new functionality and levels of customization that might soon be available on the desktop."

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New KDE 4 preview shows progress (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews the latest KDE 4 snapshot. "On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed "Kludge," the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library."

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Krugle offers code search engine for open source, with open source (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Krugle. "With the rise in popularity of open source software, developers don't need to start from scratch when coding new software. Instead, they can use specialized search engines that crawl repositories to find the perfect code snippet. Now, one entrepreneurial open source developer has built a business that expands on the basic code search engine, and in true hacker recursive style, finds his company relying on the very tool it exists to create. Krugle is a combination code search engine and developer community."

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KVM steals virtualization spotlight (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at KVM. "Four months ago, almost nobody had heard of an open-source virtualization software called KVM. But that was then. The project, backed by a stealth-mode start-up called Qumranet, uses a technical and cultural approach that has quickly drawn powerful allies--including Red Hat and Linux founder Linus Torvalds."

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Multimedia freedom with Linux (WhatPC)

WhatPC has a review of Mandriva Linux with an emphasis on (often proprietary) multimedia. "Another hassle is that Apple's iTunes will not run on Linux, though it is possible to connect an iPod and manage its music library. In some ways Linux users get the best deal, since free software such as Amarok lets you copy music from and to the iPod, which iTunes does not. Some things in Linux take a little more work, but the outcome may be better than the alternatives."

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Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)

Trevor Baca discusses the need for voice connectivity on the web. "We're telecom innovators. We think about people and communications and technology a lot. And we look at Myspace and can't help but wonder how all that happened without us. Put another way, just how did social computing get so social without voice? First, let's check the observation. Tens of millions of messages, perhaps, pass through Myspace daily. Those messages are text, images, or both. But not voice. And yet voice seems so obvious. Friend online? Click here to ring both your phones. But no."

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