An update from LWN

It's been a while since the last LWN update. That's generally a good thing, but, as will be seen below, there's news to report.

In the area of subscriber counts, however, there's not a whole lot of news. The number of individual subscribers continues to grow very slowly, and the group subscriptions are growing a little less slowly. We've had some modest increases in advertising and syndication income which have given us some welcome breathing room, but LWN is still not earning enough to cover the true expenses of creating it. As your editor's children approach college age, this situation is becoming increasingly pressing.

LWN suffers from an obvious lack of attention to its business side. Much effort goes into the creation of the best content that we can, and we have no regrets about that. But without more attention to promoting the site, actually selling subscriptions, making sure that the benefits of LWN are clear to new visitors, selling advertisements, etc., LWN will not grow to where it needs to be by the time it needs to get there. It is a rare business which can thrive in the complete absence of a sales and marketing effort.

So we need to free some time to devote toward making LWN a successful business. We could just cut back on content, but that does not seem much like a path with a successful conclusion either. So it has long been clear to us that LWN needs more staff to get itself to a sustainable position. The business, as it is organized now, needs more time than we are able to put into it.

The good news is that, as a result of very careful spending, LWN actually has a small stash of money in the bank. After our infamous credit card dispute in 2002, we developed a healthy appreciation for the benefits of having enough cash on hand to carry through an interruption of our income stream. That pile has grown to the point that we are able to use it to fund another staff position for a year or so in the hope that the cash flow balances out by the end of that time. And that is what we intend to do.

So we are happy to report that, starting in June, longtime LWN writer Jake Edge will be joining the crew full time. We asked Jake to provide a description of himself for the readers, and got back:

Jake will be contributing (more) content, working on the site code, and generally helping to figure out how to turn LWN into a more successful operation. Welcome, Jake!

On another front, we have often talked about the future of the "letters to the editor" page. A quick check shows that the last time we had a letter to publish was last January. So consider it official: the letters page is now gone.

LWN.net will celebrate its tenth anniversary next January. Those years have flown by; somehow we had never imagined that we would be doing this for so long. There's only one reason why we have continued with this exercise for all those years: our readers. Your support has kept us going through all of the ups and downs. In response we offer our most sincere thanks while we work toward being here for another ten years - at least. Our 20th anniversary issue, we suspect, will be about the year of the Linux desktop.

Comments (46 posted)

OSBC: The Microsoft/Novell panel

The 2007 Open Source Business Conference featured a panel discussion on the question of whether the Microsoft/Novell agreement is good for open source or not. Your editor was asked to sit on this panel and try to represent the community's point of view - as if the community has a single point of view. The event is a bit of a blur - only partially caused by the beer your editor sought out to help with the recovery afterward - so this will not be a complete report. Hopefully it will still be useful.

Other members of the panel were Justin Steinman (Novell), Sam Ramji (Microsoft), and Alison Randal (O'Reilly). The panel was moderated by Doug Levin, the CEO of Black Duck Software. Mr. Levin did an admirable job of keeping this standing-room-only event on track and inclusive.

After the introductions, each panelist got to make some opening remarks. Your editor had worried considerably over this stage of the event, and had prepared the following statement. The actual words were not read from this text, however; the intent was substantially the same but the wording was generally different.

Justin Steinman's opening remarks mostly highlighted how the agreement has been good for Novell. Microsoft is now selling SUSE Linux into places it has never been before; in fact, Microsoft is now Novell's biggest single sales channel. Increasing Linux adoption is a good thing, he says, and this agreement has certainly served that end.

Allison Randal took the position that the agreement is mostly irrelevant for open source. It's just another boring industry partnership, with the usual sort of joint ventures. Had it been between Novell and IBM, she says, nobody would have noticed. Microsoft's patents are a problem, like so many other patents held by many others in the industry, many of which would come to our defense if Microsoft were to decide to start suing Linux users and start the "patent armageddon." Still, it would be nice, she suggested, if Microsoft were to join the Open Invention Network and help bring an end to this problem.

Sam Ramji talked mostly about interoperability. Microsoft sees the computing network of the future as being entirely heterogeneous and it wants to be a proper player in that environment. He reiterated the "we would rather license than litigate" line, noting that Microsoft spends about $100 million per year defending patent suits.

One of the questions from the audience had to do with the effect that GPLv3 will have on this agreement and potential patent litigation in general. Justin and Sam both declined to comment, saying that they saw no point in talking about a license which is still in a draft state. Allison pointed out that GPLv3 is unlikely to change much from the current discussion draft, but no more information was to be had from Microsoft or Novell.

There was also a comment to the effect that open source users are better served by adherence to standards than interoperability agreements. Adding support for Microsoft's OOXML format seems to be a particularly sensitive point. Justin responded that if he were to go into a company trying to sell a solution based on OpenOffice.org, and that solution could not handle Office 2007 files, he would be laughed out the door. So supporting Microsoft's formats is important, even if Novell's policy remains that OpenDocument is the format of choice. Sam noted that standards are great, but true interoperability requires a great deal of work and testing; this agreement is about getting Microsoft and Novell engineers together to do that work.

Perhaps the most surreal moment came in response to questions about why Microsoft is going out trumpeting its 235 patents if it does not intend to sue, and why it does not reveal the actual patents. Sam made the statement that the 235 patents came out as a response to requests for greater transparency in Microsoft's dealings on intellectual property issues - a response which did not achieve universal respect among the members of the audience. He did not want to address the question of revealing the patents, though - and he did not have to. Microsoft's lawyer in charge of open source issues just happened to be sitting in the front row; he sprung up and claimed that Microsoft doesn't reveal the patents because the administrative burden of doing so would be too high - a statement that The Register had much fun with the next day.

Allison made the point that the community really does not want to know about these patents. Once we have been put on notice that we are alleged to be infringing upon a specific patent, we must respond in one way or another.

A theme that came out a few times in the discussion is that there are voices within Microsoft arguing for greater participation with the open source community. There are people within Microsoft who understand the power of free software and who want the company to be a constructive force in the industry as it heads in that direction. Like any large company, Microsoft suffers from a certain amount of schizophrenia, with the result that different messages will be heard from different groups. But there is reason to hope that rational and friendly (though always competitive) thought will prevail.

The session ended with a show-of-hands vote on whether the audience thought the agreement was a good thing or not. There were approximately equal numbers of yes and no votes - but the bulk of the audience did not vote at all. In many minds, it seems, the jury is still out on whether this deal is good for open source or not.

Comments (18 posted)

What Microsoft and Novell agreed to

Since last November, there has been much discussion of the deal between Microsoft and Novell. To an extent, it has all been talk in a vacuum, since the actual text of the agreement has not been available. That has finally changed, however; the terms of the agreement have been released as part of Novell's (delayed) annual regulatory filings.

It turns out that there are three different agreements: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements. In the case of any disagreement between the agreements, the patent agreement wins out over the other two, and the technical agreement beats the business agreement.

We still do not get to see the full set of terms; they have been redacted, heavily in some places. So one is left trying to make sense of text like:

Fortunately, the bulk of the agreement has not been so heavily obscured.

The core of the patent agreement is about what one would expect, given the conversation over the last six months:

Of course, there's no end of fine print which should be read by anybody wanting to rely upon this non-license. To begin with, Novell's customers only get the non-license from Microsoft for as long as Novell complies with the terms of the agreement. Many of those terms - especially in the termination section - are blanked out. If Novell and Microsoft get into a big disagreement in the future, the non-license could vanish overnight.

The definition of "Covered Products" is complex and full of exclusions. In particular, "clone products" are not part of the deal:

Certain possible clone products shipped before the signing of the agreement are excluded from this definition, but four (Wine, OpenXchange, StarOffice, and OpenOffice) are explicitly excluded from the exclusion - though there is a complicated dance to the effect that those products are not necessarily clone products either. "Foundry products," seemingly being those which are developed by third parties, are excluded. Then, there's the "other excluded products" which include web-based office productivity applications, video game consoles, business applications ("such as accounting, payroll, human resources, project management, personnel performance management, sales management, financial forecasting, financial reporting, customer relationship management, and supply chain management"), "unified communications," and, interestingly, mail transfer agents. If you are a Novell customer running sendmail, and Microsoft claims patents in sendmail, you can still be sued.

There's a few other details; the non-license is, unsurprisingly, not transferable. There is an explicit clause that neither party is acknowledging any infringement or even that the other side's patents are valid. Lots of details on what happens when companies are acquired or spun off. And so on. Novell has recently stated that the company itself remains as open as ever to patent infringement suits by Microsoft, but that's only partly true: both companies have forgiven each other for any infringement which may have happened before the agreement was signed. There is one exclusion here: there is no forgiveness for distributing Wine.

One last thing worth noting: at OSBC, both Novell and Microsoft refused to comment on the possible impact of GPLv3, saying that it was inappropriate to talk about a license in draft form. Novell is a little more forthcoming in the "risk factors" section of its annual report:

The technical cooperation agreement contains relatively few surprises. Each company commits to working to make the other's system work better as a virtualized guest. There will be a special "shim" layer which implements Microsoft's top-secret hypercall API and glues it to Xen or another hypervisor. There will be information sharing on management interfaces for virtualized guests. An "optimization innovation laboratory" will be set up on the U.S. east coast to "showcase, test, and validate" the various virtualization efforts. There is an effort to collaborate on directory and identity management. And there is cooperation around the Office Open XML format; the first term of this agreement is the highly redacted section quoted above, so it's hard to tell what is really going on.

The business cooperation agreement talks about creating a joint marketing plan to sell the various activities described in this deal. Microsoft will kick in $60 million to make this marketing happen; Novell gets to decide how some of that money will be spent. The two companies promise to endorse each other's offerings. Microsoft will be tossing in another $34 million for a sales force trying to sell the combined offerings. There is a special term prohibiting either company from selling the combined Linux/Windows package as a single unit. Each company must separately license its part of the offering to the customers.

Microsoft commits to buying $240 million in SUSE Linux certificates. This section is highly redacted ("Microsoft may also *** through the *** in which case an *** will be *** from the *** for the *** in the Term") so there's a lot of presumably important details we'll never know about. Novell gets an exclusive deal in that Microsoft promises not to make any similar deals with other Linux distributors for three years.

The bulk of this set of agreements really is as boring as some people have claimed. It's two companies trying to make their products work better together and to increase the market for both. The patent agreement is worth some study, though, especially for anybody who is tempted to rely on it to make their business somehow safer. The exclusions from coverage by the non-license have not been highlighted by any of the PR from either company, but they do very much affect the real nature of the coverage provided. The complicated dance around exclusions may just be lawyers trying to nail everything down, or it may indicate a deeper agenda somewhere. For those of us wondering what is really going on, the release of the text of these agreements may have shed rather less light than we would have liked.

Comments (37 posted)

USB laptop firewall runs Linux

A new firewall product for Windows laptops would generally be greeted with yawns from the Linux community, but the newly announced Yoggie Pico has some features that may be of interest. The Pico is a device that contains a 'security processor' running Linux and whole slew of free and open source security applications in a USB 'key' form factor. The intent is to provide a laptop user on the road the same level of security as they would have behind the corporate firewall.

At its core, the Pico has an Intel CPU, some RAM and two separate banks of flash. At boot time, it copies the read-only version of the software from one bank to the other and runs from the copy; an attempt to ensure that even if the Pico is successfully compromised, a reboot will restore it. A driver is installed on the laptop that snags all network traffic just above the link layer and sends it off to the Pico for filtering. This allows traffic from all network interfaces to be intercepted.

The Pico provides firewall protection and Network Address Translation (NAT) via iptables and runs Snort for intrusion detection/prevention. It also does content filtering of various internet protocols (HTTP, FTP, POP3 and SMTP) to stop viruses, spyware, phishing and spam. It has three proprietary, patent-pending, modules that in some, unspecified way correlate the information gathered by the other security software to detect and thwart previously unknown threats.

If you can believe everything that is said on the website, the Pico will protect a laptop from any known or unknown threat immediately upon plugging it in. One suspects the reality falls somewhat short of the hype. Statements like: 'simply plug it to your laptop and you are completely secure' are at best exaggerated, at worst deceptive; security is a process and a set of tradeoffs, not a destination. How those tradeoffs are administered is glossed over as well; too much configurability can be error-prone, while too little can lead to unusable rigidity.

There certainly is a niche for this kind of protection; laptop security is often the Achilles heel of a company's network security. The Pico driver provides administrators a means to disallow network traffic when the Pico is not present which may help keep laptops from bringing home various ills. As a separate hardware device that does not rely on much from the host OS, the Pico could provide a nice laptop security device; it remains to be seen if its $180-200 price point is attractive.

Yoggie plans to release a driver for Linux (as well as Mac OS X and Windows Vista) sometime soon, but because it is relatively easy to run the same applications on the laptop itself, it may not be a big seller in that (already small) market. Depending on how hackable the device is, there might be a rather larger market for a USB attached computer that can run Linux. It will be interesting to see whether Yoggie stands in the way or actively assists anyone interested in modifying their Pico for purposes other than what the company had in mind. And if Linux hackers can figure out how to 'mod' it and talk to it, with or without Yoggie's help, some very interesting applications could result.

Some rumblings about GPL compliance have been heard in the community (for example see the comments on the LWN announcement). No links to source code could be found on the website; it is possible that the code is shipped with the device though there are indications that is not happening either. From the website, it would appear that the company has been shipping a similar Gatekeeper device with a different form factor and connectivity. It appears to have substantially the same software and one would have hoped that any GPL compliance issues would have been resolved then. An answer to an inquiry about the code is pending, stay tuned.

Comments (5 posted)

Google, Yahoo, Facebook Extensions Put Millions of Firefox Users At Risk (Wired)

Wired reports on a vulnerability in a number of Firefox extensions. "Unlike almost all of the extensions hosted at Mozilla, the foundation that created the open-source Firefox browser, these commercial extensions check for updates from servers controlled by their respective corporate overlords. And they fail to check for extensions from servers with SSL certificates, which most users know as sites that start with https://. That means that users who open their browsers when using an open wireless connection are vulnerable to a hacker being able to intercept these third-party extensions' checks for updates at a plain http:// site and then pretend to be the update server."

Update: here's the disclosure of the vulnerability from Christopher Soghoian, the researcher who found it.

Comments (20 posted)

freetype: arbitrary code execution

Package(s):	freetype	CVE #(s):	CVE-2007-2754
Created:	May 24, 2007	Updated:	June 1, 2010
Description:	The Freetype font rendering library versions 2.3.4 and below has an integer sign error. Remote attackers may be able to create a specially crafted TrueType Font file with a negative n_points value that will cause an integer overflow and heap-based buffer overflow, allowing the execution of arbitrary code.
Alerts:	Gentoo 201006-01 freetype 2010-06-01 Fedora FEDORA-2009-5644 freetype1 2009-05-28 Fedora FEDORA-2009-5558 freetype1 2009-05-28 CentOS CESA-2009:0329 freetype 2009-05-22 Red Hat RHSA-2009:1062-01 freetype 2009-05-22 Red Hat RHSA-2009:0329-02 freetype 2009-05-22 Debian DSA-1334 freetype 2007-07-18 SuSE SUSE-SA:2007:041 freetype2 2007-07-04 Fedora FEDORA-2007-561 freetype 2007-06-18 Mandriva MDKSA-2007:121 freetype2 2007-06-13 Foresight FLEA-2007-0025-1 freetype 2007-06-13 Red Hat RHSA-2007:0403-01 freetype 2007-06-11 Debian DSA-1302-1 freetype 2007-06-10 Fedora FEDORA-2007-0033 freetype 2007-06-01 Ubuntu USN-466-1 freetype 2007-05-30 Gentoo 200705-22 freetype 2007-05-30 Trustix TSLSA-2007-0019 fetchmail, freetype, gd, libpng, python24 2007-05-25 rPath rPSA-2007-0108-1 freetype 2007-05-23 Foresight FLEA-2007-0020-1 freetype 2007-05-21 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2007.018 OpenPKG Enterprise E1.0-SOLID freetype-2.2.1-E1.0.1 2007-05-24

Comments (none posted)

gforge: arbitrary code execution

Package(s):	gforge	CVE #(s):	CVE-2007-0246
Created:	May 24, 2007	Updated:	May 30, 2007
Description:	The CVS browsing interface from the Gforge collaborative development tool does not properly escape URLs. This can be used by an attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the www-data user.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-1297-1 gforge-plugin-scmcvs 2007-05-24

Comments (none posted)

madwifi: denial of service

Package(s):	madwifi	CVE #(s):
Created:	May 25, 2007	Updated:	June 6, 2007
Description:	From this Secunia advisory: "Some vulnerabilities have been reported in MadWifi, which can be exploited by malicious, local users and malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service)."
Alerts:	Foresight FLEA-2007-0021-2 madwifi 2007-05-24 Foresight FLEA-2007-0021-1 madwifi 2007-05-24

Comments (none posted)

mod_jk: proxy bypass

Package(s):	mod_jk	CVE #(s):	CVE-2007-1860
Created:	May 30, 2007	Updated:	March 7, 2008
Description:	From the Red Hat advisory: "Versions of mod_jk before 1.2.23 decoded request URLs by default inside Apache httpd and forwarded the encoded URL to Tomcat, which itself did a second decoding. If Tomcat was used behind mod_jk and configured to only proxy some contexts, an attacker could construct a carefully crafted HTTP request to work around the context restriction and potentially access non-proxied content."
Alerts:	SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:005 acroread, asterisk, cacti, compat-openssl097g, icu, libcdio, wireshark/ethereal, Jakarta, perl-tk 2008-03-06 Gentoo 200708-15 mod_jk 2007-08-19 Debian DSA-1312-1 libapache-mod-jk 2007-06-18 Red Hat RHSA-2007:0380-01 mod_jk 2007-05-30 Red Hat RHSA-2007:0379-01 mod_jk 2007-05-30

Comments (none posted)

otrs2: code injection

Package(s):	otrs2	CVE #(s):	CVE-2007-2524
Created:	May 30, 2007	Updated:	June 8, 2007
Description:	The otrs2 ticket request system fails to properly sanitize input data, allowing the injection of arbitrary code.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-1298-1 otrs2 2007-05-28

Comments (3 posted)

pulseaudio: denial of service

Package(s):	pulseaudio	CVE #(s):	CVE-2007-1804
Created:	May 30, 2007	Updated:	March 10, 2008
Description:	The pulseaudio network code suffers from a denial of service vulnerability exploitable by an unauthenticated attacker.
Alerts:	Mandriva MDVSA-2008:065 pulseaudio 2007-03-09 Ubuntu USN-465-1 pulseaudio 2007-05-25

Comments (none posted)

Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.22-rc3, released on May 25. "The geeks with embedded hardware can consider themselves doubly special (and not just because your mothers told you you are), because we've got updates to ARM, SH and Blackfin. What more could you possibly want? Some ATA updates? USB suspend problem solving? Infiniband? DVB and MMC updates? Network drivers and some fixes for silly network problems? Yeah we got them!" The long-format changelog has the details.

The current stable 2.6 release is 2.6.21.3, released on May 24 with a single patch, being a security fix for the geode-aes driver. 2.6.21.2 came out on May 23 with a rather longer set of fixes.

For older kernels: 2.6.20.12 was released on May 24 with the geode-aes fix. 2.6.16.52-rc1 showed up on May 25 with a handful of fixes.

Comments (none posted)

Quote of the week

-- Linus Torvalds

Comments (none posted)

The return of syslets

Things have been quiet on the syslet/threadlet/fibril front for some time. Part of the reason for that, it would seem, is that Ingo Molnar has been busy with the completely fair scheduler work and has not been able to get back to this other little project. This work is not dead, though; instead it has been picked up by Zach Brown (who came up with the original "fibril" concept). Zach has released an updated patch bringing this work back to the foreground. He has not made a whole lot of changes to the syslet code - yet - but that does not mean that the patch is uninteresting.

Zach's motivation for this work, remember, was to make it easier to implement and maintain proper asynchronous I/O (AIO) support in the kernel. His current work continues toward that goal:

In particular, one part of the new syslet patch is a replacement for the io_submit() system call, which is the core of the current AIO implementation. Rather than start the I/O and return, the new io_submit() uses the syslet mechanism, eliminating a lot of special-purpose AIO code in the process. Zach's stated goal is to get rid of the internal kiocb structure altogether. The current code is more of a proof of concept, though, with a lot of details yet to fill in. Some benchmarks have been posted, though, as Zach says, "They haven't wildly regressed, that's about as much as can be said with confidence so far." It is worth noting that, with this patch, the kernel is able to do asynchronous buffered I/O through io_submit(), something which the mainline has never yet supported.

The biggest area of discussion, though, has been over Jeff Garzik's suggestion that the kevent code should be integrated with syslets. Some people like the idea, but others, including Ingo, think that kevents do not provide any sort of demonstrable improvement over the current epoll interface. Ulrich Drepper, the glibc maintainer, disagreed with that assessment, saying that the kevent interface was a step in the right direction if it does not perform any better.

The reasoning behind that point of view is worth a look. The use of the epoll interface requires the creation of a file descriptor. That is fine when applications use epoll directly, but it can be problematic if glibc is trying to poll for events (I/O completions, say) that the application does not see directly. There is a single space for file descriptors, and applications often think they know what should be done with every descriptor in that space. If glibc starts creating its own private file descriptors, it will find itself at the mercy of any application which closes random descriptors, uses dup() without care, etc. So there is no way for glibc to use file descriptors independently from the application.

Possible solutions exist, such as giving glibc a set of private, hidden descriptors. But Ulrich would rather just go with a memory-based interface which avoids the problem altogether. And Linus would rather not create any new interfaces at all. All told, it has the feel of an unfinished discussion; we'll be seeing it again.

Comments (12 posted)

Slab defragmentation

Memory defragmentation is a subject which has appeared often on this page - even if no solutions have yet found their way into the mainline kernel. Most of the defragmentation approaches out there work at the page level with the idea of being able to satisfy multi-page allocations reliably. There is another type of fragmentation problem, however, which also has the ability to complicate the kernel's memory management: fragmentation within slab pages.

The slab allocator grabs full pages and divides them into allocations of the same size. For example, kernel code which will often allocate a specific structure type will create a slab for that type, allowing those allocations to be satisfied quickly and efficiently. The slab allocator can release pages back to the kernel when all of the objects within those pages have been freed. In real use, however, objects tend to get spread across many pages, leaving the allocator with a pile of partially-used pages and no way to return memory to the system. This sort of internal fragmentation can lead to inefficient memory usage and the inability to reclaim memory when it is needed.

Christoph Lameter's slab defragmentation patch aims to solve this problem by getting slab users to cooperate in freeing specific slab pages. A defragmentation-aware slab user will start by creating a structure of the new kmem_cache_ops type:

    struct kmem_cache_ops {
	void *(*get)(struct kmem_cache *cache, int nr, void **objects);
	void (*kick)(struct kmem_cache *cache, int nr, void **objects, 
                     void *private);
    };

In this structure are two methods which the slab user must define. When the slab code picks a specific page to try to free (typically a page with a relatively small number of allocated objects), it will make an array of those objects and pass it to the get() method. That method has a guarantee that all of the objects are allocated at the time of the call; its job is to increase the reference count of each object to prevent it from being freed while other things are happening. The return value is a private pointer which will be used later.

Note that the get() method is called in something like interrupt context with slab locks held. So it cannot do a whole lot, and, in particular, it cannot call any slab operations.

After get() returns, the slab code will pass the same parameters into kick(), along with whatever value get() returned. Depending on the situation, the private value could be a pointer to internal housekeeping or simply a flag saying that it will not be possible to free all of the objects. Assuming it is possible, kick() should attempt to free every object in the objects array. Slab operations are permissible in kick(), and the function is welcome to reallocate and move the objects. Reallocation will have the effect of freeing the target page and coalescing objects into a smaller number of fully-used pages.

There is no return value from kick(); the slab code simply checks to see if there are any remaining objects on the page to decide whether the operation succeeded or not. It is perfectly acceptable for the operation to fail; that will happen, for example, if code in other parts of the kernel holds references to the target objects.

The slab creation function has had its API changed to allow the association of a set of operations with a given cache:

    struct kmem_cache *kmem_cache_create(const char *name, size_t size, 
                      size_t align, unsigned long flags,
 		      void (*ctor)(void *, struct kmem_cache *, unsigned long),
		      const struct kmem_cache_ops *ops);

The destructor is no longer used, so it has been removed from the list of kmem_cache_create() parameters and replaced by the ops structure.

The patch includes code to add defragmentation support for the inode and dentry caches - often the two largest slab caches in a running system. There is also a new function:

    int kmem_cache_vacate(struct page *page);

This function will attempt to move all slab objects out of page, which really should be a page managed by the slab allocator; a non-zero return value indicates success. Among other things, this function can be used to clear specific pages which would help complete a higher-order allocation.

There has been relatively little discussion of this patch set; the core concept appears not to be overly controversial. It looks like a relatively low-overhead way to improve how the kernel uses memory; even the most critical reviewer can have a hard time getting upset about that.

Comments (1 posted)

Process containers

Back in September, LWN took a look at Rohit Seth's containers patch. Since that time, containers development has moved on to Paul Menage who, like Rohit, posts from a google.com address. The patch has evolved considerably, to the point that Rohit's name no longer appears within it. As of the recently posted containers V10 patch, this mechanism is reaching a reasonably mature state.

This patch introduces a couple of new concepts into the kernel. The first one has an old name: "subsystem". Fortunately, the driver core has just removed its "subsystem" concept, leaving the term free. In the container patch, a subsystem is some part of the kernel which might have an interest in what groups of processes are doing. Chances are that most subsystems will be involved with resource management; for example, the container patch turns the Linux cpusets mechanism (which binds processes to specific groups of processors) into a subsystem.

A "container" is a group of processes which shares a set of parameters used by one or more subsystems. In the cpuset example, a container would have a set of processors which it is entitled to use; all processes within the container inherit that same set. Other (not yet existing) subsystems could use containers to enforce limits on CPU time, I/O bandwidth usage, memory usage, filesystem visibility, and so on. Containers are hierarchical, in that one container can hold others.

As an example, consider the simple hierarchy to the right. A server used to host containerized guests could establish two top-level containers to control the usage of CPU time. Guests, perhaps, could be allowed 90% of the CPU, but the administrator may want to place system tasks in a separate container which will always get at least 10% of the processor - that way, the mail will continue to be delivered regardless of what the guests are doing. Within the "Guests" container, each individual guest has its own container with specific CPU usage policies.

The container mechanism is not limited to a single hierarchy; instead, the administrator can create as many hierarchies as desired. So, for example, the administrator of the system described above could create an entirely different hierarchy for the control of network bandwidth usage. By default, all processes would be in the same container, but it is possible to set up policy which would shift processes to a different container when they run a specific application. So a web browser might be moved into a container which gets a relatively high portion of the available bandwidth while Bittorrent clients find themselves relegated to an unhappy container with almost no bandwidth available.

Different container hierarchies need not resemble each other in any way. Each hierarchy has one or more subsystems associated with it; a subsystem can only be attached to a single hierarchy. If there is more than one hierarchy, each process in the system will be in more than one container - one in each hierarchy.

The administration of containers is performed through a special virtual filesystem. The documentation suggests that it could be mounted on /dev/container, which is a bit strange; it has nothing to do with devices. One container filesystem instance will be mounted for each hierarchy to be created. The association of subsystems with hierarchies is done at mount time, by way of mount options. By default, all known subsystems are associated with a hierarchy, so a command like:

    mount -t container none /containers

would create a single container hierarchy with all known subsystems on /containers. A setup like the one described above, instead, could be created with something like:

    mount -t container -o cpu cpu /containers/cpu
    mount -t container -o net net /containers/net

The desired subsystems for each container hierarchy are simply provided as options at mount time. Note that the "cpu" and "net" subsystems mentioned above do not actually exist in the current container patch set.

Creating new containers is just a matter of making a directory in the appropriate spot in the hierarchy. Containers have a file called tasks; reading that file will yield a list of all processes currently in the container. A process can be added to a container by writing its ID to the tasks file. So a simple way to create a container and move a shell into it would be:

    mkdir /containers/new_container
    echo $$ > /containers/new_container/tasks

Subsystems can add files to containers for use in setting resource limits or otherwise controlling how the subsystem works. For example, the cpuset subsystem (which does exist) adds a file called cpus containing the list of CPUs established for that container; there are several other files added as well.

It's worth noting that the container patch does not add a single system call; all of the management is performed through the virtual filesystem.

With a basic container mechanism in place, most of the action in the future is likely to be in the creation of new subsystems. One can imagine, for example, hooking the existing process ID virtualization code into containers, as well as adding no end of resource controllers. The creation of a subsystem is relatively straightforward; the subsystem code starts by creating and registering a container_subsys structure. That structure contains an integer subsys_id field which should be set to the subsystem's specific ID number; these numbers are set staticly in <linux/container_subsys.h>. Implicit in this arrangement is that subsystems must be built into the kernel; there is no provision for adding subsystems as loadable modules.

Each subsystem defines a set of methods to be used by the container code, beginning with:

    int (*create)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct container *cont);
    int (*populate)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct container *cont);
    void (*destroy)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct container *cont);

These three are called whenever a container is created or destroyed; this is the chance for the subsystem to set up any bookkeeping it will need for the new container (or clean up for a container which is going away). The populate() method is called after the successful creation of a new container; its purpose is to allow the subsystem to add management files to that container.

Four methods are for the addition and removal of processes:

    int (*can_attach)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct container *cont, 
                      struct task_struct *tsk);
    void (*attach)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct container *cont,
		   struct container *old_cont, struct task_struct *tsk);
    void (*fork)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct task_struct *task);
    void (*exit)(struct container_subsys *ss, struct task_struct *task);

If a process is explicitly added to a container after creation, the container code will call can_attach() to determine whether the addition should succeed. If the subsystem allows the action to happen, it should have performed any needed allocations to ensure that the subsequent attach() call succeeds. When a process forks, fork() will be called to add the new child to the container. Exiting processes call exit() to allow the subsystem to clean up.

Clearly, there's more to the interface than described here; see the thorough documentation file packaged with the patch for much more detail. Your editor would not venture a guess as to when this code might be merged, but it does seem that this is the mechanism that the containers community has decided to push. So, sooner or later, it will likely be contained within the mainline.

Comments (12 posted)

Fedora 7 Features

Fedora 7 was originally scheduled to be released on May 24, 2007. That target slipped a week, to May 31, 2007, so it may be out by the time you read this article. Fedora 7 has been called "the most ambitious release of Fedora that we've undertaken". The merger of Core and Extras alone was an ambitious project, and F7 has much more.

Not all of the features that were targeted for Fedora 7 made it in, but very many new features will be found in this release. Here's a list of some of the new features in Fedora 7:

• Consolidated dictionaries for each language - instead of a separate dictionary for OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and aspell there is only one dictionary shared by these applications.
• Eclipse plugins.
• Fast User Switching allows multiple desktop sessions that are easily switched between without logging out.
• An Install Everything spin for those who want it all.
• A KDE spin for those who want KDE and not GNOME.
• The Prime spin can be used for a desktop/workstation/developer/server install.
• The ability to create a Targeted spin - include only the packages you want without the clutter.
• An improved firewire stack.
• Support for KVM in the kernel and virtualization tools.
• F7 uses libata for parallel ATA support, instead of the 'old-ide' stack.
• Installable Live CDs and DVDs.
• Core and Extras merged into a single CVS root and a single build system.
• A snapshot of the nouveau driver.
• RPM and Yum Enhancements.
• The default kernel is tickless for improved power management.
• Bodhi is the new Fedora Update System, rewritten for the new combined universe.
• Pungi is used for tree building instead of the internal builddistro/etc scripts.
• More wireless firmware support.
• Smolt is a hardware reporting tool that will allow Fedora developers to understand the hardware that Fedora runs on better.

Additional documentation for Fedora can be found here.

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Technalign releases Pioneer Basic Release 2.1 desktop Linux operating system

Technalign, Inc. has announced the release of their Pioneer Basic 2.1 desktop Linux operating system. "Pioneer Basic R2.1 is similar to Basic R2.0 with several exceptions. The biggest exception is that Pioneer Release 2.1 is based on Feisty and not Edgy while it continues to be based on Kubuntu. Adept is nolonger incorporated as the update manager, but is now replaced with Synaptic per the business and consumer communities. Also notable are the Guarddog Firewall as well as the KlamAV anti-virus utilities that have been added and OpenOffice 2.2."

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HP releases Linux Common Operating Environment 4.0

HP has announced the release of version 4.0 of its Linux Common Operating Environment system. "Essentially, it lets someone custom design a system running Linux via the LinuxCOE System Designer website (choosing from over 100 Linux distributions), download a customized boot image onto a USB drive or CD and then install elsewhere according to the original design. Once a system is up and running, LinuxCOE provides continued lifecycle support for patch and package updates."

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Wanted: introductory page for all Debian teams

There are many teams within Debian, each with its own habits and tools. A wiki site is currently under construction that will help people find out more about Debian teams.

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Synergy for Familiar 0.8.4

Familiar is a Linux distribution for handheld devices. Synergy allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. So, if you have a handheld device running Familiar you can now use Synergy to control your handheld with your computer mouse and keyboard.

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Fedora Project Web gets a face lift

The Fedora Project website has received a face lift. "Prior to today that site went straight to the wiki, which is largely developer content with good (but somewhat hard to find) docs. Now we're expanding on fedoraproject.org and adding some more user-centric content like that found at http://docs.fedoraproject.org/."

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OpenPKG supports rpm5.org

OpenPKG has announced its support (and use) of RPM5. "As OpenPKG depends on RPM and Ralf S. Engelschall is both an Open Source software developer and a strong supporter of important foreign Open Source software projects, he agreed to actively support Jeff Johnson's new stated roadmap towards the forthcoming RPM 5.0 by providing him and his newly formed RPM project team the necessary central project infrastructure. rpm5.org was chosen by Jeff Johnson as the new location, under which today the RPM project was finally relaunched by him."

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SVN repositories on svn.opensuse.org

OpenSUSE has moved both YaST and ZYPP to svn.opensuse.org - other repositories will soon follow.

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MOTU Mentors list!

A new mailing list has been created for Ubuntu Masters Of The Universe mentoring. If you would like to become a MOTU, this list is for you.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 89

The Fedora Weekly News for May 26, 2007 covers the Fedora Project Web face lift, Fedora 7 RC2 "Fedora" spin i386 available, Fedora 7 at Respins.org and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #42

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for May 27, 2007 covers Dell's long awaited release of computers with Ubuntu preinstalled, the newly created Wine team, a new planet has been added to our blog solar system for US LoCos, an interview with Corey Burger, the newly approved Community Council member, a quick summary on the new procedure to become an Ubuntu Core Developer, and the spotlight is on the Catalan Team this week which was recently officially approved.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 204

The DistroWatch Weekly for May 28, 2007 is out. "Fedora 7, the latest and arguably most ambitious release from the increasingly community-friendly Fedora Project, will hit the download mirrors later this week. With its installable live CDs, merged package repositories and much improved artwork, the new Fedora should prove a major attraction on the 2nd quarter release calendar. But will it be able to regain some of the market share it lost in recent years to the more aggressive desktop Linux distributions? We'll have to wait and see. In other major news of the week, Dell has fulfilled its promise and started shipping the first desktop computers with Ubuntu pre-installed. Finally, don't miss our first look review of PCLinuxOS 2007 by Chris Smart and check out the list of four new Linux distributions that have been added to the DistroWatch database: BeaFanatIX, Granular Linux, Openfiler and Parted Magic."

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HowtoForge articles

HowtoForge has tutorials on setting up the perfect server with Mandriva 2007 Spring and the perfect desktop with PCLinuxOS 2007.

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Gentoo's Secret Sauce is sweet and sour (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Gentoo 2007.0 code-named Secret Sauce. "Gentoo 2007.0 is available in several formats for various platforms. As per its torrent download statistics, most popular are the live DVD, the live CD, and the minimal CD for x86 and AMD64 platforms. The live CD contains Linux kernel 2.6.19, Xorg 7.2, GNOME 2.16.0, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0, Firefox 2.0.0.3, Thunderbird 1.5.0.10, Evolution 2.8.2.1, and X-Chat and Gaim (now Pidgin) for IRC and instant messaging. The DVD version has everything the CD has, along with KDE 3.5.5, XFCE 4.4.0, GIMP 2.2.14, Abiword 2.4.6, KOffice 1.6.1, and several other applications, tools, and libraries."

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Free Linux distro turns PS3 into light-duty server (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices looks at a server-oriented Linux distribution for Sony's Playstation3. "Helios describes its PS3 distro as a version of TerraSoft's Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) for the PS3 that has been simplified and optimized for use as a server OS. The simplifications are said to result in 40 percent more RAM available for server applications. Optimizations include AppleTalk support in the kernel, and a Java 1.5 environment pre-installed." A press release is available from HELIOS.

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Tip of the Trade: Voyage Linux (ServerWatch)

ServerWatch takes a look at Voyage Linux. "Voyage Linux is pretty amazing. The stock image can be run from a bootable live CD or installed into any storage medium you want. It supports all bootable media, including PXE network boot. It's designed for wireless routers, but because it includes apt-get it is easily and highly customizable. If you've been wishing for a tiny Linux you can easily tweak to meet your needs, starting from the smallest possible image and adding what you want, this just might be it."

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Summer of Code 2007 - Ubuntu projects

May 28th marked the official commencement of student projects for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2007. The Ubuntu Linux distribution is among the program's heavyweights, with twenty projects lined up for 2007. Its status as a significant organization is not surprising given the remarkable momentum of the distribution, which has undeniably become a juggernaut in the Free software community after only a few short years of development. The GSoC students and the Ubuntu developer-mentors they are paired with need only work for one season, but their contributions will have lasting value to the Ubuntu distribution, the applications it packages, and, in some cases, other distributions that share the code they write.

Ubuntu's GSoC projects are too numerous to explore comprehensively here. More information on all of them is available at the Ubuntu GSoC page. We contacted students and mentors from five of Ubuntu's GSoC projects and asked them to describe how their initial proposals have evolved to the projects they are now working on, what their work will do for Ubuntu users, and how other distributions may benefit.

Lois Desplat's "Revision Controlled Home Directories" (mentored by Martin Pitt)

Mentor Martin Pitt, a member of the exclusive Ubuntu Core Development Team, describes Desplat's project, dubbed "Mnemosyne," as "a backup system with extra features". Despite any temptations to go wild with the concept of revision control as is applied to code, Pitt is seeking to temper the project for the desktop and guarantee that it is minimally taxing on resources, well integrated, and extensible so that it may work with multiple backend and frontends. The results of the discussion between Pitt and Desplat was compiled into an adjusted Mnemosyne project plan and timeline.

The new plans are a bit more fleshed-out than what is listed on the GSoC project page. Canonical's own Bazaar revision control system will be adopted as the primary backend over SVN. SVN will still be implemented as an optional plugin as a demonstration of backend development. Commits of changed files could be done instantaneously, but to use resources realistically they will probably be done nightly or at some other time interval - as in a traditional backup scheme.

Revision control systems do have advantages over traditional backup schemes and the ubiquitous Recycling Bin system. The system will allow users to revert back to several versions of their files rather than one specific backup. Moreover, the system will facilitate other features typical of code repositories, even if their use for file handling isn't immediately obvious. Users will be able to merge text files, patch binaries, and keep the repository on a remote device. If the entire /home directory is revision controlled, as is planned, this will include both personal documents and configuration files. Mnemosyne will also be designed for easy extension to /etc or elsewhere.

Mnemosyne is being designed as a daemon for committing, a command-line program for configuration and management, frontends for Gnome/KDE, and heavy integration into GNOME's Nautilus file manager (with KDE's Konqueror as a goal). The file manager integration will allow users to selectively omit files from revisioning (so, for instance, a very large file is not revisioned nightly), force commits, or retrieve past versions. These tools will be written in Python, reverting to C++ if necessary to "interface with another application." The tools should all be distribution-agnostic and could very well appear outside of Ubuntu.

Desplat is a software engineering student at San Jose State University. He has experience participating in open source projects with the OGRE rendering engine. He has established a Launchpad site for Mnemosyne where users may keep track of his work. Weekly reports will also be published on the GSoC coordination list. Expect a testable version of the daemon by mid-June and beta .deb packages by early July.

Kévin Dunglas' "Privacy tool(s) for Ubuntu" (mentored by Jani Monoses)

Modeled in the style of Apple's FileVault, Dunglas is building Privacy Tool, a GUI to accomplish three principal privacy goals that he has identified for Ubuntu. His tool will facilitate /home directory encryption, swap partition encryption, and the creation of a "safe deposit box" to secure individual files. He notes that he will also build a temporary file cleanser for Firefox if time allows.

Dunglas has yet to identify the encryption backend he will use for his tool. TrueCrypt and cryptsetup have been named as possibilities. He plans to perform /home directory encryption in-place, via a backend that either encrypts in-place directly or by moving files into the new, encrypted directory. Dunglas has no plans to implement full-filesystem encryption with Privacy Tool, stating that the /home directory and swap are the most critical places for privatizing user data. The safe deposit box will be offered as a mechanism for encrypting additional files.

Privacy Tool will be a Gtk/Gnome application built with Glade and Python. Though Dunglas has no plans to port it beyond Ubuntu, he is conscious of possible ports to other distributions and is building Privacy Tool from widely available packages. He hopes to make an alpha release available towards the end of July.

Dunglas is a computer science student at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie de Lens in France. He has been involved with Ubuntu France for several years. Mentor Jani Monoses is a Romanian computer science engineer strongly involved with the Xubuntu derivative.

Krzysztof Lichota's "Automatic boot and application start file prefetching" (mentored by Tollef Fog Heen)

This project is the continuation of a longstanding effort among Linux distributions to shorten application startup time by techniques such as prefetching. According to Lichota, Windows XP implements a system whereby application and system startup are analyzed to identify files used in the process. Those files can then be "prefetched" into cached memory upon future startups to minimize overall disk access. This technique, in addition to reorganizing these files into sequential, easy-to-access order on the disc may dramatically decrease launch time.

Lichota has made the full text of his Prefetching project application available. In it, he gives detailed analysis of the various prefetching schemes which have already been implemented (including two former GSoC projects) and systematically lists their deficiencies. In short, Lichota hopes that his system will be less RAM-dependent than the Ubuntu Boot Readahead, will be more effective at analyzing application-launch file usage than Preload, and will require less user-interaction and improve on the disk defragmentation capabilities of Pagecache tools.

The key to Lichota's project will be to work at a lower level than previous systems. While the Preload method employs a daemon to periodically invoke prefetching routines, Lichota will hook prefetching into the fundamental Linux exec() function, probably by patching the kernel itself. He hopes to reuse code from these previous projects for prefetching functions where appropriate.

Lichota has already begun writing his tool for reorganizing pre-fetching files on the hard disk. Unfortunately, there are no plans to implement this tool for anything but ext3 filesystems. Lichota believes that his code will apply mostly to the kernel and that it would be fairly easy for other distributions to adopt his work. He hopes to have a working, though untested, version of the prefetching tool in mid-July and an untested version of the disk tool in August. Lichota will also implement an ext3 tool for metadata pre-caching if time permits.

Krzysztof Lichota is a PhD student at Warsaw University who has already earned a Masters degree from their computer science department. He has five years of experience working for the storage industry on cluster solutions. Lichota has been encouraging his own students to participate in the GSoC for two years now and is among several University of Warsaw computer science students who are participating in the 2007 GSoC . Mentor Tollef Fog Heen is a member of the Ubuntu Core Development Team.

Two important resources exist for those interested in Lichota's project. He has constructed a site to track progress on the Prefetching GSoC project and a general site which he would like to become a base for all future Linux prefetching development. Those interested in participating in development are encouraged to join the prefetch-devel mailinglist.

Petter Remen's "Device & Driver Manager for Ubuntu" (mentored by Kyle McMartin)

The inspiration for Remen's project comes from a device manager specification developed by Ubuntu kernel developer Ben Collins. His goal was to implement a GUI Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) device manager for GNOME that will allow users to modify driver configuration without touching plaintext configuration files or a command line. Collins warns that the existing GNOME hal-device-manager, which displays a hardware device tree taken from HAL, but does little for user-friendly configuration, will have to be forked and some kernel hacking may be necessary.

Remen clearly outlines his vision for the project's GUI. The tool will immediately present users with a list of hardware categorized by simple terminology, which can also be filtered by user defined criteria. For each listed device, the tool will display the currently enabled driver and allow the user to replace or reconfigure the driver. Furthermore, the tool will facilitate loading drivers from CDs or other user-specified locations and allow users to disable devices. Users will be able to save their configurations in "hardware profiles" to apply upon reboot or implement on another computer.

Remen indicates on his GSoC project page that extensibility will be an objective of his work. He lists X server and CUPS configuration, independent from HAL, as possible future extensions to his project. Although the existing hal-device-manager is cross-platform, Remen will be implementing features that will make his tool Linux-specific. If, indeed, kernel development is necessary for his project, it may be difficult for other distributions to incorporate his work.

Mentoring the project will be Kyle McMartin, employed by Canonical as an Ubuntu kernel hacker and a member of the core development team.

Tomé Vardasca's "Ubuntu bootloader manager" (mentored by Scott James Remnant)

Bootloader configuration functionality has been present in the administration tools of SUSE and Mandriva for several years, but is an element of GUI system configuration conspicuously absent in Ubuntu. Vardasca's project will integrate bootloader configuration into Ubuntu's Ubiquity operating system installer, and duplicate the functionality for a GNOME control center module. The tool is only being designed with the GNU GRUB bootloader in mind.

As outlined in the full Ubuntu bootloader manger specification, users will be able to edit the list of operating systems presented by the bootloader and their ordering, configure kernel options, set passwords for the console and operating systems, and theme the bootloader. The tool will keep a copy of the configuration in an XML file in case replacement is necessary, along with a backup to use in case of user input error.

Theming options will play a major role in Vardasca's tool. It will include an interface for installing GfxBoot, and an enhanced version of GRUB designed for aesthetics. Alternatively, the tool will enable theming vanilla GRUB with a splash screen and a custom color scheme. A theme editor will be provided for this purpose. The configuration tool will include a preview window with a screenshot of the theme.

Although the code integrated into the Ubiquity installer may be difficult to port, the GNOME control center module will be written in Python and may find its way into other distributions. Vardasca intends to provide an alpha version of the configuration tool at the end of May and complete the integration into Ubiquity and the GNOME control center by the end of July. Those interested in participating should visit the Ubuntu Bootloader Manager Launchpad project page.

Vardasca is a health informatics student at the Superior School of Technology and Management at the Leiria Polytechnic Institute. He became interested in Ubuntu after switching from Windows upon the release of Vista. He says that friends' requests prompted him to develop a bootloader manager: "I guessed I could do it in the Google Summer of Code and, surprisingly, I guessed well." Mentor Scott James Remnant is a member of the Ubuntu Core Development Team.

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Samba 3.0.25a available for download

Version 3.0.25a of Samba has been announced. "This is the second production release of the Samba 3.0.25 code base and is the version that servers should be run for for all current bug fixes."

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conntrack-tools 0.9.3 released

Version 0.9.3 of conntrack-tools has been announced. "The netfilter project proudly presents conntrack-tools-0.9.3 The userspace daemon conntrackd covers the specific aspects of stateful Linux firewalls to enable high availability solutions, and can be used as statistics collector of the firewall use as well. The daemon is highly configurable and easily extensible."

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rpm5.org launched

A new site has been launched at rpm5.org; it claims to be "the home of the official RPM Package Manager (RPM) code base". This site should not be confused with rpm.org, which is the home of Red Hat's fork of RPM; rpm5 is the Jeff Johnson fork. A RPM5 roadmap has also been posted: "The main RPM development is already focused on the development of the forthcoming RPM 5.0. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR, an integrated package dependency resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform support."

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oopstops 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of oopstops has been announced. "This CUPS filter sanitizes the PostScript jobs created by OpenOffice 2.x. It makes the PostScript jobs DSC compliant, thus further processing by the pstops filter works without problems."

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Synfig irregular news

The Synfig irregular news for May 30 is out. For those who have not heard of Synfig before, it is "a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources." It was a proprietary product initially, but is now available under the GPL.

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Alsaplayer 0.99.79 and fftscope 1.0.4 released

Version 0.99.79 of Alsaplayer and version 1.0.4 of fftscope have been announced. For Alsaplayer: "Basic keyboard navigation and loop inside a selection have been added." For fftscope: "This release is a major bugfix release and each user is encouraged to upgrade."

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Faust 0.9.9.1 released

Version 0.9.9.1 of Faust is out with some new capabilities. "Faust is a functional programming language for real-time signal processing and synthesis that targets high-performance audio processing applications and plugins. The Faust compiler translates Faust programs into optimized C++ code for a variety of audio platforms : Jack, Alsa, OSS, Ladspa, VST, MaxMSP, Q, PD, SuperCollider, etc."

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RTMix 0.76b released

Release 0.76b of RTMix, an audio performance coordination tool, is out. "Well, it's been over 2 (3?) years since last release, but rtmix refuses to die ;-). Thanks solely to Robin Gareus and his heroic work in making rtmix gcc4 compliant, I am releasing rtmix version 0.76(b). Apart from compile error fixes (courtesy of Robin), there have been a few cosmetic tweaks, but most notably, the source is now released under a 100% GPL-compliant license."

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Speex 1.2 beta 2 released

Version 1.2 beta 2 of Speex, an open-source patent-free audio compression format designed for speech, is available. Changes include: "The RAM requirement for wideband has gone down drastically (i.e. more than 2x). A new resampler module has been added, providing arbitrary sampling rate conversion -- fast. The echo canceller has also been improved. A bug in 1.2beta1 that made the echo canceller unstable has been fixed. The echo canceller should now converge faster, be robust and tolerant of incorrect capture-playback synchronisation. The preprocessor has also been greatly improved. Not only should the quality be better, but it is now fully converted to fixed-point. At last, early TriMedia support (incomplete) has been merged."

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KeyJnote: the stylish way of giving presentations

KeyJnote is a cross-platform slide presentation application that aims to add style to presentations. "KeyJnote is a program that displays presentation slides. But unlike OpenOffice.org Impress or other similar applications, it does so with style. Smooth alpha-blended slide transitions are provided for the sake of eye candy, but in addition to this, KeyJnote offers some unique tools that are really useful for presentations."

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MathGL version 1.1 (Stable) released

Stable version 1.1 of MathGL has been announced. "MathGL library make wide spectrum of mathematical graphics (plots, surfaces, contours, isosurfaces and so on) in platform independent way. Graphics may be exported to EPS, PNG, JPEG or TIFF formats. Front-end for library is based on OpenGL and GLUT libraries. Also it is possible to draw plot in console regime directly to file (bitmap or PostScript) without using X-server. Output graphics is adopted to use with wxWidgets and FLTK libraries."

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GNOME Roadmap Released

The GNOME project has released a roadmap for GNOME 2.20 and beyond. "The GNOME Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members."

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Bounties offered for Planner Features (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has announced a new Bounty program for the Planner application. "Bounties for new features to be added to Planner are being offered by Intouch. Requested features are: 1) Ability to produce variance reports 2) Ability to filter projects by resource 3) Ability to link projects via a milestone 4) Automatic email to resources when a part of their schedule has been changed".

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GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:

• Agave 0.4.3 (bug fixes, documentation and translation work)
• Banter 0.1.4 (new features)
• Dasher 4.4.2 (bug fixes)
• Empathy 0.5 (new features and bug fixes)
• Eye of GNOME 2.18.2 (bug fixes and translation work)
• GDM2 2.18.2 (bug fixes and translation work)
• gedit-plugins 2.18.0 (new features and API changes)
• Glade 3.2.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gnome-games 2.18.2 (bug fixes)
• gnome-mag 0.14.4 (bug fixes and translation work)
• GOK 1.2.5 (bug fixes)
• GTK+ 2.11.0 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gtk-engines 2.10.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gtksourceview 1.90 (new features and API changes)
• gwget 0.99 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• PyORBit 2.14.3 (bug fixes)
• Rhythmbox 0.10.1 (bug fixes and translation work)
• Rhythmbox 0.11.0 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• Zenity 2.18.2 (bug fixes and translation work)

You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

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KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News)

The May 27, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "Continued work in Plasma, particularly in the clock visualisations. Kalzium uses the GetHotNewStuff framework to download new molecules for its 3d viewer, plus speed optimisations for the rendering of these molecules. The start of fullscreen support in the Gwenview image viewer. Work begins on a WebKit-based KPart..."

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The Road to KDE 4: KWin Composite Brings Bling to KDE (KDE.News)

KDE.News offers a video-heavy look at the KWin window manager in KDE4. "KWin has implemented effects in a way that allows a number of different rendering methods to be used, depending on your specific combination of hardware and drivers. These features have brought KWin rapidly into the era of dazzling eyecandy, along with some pleasant surprises on the usability front."

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HIG Hunting Season in its 3rd Week (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the ongoing HIG Hunting Season. "Are you fed up with cryptic error messages you don't understand? Then get involved! This week's target of the HIG Hunting Season is warnings and error messages."

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KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week:

• AmarokPidgin 0.1.6 (new name, new feature)
• digiKam 0.9.2-beta2 (new features and bug fixes)
• DigikamImagePlugins 0.9.2-beta2 (new features)
• flvEncoder 1.01b (unspecified)
• GenTube 1.5 (bug fixes and translation work)
• kalculus 0.5 (unspecified)
• kAnyRemote 2.12 (new features and bug fixes)
• KatchTV 0.86 (new features)
• KDE 3.5.x Alternate logout 1.0 (unspecified)
• KDE DVDAuthor Wizard 1.4.6 (new feature and bug fix)
• Khalkhi applet for Kicker 0.5.3 (new features)
• Khalkhi framework 0.2.2 (new name and new features)
• KMail Power Tools 0.3 (new features and bug fixes)
• konqil.icio.us 1.8 (bug fixes)
• KPlayer 0.6.2 (bug fixes, documentation and translation work)
• KScannerButtons 0.9.5 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• Kst 1.4.0 (new features and bug fixes)
• KTorrent 2.2beta1 (new features)
• kuftp 0.8.0 (new features)
• kxneur 0.6.1 test (test version for KDE)
• Manslide 1.5.8 (translation work)
• QueryDict 0.2 (unspecified)
• Qtractor 0.0.2.604 (new features and bug fixes)
• Scribus 1.3.4 (new features)
• SIR 1.9.1 (bug fixes and translation work)
• TaskJuggler 2.4.0 beta1 (bug fixes and performance improvements)
• taxipilot 0.9.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• WebIssues 0.9.0 / 0.8.2 (bug fixes and documentation work)

You can find more new KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

Comments (none posted)

The Linux Desktop Testing Project tutorial doc

A new Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) tutorial document is available. [pdf] Feedback is requested.

Full Story (comments: none)

Announcing Scribus 1.3.4

Version 1.3.4 of Scribus, a page layout application, has been announced. "Almost one year in the making, this release brings Scribus to a new plateau in professional print capabilities, innovative features and a completely re-written text layout engine."

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WIKINDX 3.6.4 released (SourceForge)

Version 3.6.4 of WIKINDX is out with feature enhancements and minor bug fixes. "WIKINDX is a free single or multi-user research environment storing searchable bibliographies, notes and citations and integrated with a WYSIWYG word processor for the authoring of publication-ready articles automatically formatted to chosen citation styles."

Comments (none posted)

Kicad release 2007-05-25

Release 2007-05-25 of Kicad, a printed circuit CAD application, is out with a bug fix for 3D shape display and improvements to the Gerber file viewer.

Comments (none posted)

XCircuit 3.6.94 released

Version 3.6.94 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing tool, is out with bug fixes. See the changes document for details.

Comments (none posted)

SQL-Ledger 2.8.5 released

Version 2.8.5 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, is out. See the What's New document for change details.

Comments (none posted)

Full Tilt for Krita! (KDE.News)

KDE.News mentions a new fund raising effort for Krita, a painting and image editing application for KOffice. "Krita development is in a crucial phase, we are adding fun, useful and amazing stuff at a stunning rate. But there are things that no Krita developer can do, because we lack the proper hardware. Krita's renaissance started with a simple Wacom Graphire tablet, and it led to some great new possibilities. But to implement support for modern tablet features like tilt and stylus rotation we need to buy more advanced tablets and art pens, and to make that possible, we need your help!"

Comments (none posted)

Wine Weekly Newsletter

The May 26, 2007 edition of the Wine Weekly Newsletter is online with coverage of the Wine project. Topics include: Novell's Patent Fun, ntoskrnl.exe, Gecko Package Update, Making Direct3D Threadsafe, Free Fonts, Keyboard Handling Changes and AppDB Vandalism.

Comments (none posted)

BasKet calls for developers

Release 1.0.2 of BasKet Note Pads (reviewed here last February) is out. There's a few enhancements, but the more important part of the announcement is the appeal for developers. "BasKet Note Pads has no developer anymore. Without new developers, I'm afraid the project will have to be stopped (and unavailable on KDE 4)." BasKet has some real fans; now is the time for those who would like to see this application make progress to jump in and help.

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OpenOffice.org Newsletter

The May, 2007 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.

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LeafRSS 0.9 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.9 or LeafRSS has been announced. "This version includes full smarty template integration, as well as options to embed the articles in another web page, or even to allow the output of the filter as an RSS feed."

Comments (none posted)

moap 0.2.4 released

Version 0.2.4 of moap, a "swiss army knife for project maintainers and developers", has been announced. The project description states: "It aims to help in keeping you in the flow of maintaining, developing and releasing, automating whatever tasks can be automated. It allows you to parse DOAP files and submit releases, send release mails, create iCal files and RSS feeds, maintain version control ignore lists, check in based on the latest ChangeLog entry, and more."

Comments (none posted)

Stable release 5.0.0 of MultiTail

Stable release 5.0.0 of MultiTail, an enhanced version of the command line tail utility, has been announced. "Merge of last development version with last stable version. Some of the new features are: added support (in color schemes) for alternating colors and attributes can be merged for multiple matching lines, added case insensitive toggle and history to searchfields, colorscheme for motion, Argus, portsentry, mpstat, p0f and strace, added wordwrap-mode, various fixes and updates (man-page/on-line help), conversions and color schemes can use external scripts."

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An Introduction to Haskell, Part 1: Why Haskell (O'ReillyNet)

Adam Turoff presents part one in an O'Reilly article series on Haskell. "Let me start by being perfectly clear: if you are a professional programmer, then Haskell is in your future. In 1987, this statement would have been equally true about Smalltalk. Today, 20 years later, object-oriented programming, class hierarchies, model-view-controller patterns, and other ideas from Smalltalk are now commonplace, even though Smalltalk never saw widespread adoption. Haskell is in a similar situation today. It is an esoteric language, yet stable and reliable enough for serious work."

Comments (none posted)

Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links

The May 28, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.

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Ruby/Ruby on Rails programming tutorials

Meshplex.org has some online tutorials on the Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails web platform. (Thanks to Luke).

Comments (none posted)

Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links

The May 30, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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SDCC 2.7.0 RC3 released

Version 2.7.0 RC3 of SDCC, A C cross-compiler for Intel 8051, Maxim 80DS390, Zilog Z80 and Motorola 68HC08 processors, is out.

Comments (none posted)

Burstsort 1.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.0 of Burstsort has been announced. "Burstsort is a library for sorting strings, and is currently the fastest algorithm for doing so, being much faster than Quicksort and Radixsort. It has applications to computational linguistics, genomics, and many other areas of science where sorting strings is required."

Comments (none posted)

kdtree 0.5.1 released

Version 0.5.1 of kdtree has been announced. "kdtree is a simple, easy to use C library for working with kd-trees. Kd-trees are an extension of binary search trees to k-dimensional data. They facilitate very fast searching, and nearest-neighbor queries. This particular implementation is designed to be efficient and very easy to use. It is completely written in ANSI/ISO C, and thus completely cross-platform."

Comments (none posted)

Semaphores in Linux (O'ReillyNet)

Vikram Shukla looks at semaphores. "Multithreaded applications are part and parcel of day-to-day commercial application. It would be difficult to imagine any full fledged application running commercially that is not multithreaded. Applications must use the multithreaded approach to improve on the performance of the application or systems. However, most beautiful things in life do not come without a price. Likewise, if the multithreaded feature needs to be used by the application, then it comes with a set of issues, such as deadlocks, race conditions, incorrect behavior of threads, etc. To overcome these issues, the OS provides a set of tools like Mutex, semaphores, signals and barriers that are handy in solving multithreaded multiprocessed issues. This article discusses one of these tool, semaphores, and provides some insight about them."

Comments (none posted)

Five days with the Classmate PC and Mandriva (Linux.com)

Tina Gasperson reviews the Intel Classmate PC on Linux.com. "Some say the Classmate PC is Intel's answer to (or competition with) the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) effort. Intel is hawking the lilliputian laptop in "emerging markets" like Nigeria, India, and Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and secondary students. It's to be officially released and shipped en masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun."

Comments (24 posted)

Dell launches three Ubuntu Linux PC (Computerworld)

Computerworld covers Dell's launch of three PCs that will ship with Ubuntu Linux. "Dell Inc. will officially launch its first three consumer PCs running the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux OS on Thursday -- two desktops and an Inspiron E1505n notebook PC. The new models give buyers a third choice when shopping for a PC at Dell: a machine with Windows installed, a machine with no OS, on which they can install one of their choice, and now a machine with Ubuntu Linux already installed. Other PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Lenovo Group Ltd. also sell PCs that run Linux, but mainly on customized machines, because retail demand for the open-source OS is tiny compared to that for Windows."

Comments (25 posted)

Hugin developer launches photographic distortion correction database (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers Pablo d'Angelo's presentation at the Libre Graphics Meeting. "The lead developer of the Hugin panorama-stitching application, Pablo d'Angelo, has proposed a new open database for collecting camera lens information that could be used to correct systematic distortion in photographs. The database would be populated by user-submitted calibration data and some data donated from a competitor, but the exact format and licensing of the database are still under consideration. One developer's suggestion would make proprietary software that uses the database pay for the privilege."

Comments (2 posted)

64-Bit Linux Spotlighted at Gelato ICE (HPCwire)

HPCwire covers the Gelato ICE Itanium Conference & Expo. "Scientists, developers, and engineers from 56 companies and institutions convened from all around the globe for the April 2007 Gelato ICE: Itanium Conference & Expo held in San Jose, California. The event was organized by the Gelato Federation, an international technical community dedicated to advancing Linux on the Intel Itanium architecture. Conference sponsors included HP, Intel, and the Itanium Solutions Alliance, and media sponsors HPCwire and GRIDtoday."

Comments (none posted)

MS Goes Open Source to Boost Identity Management (eWeek)

eWeek covers open source projects at Microsoft. "Microsoft is launching a slew of initiatives to help Web sites identify visitors. First, the company is kicking off four open-source projects to support the development of ID cards for online users. Microsoft is also releasing one of its identity management specs, Identity Selector Interoperability Profile, under its OSP (Open Specification Promise), meaning the specification is clear of licensing fees or patent worries."

Comments (2 posted)

Novell to detail Microsoft patent pact (ZDNet)

ZDNet reports that Novell will soon announce more information in its patent agreement with Microsoft. "Novell plans to reveal the details in conjunction with filing its upcoming annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, spokesman Bruce Lowry said Wednesday at the Open Source Business Conference here. The report had been held up by Novell's investigation into its stock option compensation practices. "We will be filing our SEC filing by the end of this month. We will be publishing the Microsoft agreements as attachments," Lowry said during a panel discussion. The agreements will have some details redacted, he said."

Comments (none posted)

Windows firewall squeezes into USB key (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices looks at the Yoggie Pico. "Yoggie Security Systems has squeezed a complete hardware firewall for Windows systems into a USB key sized form-factor. The "Yoggie Pico" runs Linux 2.6 along with 13 security applications on a 520MHz PXA270, a powerful Intel processor popular in smartphones and other high-end consumer devices."

Comments (11 posted)

Hey Microsoft, Sue Me First (Linux Journal)

Nicholas Petreley discusses the Sue me first Microsoft list in a Linux Journal posting. "I bought the domain name HeyMicrosoftSueMe.org at the suggestion of Marcel Gagné after posting a blog entry on the topic. The idea was to ask Linux users to join me in calling Microsoft's bluff. Let's get the patent infringement claims tried in court and get this over with. Several people talked me out of it. Fortunately, a lawyer named Christian Einfeldt had the same idea and followed through."

Comments (9 posted)

Eben Moglen: GPLv3 not about MS and Novell (Linux.com)

Linux.com has a series of videos of Eben Moglen talking about GPLv3 in Ogg format. "One of the highlights of my visit to San Diego for the Red Hat Summit was the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Professor Eben Moglen. From that interview, we have selected six segments on various topics for your viewing pleasure, and will be publishing one each day this week. First up, an explanation of all the things that GPLv3 is about other than the MS/Novell deal." In the second segment, Eben explains why MS should remove patents from the Novell agreement.

Comments (none posted)

People Behind KDE: Jason Harris (KDE.News)

KDE.News introduces this People Behind KDE interview with Jason Harris. "In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? I'm the lead developer of KStars, the desktop planetarium, and I wrote KPlotWidget, which is now part of kdelibs. I'm also one of the admins for the kde-edu mailing list, I was involved in Google Summer of Code 2006, and I initiated the KDE 4 Release Team."

Comments (none posted)

Firefox extension lets you remove elements from Web pages (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at the RIP (Remove It Permanently) extension for Firefox. "Are you irritated by huge graphical ads smack in the middle of an article? Or maybe you don't want to waste bandwidth viewing the dozens of images in a review, or user icons in forum boards? You can remove them for good with a single click by using Firefox's RIP extension, which zaps anything out of a Web page, permanently."

Comments (6 posted)

New tool screens spam, digitizes books (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks at the ReCaptcha project. " A group of Carnegie Mellon University programmers has launched a service called ReCaptcha that can help cut down on spam while letting people digitize books. The project is a variation of the widely used "Captcha" technique to weed out computer abuse such as e-mailing spam or posting spam on blog comments. Captchas require users to pass little pattern recognition tests, commonly reading distorted or obscured words."

Comments (6 posted)

Tone-mapping HDR photos with Qtpfsgui (Linux.com)

Nathan Willis explores Qtpfsgui on Linux.com. "A lot of photos tagged with "HDR" turn up on Flickr and similar photo sharing sites these days. They're unnatural, surreal, sometimes crazy-looking images with the bright areas darkened, the dark areas brightened, and lots of saturation. You can get in on the craze under Linux using Qtpfsgui."

Comments (none posted)

Unveiling the Art of Illusion (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Art of Illusion. "Blender gets the lion's share of press among free 3-D modeling applications, but it is not the only player in the field. Art of Illusion (AOI) is a mature, GPL-licensed 3-D modeler with robust editing, animation, and rendering features, and it's a lot easier to use than Blender."

Comments (none posted)

First-Person Shooters (OS Reviews)

OS Reviews compares three open source games. "Entering the arena are three different offsprings of id Software's various liberated engines. First, there is PrBoom, which is based on the Doom engine. Moving one step further in FPS history comes Nexuiz, being built on top of the DarkPlaces engine, which in turn is derived from Quake I. The Quake III Arena engine is the one most recently released under the GPL and serves as the basis for OpenArena."

Comments (9 posted)

CSS ruled "ineffective" in Finland

Here's a press release from Turre Legal on a recent ruling from the Helsinki District Court. In brief, the court ruled that, since the content scrambling system (CSS) mechanism used with DVDs has been to thoroughly compromised, it is no longer an "effective" protection mechanism; as a result, circumventing it is not illegal. "Defendant's counsel Mikko Välimäki thinks the judgment can have major implications: 'The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word 'effective' comes directly from the directive'. He continues: 'A protection measure is no longer effective, when there is widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method.'" (Thanks to Chel van Gennip).

Comments (29 posted)

Mozilla Foundation searching for Executive Director to replace Frank Hecker (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on the Mozilla Foundation's search for a new Executive Director. "The Mozilla Foundation is looking for a new Executive Director to lead and manage the organisation. The successful candidate will take over from Frank Hecker, who declared his intention to resign as Executive Director last month. At that time, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors, announced that recruiter Eunice Azzani has been engaged to help identify potential Executive Director candidates."

Comments (none posted)

SAE Institute Sponsors Ardour Open Source DAW Project

The Ardour digital audio workstation project has announced a new sponsor, the SAE Institute. "SAE Institute, the leading worldwide college for audio engineering, has agreed to become a corporate sponsor of Ardour, the open source digital audio workstation project. This major sponsorship ensures continual development of Ardour as a free, community-based audio recording and production software. Ardour has previously received corporate support from Solid State Logic and Harrison, but has primarily relied on donations from the public and the dedication of creator Paul Davis".

Comments (none posted)

Mozilla funds Democracy Player

The folks at Mozilla (whether it's "Corporation" or "Foundation" is not specified) have announced the awarding of a $100,000 grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is working on the development of the Democracy Player (soon to be renamed "Miro," apparently). (LWN reviewed Democracy Player last September).

Comments (9 posted)

Novell and the EFF team up to reform software patents

Novell, Inc. has announced that it is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to reform software patents worldwide. "Novell and the EFF will work to lobby governments and national and international organizations to develop legislation and policies around patents designed to promote innovation. A key area of focus will be the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where member governments of the United Nations meet to coordinate positions on intellectual property issues. Given the ease with which software ideas and code cross borders, a global approach to the issue is required"

Comments (4 posted)

OpenLogic partners with with Ashisuto

OpenLogic, Inc. has announced a partnership with Japan's K.K. Ashisuto. ""OpenLogic and Ashisuto will make enterprise-grade open source management tools and support available for large Japanese enterprises using open source products," said Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic. "The combination of Ashisuto's customer support experience and OpenLogic's open source software experience will empower open source users to manage and use open source software more easily while reducing risk." Under the agreement, OpenLogic will provide support to Ashisuto customers for hundreds of open source packages."

Comments (none posted)

Penumbra: Overture for Linux

Frictional Games has announced the release of the game Penumbra. "Recently we moved our office to a more Arctic location and took the opptortunity to get ourselves a penguin pet. We put him through various challenging escapades, strange rituals and voila: We can proudly present the Linux version of Penumbra: Overture Episode 1. Penumbra: Overture is a first person survival horror game, created by Frictional Games and runs on the internally developed HPL-Engine. An engine that is now cross-platform, soon to be supporting the Mac OS X platform as well."

Full Story (comments: 1)

Sun and Redflag Chinese 2000 to collaborate on OpenOffice.org projects

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd. "Sun Microsystems, Inc., the OpenOffice.org community and Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., today announced a joint development effort that will focus on integrating new features in the Chinese localization of OpenOffice.org, as well as quality assurance and work on the core applications. Additionally, Redflag Chinese 2000 made public its commitment to the global OpenOffice.org community stating it would strengthen its support of the development of the world's leading free and open source productivity suite."

Comments (2 posted)

VA Software Corporation changes name to SourceForge, Inc.

VA Software Corporation has announced that it is changing its name to SourceForge, Inc. "VA Software Corporation (Nasdaq: LNUX), the online media and e-commerce leader in community-driven open source innovation, today announced it has changed its name to SourceForge, Inc. The change reflects the company's strategic focus on its network of Web properties following the disposition of its enterprise software business. The company's Nasdaq ticker symbol will remain the same."

Comments (none posted)

Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 Brisbane - CFP

A call for papers has gone out for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2007. The event will be held in Brisbane, Australia on November 27-29, 2007, proposals are due by June 30.

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64 Studio music workshops in the UK this summer

Two 64 Studio workshops will take place in the UK this summer. "There will be 64 Studio workshops at both Debian Day (Edinburgh, 16th June, https://debconf7.debconf.org/wiki/DebianDay ) and LugRadio Live (Wolverhampton, 8th July, http://www.lugradio.org/live/2007/index.php/Main_Page )."

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Akademy Tutorials, BoFs, Power and Video (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks forward to Akademy 2007. "With only a month to go the schedule for Akademy 2007 is filling up. Our tutorial day has been popular enough to fill up two days covering subjects from Interview in Qt 4 to Emacs, Kopete plugins and an introduction to KDE development."

Comments (none posted)

GUADEC Registration Open

Registration for GUADEC is now open. "The GUADEC team is pleased to announce the registration is now open for GUADEC 2007 and will stay open up until the event. To register, please go to http://www.guadec.org/registration/."

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KDE to be Present at LUGRadio Live 2007 (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports on the KDE presence at LUGRadio Live 2007. "KDE will be exhibiting at LUGRadio Live 2007 which is back in Wolverhampton, England on July 7th and 8th. The event, now in its third year, is the largest gathering of Free Software projects in the UK. LUGRadio Live overlaps with the end of Akademy in Glasgow so you may want to stop by on your way home."

Comments (none posted)

KDE to be at Linuxtag 2007 (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KDE presence at LinuxTag 2007. "This year Germany's LinuxTag conference and exhibition takes place in in Berlin's Messe for the first time. As with previous years there will be a KDE booth, where you can meet some of the people behind KDE. Meet them and talk about the project, programs, features and, of course, about the upcoming KDE 4 platform."

Comments (none posted)

Free visitor vouchers for LinuxTag, Berlin

Novell is giving away 50 visitor vouchers for LinuxTag. "We can provide approx. 50 visitor vouchers which enables you to get free access to the event. If you're interested please send Florian an email. He'll than provide you with a code to activate the ticket online. This happens on first come, first serve basis."

Full Story (comments: none)

GOTO10 @ folly Summer School of Sound

The Summer School of Sound will take place at St. Martins College, Lancaster, UK on June 27-29, 2007. "Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux will lead a three day course, exploring free and open source software available for home studio purposes such as audio and midi sequencers, sound editors and virtual effect racks, as well as the creative possibilities of puredata in an audio workstation setup. The course will also provide information on how to release and publish your work online (from encoding, to licensing and streaming). The Summer School of Sound will also include an evening performance on Thursday 28 June by GOTO10 artists de Valk and Mansoux, as well as Claude Heiland-Allen and Chun Lee."

Full Story (comments: none)

Events: June 7, 2007 to August 6, 2007

The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.

Date(s)	Event	Location
June 9 June 10	PyCon Uno - First Python Italian conference	Florence, Italy
June 10 June 15	DebCamp	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 10	Pluto Meeting 2007	Padova, Italy
June 11 June 14	Third International Conference on Open Source Systems	Limerick, Ireland
June 13 June 15	Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit	Mountain View, CA, USA
June 16	DebianDay	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 16	Firefox Developer Conference	Tokyo, Japan
June 17 June 23	Debian Developer Conference	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 17 June 22	2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference	Santa Clara, USA
June 18 June 20	O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference	San Jose, CA, USA
June 18 June 20	Advanced Workshop on GCC Internals	Bombay, India
June 20 June 22	IT Underground	Dublin, Ireland
June 20	Open Source Showcase @ OpenAdvantage	Birmingham, UK
June 23	Mozilla Developer Day	Paris, France
June 25 June 27	SOA World Conference and Expo 2007	New York, NY, USA
June 27 June 30	2007 Linux Symposium	Ottawa, Canada
June 27 June 29	Summer School of Sound	Lancaster, UK
June 29	NLUUG event theme innovation Enschede	Enschede, the Netherlands
June 30 July 7	Akademy 2007	Glasgow, Scotland
July 2 July 6	Learning Programming with PHP	Redditch, Worcestershire, UK
July 6	II WHYFLOSS CONFERENCE MADRID	Madrid, Spain
July 7	Italian PostgreSQL Day	Prato, Tuscany, Italy
July 7 July 8	LugRadio Live 2007	Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
July 9 July 11	EuroPython 2007	Vilnius, Lithuania
July 9 July 13	PostgreSQL 8.2 Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, USA
July 10 July 11	The Linux Foundation Japan Symposium	Tokyo, Japan
July 12 July 13	IV GUADEC-ES	Granada, Spain
July 12 July 13	DIMVA 2007	Lucerne, Switzerland
July 14	UK Gentoo Meeting 2007	London, UK
July 15 July 21	GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference	Birmingham, England
July 18 July 20	GCC and GNU Toolchain Developers' Summit	Ottawa, Canada
July 22 July 24	Ubuntu Live	Portland, OR, USA
July 23 July 27	O'Reilly Open Source Convention	Portland, OR, USA
July 23 July 27	Asterisk Bootcamp with Jared Smith at Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, USA
July 23 July 25	Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference	Austin, TX, USA
July 24 July 27	Ninth course on the Exim mail transfer agent	Cambridge, UK
July 28 August 2	Black Hat USA 2007	Las Vegas, NV, USA
July 30 August 3	Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, USA
August 3 August 5	Wikimania 2007 (Annual Wikimedia conference)	Taipei, Taiwan
August 3 August 5	DefCon 15	Las Vegas, NV, USA
August 4 August 7	LinuxWorld Conference & Expo	San Francisco, CA, USA

If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.