Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Interview with Nicholas Reville About Miro and Open Media, by Sean Daly (Groklaw)
Sean Daly talks with Nicholas Reville about Miro and open media, on Groklaw. "Nicholas Reville: Miro is software that you download into your computer that turns it into something like a TV for the Internet. It's free; it's open source; it's made by a nonprofit which is the organization that I work for. And the idea behind Miro is to give you a comprehensive TV-like experience on your computer. And we're trying to do that not just because we want to have a great experience for our users, which we do, but also because we've built the software in a very open, very democratic, very accessible way. The goal is to open up video online, to not have the same kind of gatekeepers and restrictions that creators face in traditional broadcasting, to not have those as television moves online."
DNS Inventor Warns of Next Big Threat (Dark Reading)
Malicious DNS servers that return results directing traffic to phishing or malware sites are the subject of some recent research reported on by Dark Reading. "In their study of DNS resolution, they found around 17 million open-recursive DNS servers on the Net, and discovered that about .4 percent, or 68,000 of them, are performing malicious operations by answering DNS queries with false information that sends them to malicious sites. About 2 percent are returning suspicious results, they reported."
Trade Shows and Conferences
LiMo Muddies the Mobile Linux Waters (PC Magazine)
PC Magazine tries to untangle some of the different players in the mobile Linux space. Reporting from the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona, the article tries to decipher the LiMo vs. Android as well as where Azingo and others fit into the picture. "Monday's announcements show the huge range of systems LiMo is trying to subsume. The group announced fifteen commercial handsets supposedly running LiMo-compliant Linux. LiMo also announced a plan for a LiMo software developers' kit, coming out in the second half of 2008. True LiMo phones will appear starting in the fourth quarter of 2008, the organization said."
Companies
Zvents releases open-source cluster database (LinuxWorld)
LinuxWorld investigates the Zvents Hypertable project. "Event search firm Zvents is releasing a massively parallel database server, based on a published Google design, as an open source project. The new software, Hypertable, is designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs, said Doug Judd, principal search architect for Zvents, in a LinuxWorld.com podcast. Moving the project from in-house to open source is a way for a relatively small company to get the infrastructure software it needs, Judd says."
Linux Adoption
Linux, we have a PR problem (ITnews)
ITnews knows what open source's real problem is: lack of sufficient PR. "Right now the invisibility of open source across the general community is a problem. This lack of visibility will hurt open source far more than any technological barriers preventing people from using it. Open source companies who aren't focusing on educating the market are shooting themselves in the foot."
Interviews
Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)
Not the Gentoo Weekly News has an interview with Amarok developer Mark Kretschmann. "Mark Kretschmann: I make no secret of being a very strong Ruby supporter. In fact I even consciously forced Ruby to be a hard dependency of Amarok; partly for technical reasons, partly simply for using my leverage to promote this language more. For me Ruby programming was an eye opener: it's so smart and wonderful on so many levels, and yet easy to learn. I tend to be vocal about such things, and I openly fight Python (which is of course the antichrist) wherever I can. Give Ruby a try, it's just a work of art, and actually useful. I use it whenever I'm not forced to use C++, and I'm even known for my wilds plans to rewrite part of Amarok in Ruby. Maybe with Amarok 3.0, we'll see :)"
Interview with Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko (SCALE)
The Southern California Linux Expo has posted an interview with OpenMoko's Michael Shiloh, who will be at the event. "The Neo FreeRunner looks a lot like the earlier model, the Neo 1973, with some additions: we've added WiFi, a faster processor, more memory, a 2D/3D graphics accelerator, and a pair of accelerometers. The goal of our extensive testing, before we go into mass production, is to verify the hardware so that no changes will be necessary."
Resources
Virtualization in Linux: A Review of Four Software Choices (Techthrob.com)
Techthrob.com takes a look at virtualization choices for Linux. "This article looked at four different products for virtualization in Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux. The findings were interesting - the only product that requires the purchase of a licence for personal use, Parallels, actually performed the worst of the group. Qemu did well for a completely free-as-in-speech application, although VMware and VirtualBox blew the competition away in terms of performance."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
Next page:
Announcements>>