Linux in the news

The Green Penguin - Where Does Your E-Waste Go? (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at the E-Stewards certification program for electronic waste recyclers. "That old CRT monitor the size of a small fridge. The original Apple Newton that kicked the bucket and never woke up. The early-vintage musty VA Linux box - what happens to all of this e-junk after it, if ever, leaves your basement? Ideally e-junk lands at a reputable e-recycler with the equipment to safely recycle and/or dispose of these items that are very difficult to process. What happens frequently is that a less-than-reputable outfit will pack your e-junk onto a container and ship it off to a developing country with lax environmental and labor laws, where it will wreak havoc on the environment and poor people."

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The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld takes a look the Novell-Microsoft deal. "Whatever the implications for the greater Linux and open source worlds, Novell says the Microsoft deal has been good for its Suse Linux and for IT shops that use both Suse and Windows. Customers wanted a "bridge between Microsoft Windows and Linux," says Microsoft's Hauser. Customers also wanted peace of mind over potential intellectual property disputes, since those can take products off the market or result in additional licensing fees. About 100 customers are covered by the Novell-Microsoft agreement, she notes."

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Authenticate Linux Clients with Active Directory (Technet)

Microsoft's Technet Magazine has a lengthy article on authenticating Linux clients with Active Directory. "Originally, Linux (and the GNU tools and libraries that run on it) was not built with a single authentication mechanism in mind. As a result of this, Linux application developers generally took to creating their own authentication scheme. They managed to accomplish this by either looking up names and password hashes in /etc/passwd (the traditional text file containing Linux user credentials) or providing an entirely different (and separate) mechanism."

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An Introduction To OSC (Linux Journal)

Dave Phillips introduces OpenSound Control (OSC) in a Linux Journal article. "The history of OSC begins with the history of MIDI. When the major hardware synthesizer manufacturers adopted MIDI as a standard for interdevice communications it was widely and justly hailed as a breakthrough in music technology. Armed with a computer, the appropriate software, and a few synthesizers a single musician could write, record, and produce an entire piece with no other assistance. MIDI revolutionized the music industry, and its continued use is a good measure of the success of the standard. However, MIDI is far from perfect, and many musical purposes are not served well or at all by MIDI software and hardware. As a result, alternative protocols have been advanced."

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Linux distros and Apple beat Microsoft's homepage uptime (Royal Pingdom)

The folks over at the Royal Pingdom blog have a comparison of uptimes and home page load times for the web sites of multiple Linux distributions along with Microsoft and Apple. Overall, the results of this month-long monitoring effort reflect quite well on Linux, but the authors are quick to caution that these numbers only reflect a particular point in time. Longer term monitoring is ongoing as well. "It is interesting to see that even with limited resources, many of the teams behind the various Linux distributions are managing a better homepage uptime and load time than Microsoft does, at least during this time period."

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Things that go Clang in the night: LLVM 2.4 released (ars technica)

Here's a look at the LLVM 2.4 release on ars technica. "One very significant part of the LLVM effort is the Clang project, which aims to build a completely new LLVM front-end - one that can be used in place of the current GCC-based front-ends - for C-like languages. Clang is progressing rapidly and is already capable of compiling some C applications. Clang offers a lot of really compelling advantages over GCC. Some early benchmarks show that it delivers insanely fast compilation and much lower memory overhead. In some real-world tests, Clang is 2.5 times faster than GCC and uses five times less memory. It also uses less disk space during the compilation process."

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Linux on the iPhone

A blog series from user planetbeing describes an ongoing effort to put Linux on the iPhone. The Why iPhone Linux? posting explains: "Porting Linux to the iPhone is an arduous project. We will be trying to develop an entire suite of device drivers for undocumented hardware and then attempt to run a full-fledged operating system on it. This thread speculates "10 days" or "3 hours" as the amount of time it'd take to get Linux up and running on the iPhone. Perhaps this figure would be accurate on a x86 platform, or other platforms with hardware for which device drivers are already written or for which at least documentation is available, but we have no such luck on the iPhone." (Thanks to Mattias Mattsson).

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