Linux in the news

Villa: The Linux desktop's change problem

Luis Villa has put up a thoughtful post on the difficulties of innovating on the Linux desktop. "Discussion in this bug about the Sugar filesystem is fairly typical of what happens when you try to implement radical change- people used to the old system focus intensely on the transition costs (it doesn't work RIGHT NOW and my old system WORKS RIGHT NOW DAMMIT) and give varying levels of thought (usually little) to the potential upside of the change- maybe tagging and search really have vastly more potential than hierarchies now that our computers have more capabilities than they did in the time of Aristotle. Kudos to the Sugar folks for persisting despite that resistance."

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Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County (Wired)

This Wired article is about Diebold's proprietary vote-counting software, but it is an interesting example of how added visibility into a system can help to find fatal bugs. "Parke Bostrom, one of the Transparency Project volunteers, wrote in a blog post about the issue, 'This means the audit log is not truly a 'log' in the classical computer program sense, but is rather a 're-imagining' of what GEMS would like the audit log to be, based on whatever information GEMS happens to remember at the end of the vote counting process.'" Worth a read. (Via Felten).

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Cycles and Simplicities (Linux Journal)

Doc Searls writes about the tendency for companies to become mired in the tracks of their own success. "It's strange to think of Google and Facebook as old, but Dave's right. They are. Search is old. Advertising is old. Online social communities in a big walled garden is old. You can look at it this way: Google fixed Lycos's problem. (And Infoseek's, and Hotbot's, and AltaVista's.) And then it fixed the yellow pages' and classified advertising's problems. And it used the proceeds from both to start fixing many other problems too."

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Novell reports leap in Linux revenues (ZDNet)

ZDNet examines the latest financial report from Novell. "Novell's Linux business grew by 33 percent over the fourth quarter last year, according to the company's latest financial figures. Identity and access management revenues were up 11 percent compared to the same period last year, and systems and resource management revenues climbed 15 percent. The quarterly results, released on Friday, show that just two areas declined. Novell's Workgroup business fell by nine percent, while its services business plunged by 26 percent."

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The "Roboat": Solar and Linux-Powered Sailboat (CleanTechnica.com)

CleanTechnica.com has a quick look at an autonomous solar-powered sailboat that is controlled by Linux. Known as the "Roboat", it won the first World Robotic Sailing Championship. "The boat also features sensors that track position and speed over ground, speed through water, ultrasonic wind speed, and more. When a destination is set, the Roboat’s chain-driven motors adjust the mainsail, jib, rudder, and boom."

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A no-fly zone to protect Linux from patent trolls (Legal Pad)

Over at Legal Pad (a Fortune magazine sponsored weblog), Roger Parloff examines plans for Linux Defenders, an initiative aimed at protecting free software from software patents and patent trolls. The initiative, which is going to be announced on December 9, is being led by the Open Invention Network (OIN) and is co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center. "Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be."

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Interview with Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop has the second in its series of interviews about Linux multimedia, this time with Totem developer Bastien Nocera. Totem is the GNOME movie player. "I was already well chuffed years ago when distributions started adopting Totem as their default movie player. Even though I'm happy to see it mentioned next to such a venerable institution as the BBC, its selection really has more to do with Totem's position as the GNOME movie player, and all the work being done on that desktop (and the underlying frameworks) by all the contributors, rather than just being 'another movie player'."

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Storing Files/Directories In Memory With tmpfs

HowtoForge takes a look at storing files in memory, instead of on a hard drive. "You probably know that reading from RAM is a lot of faster than reading files from the hard drive, and reduces your disk I/O. This article shows how you can store files and directories in memory instead of on the hard drive with the help of tmpfs (a file system for creating memory devices). This is ideal for file caches and other temporary data (such as PHP's session files if you are using session.save_handler = files) because the data is lost when you power down or reboot the system."

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Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google's Native Client plugin (ars technica)

Here's a look at Google's Native Client plugin on ars technica. "Native Client provides a sandboxed web-embeddable runtime environment for portable x86 binaries. It also provides a bridge to facilitate communication between JavaScript and Native Client executables. This makes it possible for complex web applications to seamlessly leverage native code for processor-intensive computations." The code is BSD-licensed and available from the Native Client page on Google Code.

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KDE 4.2 beta 1 on Gentoo

Kevin Bowling takes a look at KDE 4.2 on a Gentoo Linux box. KDE 4.2 is currently in beta, set for release on January 27. "Much needed features such as changing the panel height, auto-hide, and screen edge selection have been added. The task bar is highly configurable in typical KDE fashion, allowing you to define task grouping, sorting, filtering based on current desktop or screen or minimized windows only, as well as allowing manual grouping. The system tray also now allows hiding of unwanted tray icons."

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