Linux in the news

Cooperation During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (KDE.News)

KDE.news takes a look at the cooperation between KDE and GNOME developers at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. "At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB."

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The Open-PC Project Announced at GCDS 09 (KDE.News)

The open-pc project was announced at the recently-concluded Gran Canaria Desktop Summit as reported by KDE.News. Open-pc is an effort to produce a free software based PC, with hardware supported by free drivers, as well as applications that are well-tested to work on the device. "The project was initiated in response to the lack of quality in the Free Software-based hardware solutions currently on the market. As many reviewers and end-users have stated, the pre-installed software used by hardware vendors generated a bad image for Free Software with potentially interested end-users. Much of the software was buggy and not widely tested and device drivers were often unstable, non-free or not available at all."

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Qt Labs America and other Akademy talks and sessions (KDEDot)

KDE.News continues its coverage of the 2009 Akademy. "One of the big announcements was for Qt Labs America. The team at OpenBossa are working with Qt Software to promote Qt development in Latin America, starting with Brazil. They want to find students to work on KDE as a means to learning development, similar to the methods tried by the university in Toulouse. They will sponsor KDE developer sprints, and are looking for KDE teams to invite out to Brazil."

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Vibrant Community Propels KDE Forward at Akademy 2009 (KDEDot)

KDE.News has a report from the Akademy side of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. "The KDE development platform gains support by Maemo's announcement to include Qt as supported platform in its next release. The semantic desktop gained traction with wider adoption of its underlying infrastructure. The Plasma team showed their upcoming netbook interface; a first version is expected to be available in the first quarter of next year. Cornelius Schumacher reports that KDE e.V., the organization behind KDE, is healthily growing and new projects to grow KDE's developer base and industry adoption are being spawned. A shift to next generation code hosting using the version control system git and its web interface Gitorious was announced, creating a way for more people to contribute to KDE in the future."

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SCO Files Notice of Cure Amounts Re Leases and Executory Contracts (Groklaw)

Groklaw picks apart a lengthy SCO bankruptcy filing. "It is to me one of the most fascinating document SCO has ever filed. It presents a picture of SCO's business that is very different from what they have presented to the courts. One fascinating thing is that it seems it was possible to get UNIX System V after 1995, despite SCO testimony at trial in SCO v. Novell that after that time period you could only get UNIX by licensing UnixWare. Forget that you don't think this sales plan will ever happen. It's an opportunity to look at the innards of SCO's business. I went through every page, looking for what new customers, or any updating customers, licensed after 1995. I was curious to see whether UnixWare took off and UNIX drifted down or suddenly stopped after 1995. I had a theory that perhaps SCO didn't want to sell UNIX after that, so as to avoid paying Novell royalties. But what I found instead surprised me greatly."

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Behold, The Googlification Continues - Or Does It? (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks into Google's recent announcement of Google Chrome OS. "Everyone thought the biggest news to come out of the Googleplex yesterday was the announcement that four of the company's most popular offerings — Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk — have left their long-held beta status behind, though the change appears to be mostly cosmetic, given the services well-established, if sometimes momentarily questioned, reliability. That news was, however, merely a foretaste of what was to come, as late last night the search giant revealed that it has even greater ambitions: to revolutionize the operating system."

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USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

GCN reports on a move to SUSE Linux by a division of the US Postal Service. "Postal Service information technology officials have upgraded the 15-year-old, mainframe-based system to handle more transactions and lower the cost of operating the system. The work to upgrade PTS is part of a larger plan to standardize on the open-source and less expensive Linux operating system, said John Byrne, manager of application development and head of USPS’ Integrated Business Solutions Centers. The service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment."

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File System Evangelist and Thought Leader: An Interview with Valerie Aurora (Linux Magazine)

Linux Magazine has an interview with file systems hacker and LWN guest author Valerie Aurora. In it she discusses some of the topics she has written about here (chunkfs, union file systems) as well as providing her thoughts on btrfs vs. ZFS and distributed file systems. "All of this seemed pointless, though - how can Linux stay competitive in file systems without Linux developers being paid to work on file systems full-time? So, with Zach Brown and Arjan, I cobbled together the first Linux File Systems Workshop out of shoestring and duct tape, hoping that if the existing Linux file systems developers could just talk to each other, we could come up with a way to improve funding for Linux file systems development. I don’t know that it helped, but if it did, I consider this to be my most important contribution to Linux file systems." She has a bit more about the interview on her blog: "And if you think the title is a little overblown - it describes me as both 'evangelist' and 'thought leader' - you should have seen it before I begged Jeff to tone it down a bit. :) Other than the overly complimentary introduction, I think he's done a great job as an interviewer."

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Shuttleworth about GNOME 3.0 (derStandard)

derStandard.at interviews Mark Shuttleworth. "And the really big news here is that we've been having very good discussions with the Debian release team. So the Debian release team has indicated that they are very open - not about a release date but a freeze date. That freeze date would be the time where we sit around and look at all the major components and decide what the major versions would be that we collaborate around. There is no pressure that we have to agree on everything, but just actually having the conversation is useful for any upstreams who care about this information."

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Keeping In Touch: A Guide To Linux Audio Comm Channels (Linux Journal)

Dave Phillips looks at ways to keep in touch with audio development. "Recently I asked readers for suggestions regarding Linux audio topics they'd like to read about in my articles. One response suggested a survey of the various Internet communications channels for Linux-based musicians. I liked the idea, so I considered my traditionally preferred channels, searched for and found interesting new connections, and wrote this guide to lead you on a tour of notable communications channels focused on Linux sound and music topics."

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VirtualBox 3.0: An easy way to mix and match operating systems (Computerworld)

Computerworld reviews Sun's VirtualBox 3.0. "What is it? VirtualBox is an open-source virtualization program which lets you run guest operating systems with your native desktop operating system. For instance, if you need Windows to run Quicken, but prefer Linux for all your other work, VirtualBox enables you to bring up Windows and Quicken without leaving your Linux desktop. What you get is an adjustable window containing the guest operating system floating on the host system. So, for example, you could have a Windows XP guest instance entirely hiding its Linux host system."

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