Announcements
Commercial announcements
Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Results
Red Hat has announced financial results for its fiscal year 2010 third quarter ended November 30, 2009. "Total revenue for the quarter was $194.3 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $164.4 million, up 21% year-over-year."
Articles of interest
ASUS Eee PC 1201N: Dual-Core Atom + ION FTW? (AnandTech)
AnandTech reviews the ASUS Eee PC 1201N. "With a 12.1" LCD running at 1366x768, for me the problem of being too small is addressed. I can comfortably type on such a laptop, though I still prefer full-size ergonomic ("natural") keyboards. The resolution is enough that common tasks fit within the available area. As for the performance, we have moved from a single-core 900MHz Celeron CPU to the first (only) dual-core Atom netbook. With SMT, the Atom 330 is able to work on up to four threads simultaneously, and while we still wouldn't call it "fast" it's certainly faster. The CPU also gets some help in the memory department, with 2GB of DDR2 memory in a dual-channel configuration."
OLPC Unveils Radical Laptop Design for 2012 (eWeek)
eWeek reports on the latest OLPC plans. "One Laptop Per Child is unveiling the development road map for its XO low-cost notebook through 2012, including one new XO powered by chips from Via due out in January 2010 and another with an ARM-designed processor aimed at 2011. OLPC also unveiled a one-panel laptop made of flexible plastic that is scheduled for launch in 2012."
Technology changes 'outstrip' netbooks (BBC)
BBC has some predictions on the future of netbooks. "Arm hopes that many more netbook makers will be using one of its designs as a core processor and turn to Linux as the operating system. At the very least a crop of Arm-based netbooks might mean a big boost to battery life. Arm's mobile pedigree means it is designed to be parsimonious with power." The long-term prognosis for this class of computer is grim, though.
15 game-changing Linux moments of the decade (TechRadar)
In a retrospective, TechRadar looks at Linux innovations over the last decade. "If you were sat at your Linux computer one dark evening in late 1999, things would have been considerably different. [...] Your machine would probably be running either Red Hat 6.1 or Mandrake 6. [...] Outside your window, the world was going crazy for all things dotcom. Microsoft was prepping both Windows 2000 and its ill-fated Millennium edition, while Apple had just released OS 9 and its Power Mac G4."
2009's Five Most Popular and Important Linux Stories (ComputerWorld)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols lists his most popular and favorite Linux stories of 2009. "Before jumping into this, let me say that's what popular isn't the same thing as what's important. So, I'm giving you a twofer list. The first is the most popular of my stories, and then there are the stories, which I think are the most important for Linux's future."
10 reasons why Microsoft must buy Palm (Betanews)
For some end-of-year amusement: Betanews advises Microsoft to buy Palm as a way of getting back into the smartphone market. "Microsoft should offer an open-source mobile operating system -- and WebOS would be it. A proprietary OS is less appealing when a good open-source alternative (Android) is available. Microsoft has too much valuable intellectual property tied into Windows Mobile for an open-source effort. But WebOS would be an easy open-source project."
Linux-running Pandora game handheld nears completion (Neoseeker)
There is a brief update on the status of the Linux-based Pandora handheld gaming system over at Neoseeker. The first 3000 units have sold out and the system is undergoing final regulatory testing. Eventually, it will sell for $330. "The Pandora is about the size of PSP (with dimensions of 83mm by 140mm). It has a 600MHz ARM Cortex CPU, and a 800x480 display capable of OpenGL and 16.7 million different colors. A small qwerty keyboard, a touchscreen, and dual analogue controls will help you game, or use your Pandora for non-gaming: with Wifi, Bluetooth and a USB 2.0 host you'll be able to do a great deal with this game system. [...] Did we mention the Pandora runs on Linux? It runs a variation of Angstrom-Linux and is designed to be able to handle emulators (such as for the C64, NES and other older systems) in addition to being able to run Linux games such as Quake 3, and browsers such as Firefox."
A Small Business Guide to Linux Desktop Software (Small Business Computing)
This SmallBusinessComputing.com article on desktop Linux has little to teach LWN readers - except how Linux distributions are seen by that particular audience. "If you have a limited IT vocabulary, it's probably better to stick with Red Hat and Novell. Choose the support option based on your needs and budget."
Legal Announcements
The ongoing MySQL campaign
Michael Widenius continues his campaign to keep Oracle from acquiring MySQL with a petition and a lengthy FAQ on what he sees the problems being. "If the deal is approved based on the fact that 'MySQL can be forked', that will be a big blow to open source Software. It means that open source software is not protected for anti-competitive measures and it will be ok for big companies to freely buy up their open source competitors and kill them. Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example, Oracle could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as a result."
Resources
Still Livin' La Vida Linux (Tux Deluxe)
Jeremy Allison updates the world on his Linux-based multimedia device experiences on Tux Deluxe. "The Sonos platform is based on an embedded Linux kernel, but the user interface is completely custom, using separate Linux based controller devices to select play lists (although you can also use an iPhone). This is embedded Linux done right."
Learning is Childsplay (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal reviews Childsplay. "After I finished my recent articles on Teaching with Tux and Learning with Gcompris, I received a couple of suggestions from readers that I take a look at Childsplay. I spent some time looking at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should too. As soon as I started the program, it started to play it's theme song and my 18 month old son came running, and he still comes running every time he hears that music. For most parents and educators, my review of this program could end right here, but I suspect that I should probably write a bit more."
Linux Gazette #170 is out
December's possibly gloomy outlook for Linux Gazette seems to have turned around as the January issue is out with a full complement of articles. On the back page, editor-in-chief Ben Okopnik writes about the response to December's edition: "Last month, in this very space, I asked for you, our readers, to write in; to let us know that you were reading LG, that it mattered to you - in short, to tell us whether LG's continued existence was a value to the Linux community, as I believe it is. The response has been nothing short of phenomenal and tremendously heartening: for the last month, I've been buried under a huge pile of supportive email from all over the world, with a number of offers of help and ideas for improvement."
One Month Of Monitoring The Linux Kernel Performance (Phoronix)
The Phoronix folks have launched a project to track Linux kernel performance on a daily basis. The results for the first month are now available. "For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings."
Open Source Business Resource, January issue
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available, with a focus on "success factors." "The authors in this issue explore: the importance of well defined processes, the value of documentation to end users, the diverse tasks of a community manager, the value provided by participants who don't contribute code, and how a community can assist in creating training materials. Each concentrates on a particular success factor, and as a whole, provide a fuller picture of what to look for in a successful open source project or company."
OpenMovieEditor And Blender: More NLE Delights (Linux Journal)
Dave Phillips reviews OpenMovieEditor and Blender in their video editing capabilities for the Linux Journal. "At first glance I wasn't too impressed with OpenMovieEditor, but after spending some time with it I've come to like it a lot. I still find its default appearance rather blocky (FLTK can look better), and the alternative "plastic" style and colors are too bright for my notebook's display. However, I also found OpenMovieEditor to be very easy to learn and use, steady as a rock (excepting the DV file load problem), and perfectly capable of fulfilling its stated goal as a basic NLE for desktop video production."
Calls for Presentations
Bossa Conference 2010 submission deadline extended
The submission deadline for Bossa Conference 2010 has been extended to January 17. "We're pleased to announce that the Bossa Conference 2010 will be held in Manaus, Brazil on March 07-10, 2010."
OSCON 2010: Call for Proposals
OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, will be held July 19 - 23, 2010 in Portland, Oregon. The call for participation is open until February 1, 2010. "The OSCON Call for Participation is now open. If you have winning techniques, favorite lifesavers, war stories, productivity tips, or other ideas to share, we want to hear from you. We're especially on the look-out for ways to do more with less, design and usability best practices, mobile device innovations, cloud computing, parallelization, open standards and data, open source in government, business models, and beyond."
OSDC.TW calls for papers (use Perl)
use Perl has announced the call for papers for OSDC.TW, submissions are due by January 31. "hcchien writes "We are glad to announce the OSDC.TW 2010 will be at 2010/4/24-25 in Acadmeia Sinica, Taipei. So it's time to call for papers now. If you work for any interesting open source projects. It is a good time to introduce your projects to the open source developers in Taiwan."
Upcoming Events
First FOSDEM 2010 Speaker Interviews
Interviews with four of the speakers at FOSDEM 2010 are now available. FOSDEM will be held February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium. This round of interviews includes David Fifield (Nmap), Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux kernel), Richard Clayton (Evil on the internet), and Wim Remes (OSSEC). From David Fifield's interview: "The talk will be about the Nmap Scripting Engine, or NSE. This is an embedded Lua interpreter combined with networking libraries that have access to Nmap's internal data structures. After running a port scan, the scripts you select will run to get more information about the target. We have some simple scripts that do things like check for a readable /etc/passwd on a web server or get an SSL server certificate, and more complex ones that look up AS numbers, check for Windows vulnerabilities, or list NFS exports." More speaker interviews will be coming in the next few weeks.
LibrePlanet 2010 free software community conference
The FSF has announced the LibrePlanet 2010 free software community conference. "The three day event will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard University Science Center, from March 19th to March 21st, 2010."
Events: January 14, 2010 to March 15, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| January 13 January 15 |
Foundations of Open Media Software | Wellington, New Zealand |
| January 15 January 22 |
Camp KDE 2010 | San Diego, CA, USA |
| January 18 January 23 |
linux.conf.au | Wellington, New Zealand |
| January 23 | Workshop on GCC Research Opportunities | Pisa, Italy |
| January 23 January 24 |
DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 | Wellington, New Zealand |
| February 2 | Prague PostgreSQL Developers' Day 2010 | Prague, Czech Republic |
| February 5 February 7 |
Frozen Perl 2010 | Minneapolis, MN, USA |
| February 6 | Super Happy Dev Castle #0 | Belfast, N. Ireland, United Kingdom |
| February 6 February 7 |
Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting | Brussels, Belgium |
| February 10 | Red Hat Cloud Computing Forum | Online, Online |
| February 11 February 13 |
Bay Area Haskell Hackathon | Mountain View, USA |
| February 15 February 18 |
ARES 2010 Conference | Krakow, Poland |
| February 17 February 25 |
PyCon 2010 | Atlanta, GA, USA |
| February 19 February 21 |
SCALE 8x - 2010 Southern California Linux Expo | Los Angeles, USA |
| February 19 February 20 |
GNUnify | Pune, India |
| February 20 February 21 |
FOSSTER '10 | Amritapuri, India |
| February 22 February 24 |
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing | New York, NY, USA |
| February 27 February 28 |
The Debian/GNOME bug weekend | Online, Internet |
| March 1 March 5 |
Global Ignite week | Online, Online |
| March 2 March 4 |
djangoski | Whistler, Canada |
| March 2 March 5 |
FOSSGIS 2010 | Osnabrück, Germany |
| March 2 March 6 |
CeBIT Open Source | Hannover, Germany |
| March 5 March 6 |
Open Source Days 2010 | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| March 7 March 10 |
Bossa Conference 2010 | Recife, Brazil |
| March 13 March 19 |
DebCamp in Thailand | Khon Kaen, Thailand |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Forrest Cook