Announcements
Commercial announcements
CadSoft releases Eagle 5.7
CadSoft has released version 5.7 of their Eagle printed circuit CAD application. This release adds improvements to a number of different commands. See the What's new document for details.
Articles of interest
Lenovo reveal non-Wintel Skylight Smartbook (GeekWithLaptop)
GeekWithLaptop reviews Lenovo's Skylight Smartbook. "Lenovo, the worlds fourth largest computer maker has just revealed details of their first Smartbook, and it doesnt come with an Intel chip or a Microsoft Windows operating system either. The Skylight as it is called, runs on Qualcomm Incs Snapdragon Chip, a chip that is also used in SmartPhones and the device is based on Linux. It has a 10 inch screen with a 1,280 x 720 resolution; it has 20GB flash storage, 8GB miniSD card, and 2GB storage space in the cloud. Lenovo are aiming the Skylight at people who just want to get online so it has built in Wi-Fi and 3G and onboard 1.3 megapixel webcam and apparently the Skylight will give you more than 10 hours battery life so thats cool."
New Books
O'Reilly Media announces five new books
O'Reilly Media has announced the publishing of the following new books: CSS Cookbook, Third Edition By Christopher Schmitt, HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference, Fourth Edition By Jennifer Niederst Robbins, Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 21 By Mark Frauenfelder, R in a Nutshell By Joseph Adler and Bioinformatics Programming Using Python By Mitchell L. Model.
Resources
The Gifting Season: Linux Audio For The Holidays (Linux Journal)
Over at Linux Journal, Dave Phillips takes a peek at progress made in various Linux audio tools over the last month or two. For example: "Werner Schweer's MusE audio/MIDI sequencer has attained release level 1.0. This milestone release has been a long time coming, and it seems to have been worth the wait. Stability has greatly improved in MusE's last few releases, and this version continues that trend. New features include support for VST/VSTi plugins over the dssi-vst bridge, scripting with the Python language, extended support for JACK, and many other additions."
Blog Postings
CodePlex Foundation Reports on 100 Day Goals (The Standards Blog)
Linux Foundation lawyer Andy Updegrove reports on the CodePlex Foundation's 100 day mark. "As I had ventured to guess in my earlier post, getting the technical program up and running has ranked as a higher priority than some of the other goals that had been announced for the 100 day burn-in period. Stated another way by Sam, "We bit off more than we could chew" with the original schedule. Not surprisingly today's announcement opens with reference to the technical achievements to date, as follows: 'A software code contribution agreement, new approaches to open source licensing, a project acceptance process, a first technology gallery and donated projects - these are among the early accomplishments of The CodePlex Foundation,...'" See this article for background information.
Stallman: On selling exceptions to the GPL
Richard Stallman, responding to Oracle's attempted purchase of Sun, has posted an essay on selling GPL exceptions. "In other words, selling exceptions permits some embedding in proprietary software, and the X11 license permits even more embedding. If this doesn't make the X11 license unacceptable, it doesn't make selling exceptions unacceptable."
Here We Go Again: Video Standards War 2010 (The Standards Blog)
Andrew Updegrove discusses the latest video format standards war, fueled by DRM. "One thing that is different this time around is that it's the content owners, and not the consumer electronics firms that are pushing hard for a solution, so it's not patent royalties and the ability to sell a new generation of electronic devices that is driving the action. Instead, what's involved are two different approaches intended to help content vendors somehow survive in the face of plummeting revenues and a continuing plague of piracy while allowing legal content owners to watch videos on whatever device they want, wherever and whenever they want, without having to carry around the original media on which they purchased, for example, a movie."
Wheeler: California: Open Source Software is Okay!
David A. Wheeler looks at California's recent declaration that the use of open source software is an "acceptable practice" for the state government. In his blog posting, Wheeler considers the impact that the declaration will have: "
I think this is a big deal. Officially saying 'it's okay to use free/libre/open source software (FLOSS)' is really important before FLOSS can get widespread use in governments. Most technologists already understand the potential advantages of FLOSS, but they encounter a lot of resistance when they try to use or develop FLOSS in large organizations like governments. Far too many middle managers are instinctively afraid of change from 'the way we've always done it'. For example, they may be afraid of unseen problems, or afraid their bosses will rake them over the coals later."
Interviews
Red Hat CEO On Recession, Virtualization, Ballmer (InformationWeek)
InformationWeek interviews Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. "Now the MySQL database appears about to go inside Oracle, as it awaits final approvals on its bid to acquire Sun. It's possible once it does, Michael "Monty" Widenius, one of MySQL's authors will start promoting his version, MariaDB, as the only legitimate open source MySQL. If that happens, "the code will fork, which is one of the worst things that can happen to open source code," he said. A development project with outside reviewers, testers and contributors is stronger when the code remains intact, instead of "fracturing the community" that surrounds it, he said. If that occurs with MySQL, it would not necessarily be Oracle's exclusive fault, he added."
Contests and Awards
Voting open for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org members choice awards
Voting is open for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org members choice awards. "The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 27 categories this year, including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on February 9th."
Calls for Presentations
LAC2010 call for music
A call for music has gone out for LAC2010, submissions are due by February 14. "Linux Audio Conference 2010 The conference about Open Source Software for music and audio May 1-4 2010 Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU) Utrecht, The Netherlands".
Linux-Kongress 2010 call for papers
For those who like lots of advance warning: the call for papers for Linux-Kongress 2010 is out. The event is happening September 21 to 24 in Nuremberg; submissions are due by May 24. "You are invited to participate in this traditional Linux event by giving a presentation about your current development work, the future plans and experiences with Linux on a high level. The Linux-Kongress is the best opportunity for Open Source developers to meet in Europe and exchange ideas about current and upcoming projects that play and will play an important role for Linux."
Netbook Summit Call for Presentations
A call for presentations has gone out for the Netbook Summit 2010. The event takes place in San Francisco, CA on May 24-25, submissions are due by February 12. "The Netbook Summit will provide attendees with practical information on the current state of netbooks, the new low-cost mobile computers."
PostgreSQL Conference East, Change of Venue and Dates
PostgreSQL Conference East has announced a change of venue and dates. "The aggressive marketing campaign has caused the conference to be four days, March 25th - 28th. We have also moved from Drexel University to the Radison Plaza, Warwick Hotel. This is to better allow for business professionals outside of our normal community to attend the conference. It is also to allow for the most exposure to potential exhibitors."
Call for Papers: sambaXP 2010
a call for papers has gone out for sambaXP 2010. "From May 3rd to 7th 2010 developers and users will meet again in Goettingen, Germany at the ninth international Samba conference, the "samba eXPerience 2010". The sambaXP is the leading event with focus on the most important free alternative to proprietary SMB/CIFS servers. The call for papers and early bird registration are open until January 31st 2010."
Upcoming Events
More FOSDEM speaker interviews
Another round of four interviews with FOSDEM speakers have been published. This time around, the speakers are Sergey Petrunya (MariaDB), Brooks Davis (Promoting open source methods at a large company), David Recordon (Scaling Facebook), and Dylan Schiemann (Dojo Toolkit). From David Recordon's interview: "We're planning to talk about how Facebook has been able to scale to over 350 million monthly active users via open source software. Some of this infrastructure was developed outside of Facebook, but we've also released about a half-dozen core pieces of infrastructure we've developed. If it wasn't for the LAMP stack, Mark Zuckerberg never could have built Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. This is a common story for many sites that we all use every day."
OpenClinica Global Conference announced (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews has announced the first OpenClinica Global Conference. "The worldwide community around OpenClinica, the rapidly growing open source clinical trial software, will gather on March 22nd, 2010 in Bethesda, Maryland (USA) for the first ever OpenClinica Global Conference. The event will bring together users and developers from diverse backgrounds to share experiences and expertise in using the increasingly popular open source software for clinical trial electronic data capture and clinical data management."
PGCon 2010 announced
PGCon 2010 has been announced. "PGCon 2010 will be held 20-21 May 2010, in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 18-19 May 2010. We are now accepting proposals for talks."
Keynotes picked for SCALE 8x
The SCALE 8x keynotes have been announced. "Tarus Balog and Karsten Wade have been chosen to give the keynotes at SCALE 8x, held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel from Feb. 19-22."
Events: January 21, 2010 to March 22, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| March 15 March 18 |
Cloud Connect 2010 | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| March 16 March 18 |
Salon Linux 2010 | Paris, France |
| March 17 March 18 |
Commons, Users, Service Providers | Hannover, Germany |
| March 19 March 21 |
Panama MiniDebConf 2010 | Panama City, Panama |
| March 19 March 21 |
Libre Planet 2010 | Cambridge, MA, USA |
| March 19 March 20 |
Flourish 2010 Open Source Conference | Chicago, IL, USA |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Event Reports
Moblin Linux on x86 smartphone: Intel's small step forward (ars technica)
Ryan Paul reports on Moblin devices unveiled at CES. "The GW990 will be Moblin's first real test running on a smartphone form factor, but the platform is becoming an increasingly desirable choice on netbooks. Samsung had a large number of netbooks on display at CES, but its N127—running Novell's SUSE-based variant of Moblin—really stood out. Moblin's snappy and visually refined user interface is impressive and demonstrates the value that Linux can bring to the netbook market."
Tux takes a bow: Linux makes presence known at CES (ars technica)
ars technica reports on the Linux presence at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. "The open source Linux operating system is arguably a major force in the mobile and embedded space and can be found on a growing number of popular devices ranging from the TiVo to Amazon's Kindle. It's not surprising that the proverbial penguin has a strong presence at CES this week, where gadget makers from around the world are unveiling their latest and greatest toys. Touchscreen devices are the new hotness this year and are arriving with Linux in a number of different form factors and configurations."
Web sites
OpenMediaVault web site launched
The OpenMediaVault open network attached storage solution project, a spin-off of FreeNAS, has launched its web site. See lwn article for the project's history. (Thanks to Koen Vervloesem).
Page editor: Forrest Cook