Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

It may not be as fancy-schmancy as Microsoft Surface or Jeff Han's demos but these videos of a Linux-based MPX multi-touch table shows that things are moving full speed ahead in the land of the free penguins. We talked with developer Peter Hutterer, who gave us his insight on the project, the iPhone and the ongoing multi-touch craze.

Our story last week about the paucity of Linux pre-installed machines available in New Zealand hit a nerve and elicited a flurry of comments from readers. But it seems that's not exactly the case. Lenovo's Australian and New Zealand communications head Heather Jones contacted m-net to straighten out our misunderstanding. She said that the new T61p ThinkPad will be available in New Zealand with Linux, but only if it is requested.

Some time ago we criticized the ISO in a series of posts. The closer you look at it, the more justified our suspicions seem. A Groklaw member points to some items in Portugese, then providing translations and explanation. On the face of it, some iffy thing — or shall we call it “corruption” — can easily be spotted. Portugal’s ISO says there is not enough space for IBM & Sun in the meeting room. And the ISO committee is, surprisingly, chaired by Miguel Sales Dias, from Microsoft.

One of the coolest tools to come out of the Fedora Project is Revisor, which makes it blindingly simple to create your own custom Linux distribution, where you get to choose the packages you wish to include. This week I've been playing with Revisor to generate a Dell Firmware Updates LiveCD. The result is a bootable LiveCD that lets you log in and run 'update_firmware' to flash your system to the latest BIOS on 282 Dell system types.

[In a comment, Matt adds that hopefully it will get released on linux.dell.com in the future. Nice work Dell. — Sander]

Interested in easily monitoring your Linux server from your web browser? Munin creates graphs for just about everything going on in your system. It is simple to install and configure, and is perfect for checking if your server is overloaded. You can view the results in a web browser on the Internet by using a http server like Apache.

HP has been awarded a top international Linux security certification that will help government agencies and enterprise customers reduce costs while implementing secure solutions on the company's industry-standard hardware. The certification, called the Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) Common Criteria security certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, applies to HP servers, workstations and notebooks.

An impulsive and immediate migration to Linux can sometimes lead to disappointment. Ambitious businesses are sometimes led to believe that their data can merely be be dumped from one platform onto another, but the reality is a little more complex than this. In order for a migration to be successful, one needs to be familiar with native Linux applications, and the data needs to be stored in a format that is independent from just a single application.

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of the ultra-popular open source WordPress blogging platform, has issued a blunt edict that"all sponsored themes should be removed from themes.wordpress.net" before the WordCamp conference beginning on July 21, a decree that has met with widespread approval in the WordPress community. In directly related news, on July 10, Mark Ghosh announced that sponsored themes would no longer be promoted on the popular WeblogToolsCollection blog.

[Not directly Linux related, but probably of interest to you since many of you Linux users run WordPress-powered blogs — Sander]

American Fiber Systems (AFS), with headquarters in Rochester, NY, provides fiber optic network services directly to enterprises and to carrier resellers. Bill Ciminelli, vice president of network development and services for AFS, noticed that internal communications were becoming increasingly difficult because the number of mobile company workers like field technicians and salespeople was growing so fast. With an old-fashioned voice messaging system separate from email and other collaboration tools, AFS workers had to manage communications from cell phones, laptops, office workstations, and company phones. Ciminelli began looking for a solution that would move AFS into the 21st century. To his surprise, he found it in Asterisk, an open source product.

Wyneken belongs in the growing list of note-taking applications for GNOME, along with the Sticky Notes panel apps, Evolution, and Tomboy. Specifically designed for students' needs, it is equally well-suited to the random jottings that anyone might make during the course of their work, as well as letters, reports, presentations, and even man pages. Wyneken is built on LaTeX, so it allows for complex formatting when necessary, with the tradeoff of not having a WYSIWYG display.

Last week I wrote that Linux creator Linus Torvalds called advocates of the Free Software Foundation's GPLv3 license "hypocrites." A few readers complained I had not provided a complete picture of Torvald's feelings. They were right. He also thinks FSF leaders are "controlling," "condescending," and full of "hot air." And he's got more choice words for GPLv3 itself. In a series of postings on the Linux kernel mailing list under the thread 'Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3', Torvalds makes clear his distaste for the third version of the General Public License and its creators--a group led by the Free Software Foundation's eccentric president Richard Stallman.

[A followup to last weekend's InformationWeek story that was quickly shown to be misleading. — Sander]

The iPhone doesn't run Linux, but Intel has begun work to help improve the operating system for future devices of its ilk. The chipmaker on Monday is launching its Mobile and Internet Linux Project Web site, which consolidates a number of new and existing Intel projects to improve the Linux kernel and other open-source components. In addition, the company employs "quite a bit more than a dozen" programmers for coding work, said Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open-source technologist.

On July 16, Open-Xchange announced the immediate availability of Open-Xchange Express Edition. This is a full-featured collaboration designed to make it easy for small and midsize businesses to take advantage of the cost benefits of open source without requiring prior Linux know-how. OXEE (Open-Xchange Express Edition) transforms a bare metal computer into a fully-functional collaboration server running on Ubuntu Linux. The package includes all the tools required by companies to facilitate communication and efficient teamwork. It doesn't require any additional operating system or any other prior software to work.

In response to a recent merge request, Linus Torvalds explained a best practice when moving and changing code,"when doing renames it is generally *much* nicer to do a 100% rename (perhaps with just _trivial_ changes to make it compile - the include statements etc change, and maybe you want to change the name in the comment header too)." He went on to explain,"doing 'move the code and change it at the same time' is considered bad form. Movement diffs are much harder to read anyway, so the general rule is: move code around _without_ modifying it, so that code movement doesn't really introduce any real changes, and is easier to look through the changes; do the actual changes to the code as a separate thing."

Presumably, many have done this before and could not bothered to document it because it was considered trifling. Well, I have spent far more time on things far more pointless, and, so, it is in consideration of ye idle sleepless sinners, that I write to you this here, uh, procedure, for taking an Apple IIe and using it as a a serial terminal for your GNU/Linux box. These instructions were written for a Gentoo Linux machine but they should be easily adaptable to any distribution you run, so if you're part of the great gothic hordes of (x)buntu users (Dear hordes: just kidding about the gothic part), you could probably adapt these instructions to your hippie distribution without too many problems (yes, I said it.)

[A nice guide with humor added, but only suitable for those not easily offended. — Sander]

"Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments," said Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute. "The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it's not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki." There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process.

MontaVista® Software, Inc., the leading provider of Linux for intelligent devices and communications infrastructure, will present a free educational webinar examining the latest dramatic developments in the real-time capabilities of embedded Linux. Information and registration for the session is available online at http://www.linuxwebinars.com. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, July 25, at 10:30 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time or 1:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time.

Gone are the days of annual release cycle. Software companies need to operate with rapid releases while maintaining high quality and tight integration. Virtualization helps SaaS companies deploy their software faster and more flexibly. At the same time, it promises faster and simpler delivery of on-premise software, competing with SaaS. Ken Novak, CEO of Replicate Technology, is honored to speak about these emerging trends at LinuxWorld in San Francisco Aug 7-9, 2007.

Open-Xchange Inc., today announced full-featured collaboration software designed to make it easy for small- and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of the cost benefits of open source without requiring prior Linux know-how. The product, Open-Xchange Express Edition, provides organizations with an alternative to expensive proprietary collaboration software.

Much work in Amarok. Sample OpenGL-based applets added to Plasma. General progress in the 2d projection and KML in Marble, OpenPrinting, and KOrganizer Theming Summer of Code projects. KWallet support in KRDC. KMines essentially rewritten with a QGraphicsView base. More manipulation and view work in Kreative3d. Implementation of Kubelka-Munk paint mixing research in Krita. Internet integration in Kaider. Okular becomes usable as a print preview component. KTrace, a "strace" interface for KDE 4 added to playground/sysadmin. Beginnings of support for ComunIP. More progress in the porting of Digikam and KTorrent to KDE 4. The start of a rewrite of the Oxygen widget style. And finally KBFX, an alternate K menu, moves to kdereview.