Showing all newswire headlines

Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.

I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA. I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about what happened.

As expected, the US has the greatest number of computers in the list, in fact slightly more than half. Of the rest, most (37%) are in Europe with a small number of systems in Japan (22), China (12) and India (6). Of much more interest, as I alluded to in a recent article is the penetration of Linux into this arena. Depending upon how you count the numbers provided by TOP500, between 85% and 89% of the Supercomputers are running some version of Linux. Of those that identify the distro, SuSE outnumbers Red Hat 10 to 1. No others are identified.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students learned might help other instructors.

Building a MythTV digital video recorder (DVR) is a series of small battles -- configuring digital sound, aligning your video sources and channel guide data, getting XvMC running, and so on. Any tool that simplifies one of those battles is welcome, and GNOME LIRC Properties promises to be just such a tool. It is a shortcut to configuring infrared receivers and remote controls, and although it is not perfect, it is a good step in the right direction.

The traditional file permission model, where read, write, and execute permissions are set on each file for the user, group, and others (UGO) has one drawback: It can't be used to define per-user or per-group permissions. For that, you need to employ access control lists (ACL). Eiciel is a graphical tool that integrates with the Nautilus file manager and allows for easy ACL management. The UGO model lets you associate only one group with a file. If you try to define read permissions on a file for user Charlie and read and write permissions for user Alexia, and Charlie and Alexia belong to different groups, you'll see what I mean. With ACLs, you can specify elaborate permissions for multiple users and groups.

SSHMenu adds a button to your GNOME panel that displays a configurable drop-down list of hosts that you have might like to connect to with SSH. SSHMenu is packaged and available in repositories for both Ubuntu (as sshmenu-gnome) and Fedora (gnome-applet-sshmenu). Other SSHMenu packages available for both distributions do not include GNOME support. In those, the button for the SSH menu is started in its own window and an xterm is started when you wish to connect to a host with SSH. If you install the GNOME-aware SSHMenu packages, you can add SSHMenu to your panel by right-clicking the panel and choosing "Add to Panel..." and selecting the "SSH Menu Applet." When using the GNOME-aware SSHMenu, a gnome-terminal is started to handle your SSH connections, and you can select the profile gnome-terminal should use on a per-host basis. That lets you specify a font and background color in the terminal that can act as a reminder of which host that terminal is connected with.

Amarok gained its huge popularity due to a vast number of features and very good functionality, like a complex collection management, support for iPod and several other MP3/OGG players, integration with Wikipedia, lyrics fetching, and another great number of features. The latest Amarok version, 1.4.9.1, is the most stable release in the 1.4.x series, and also the most fully-featured Amarok up to date.

Microsoft's strategy goes like this: invade open source, redefine open source, make open source work better on Windows, force open source to 'license' for software patents

Everyone is familiar with PCLinuxOS by now. And most of us have preconceived thoughts and opinions on this Linux distribution. And yet, I could not get my head around the attraction of this distro over Ubuntu, Simply Mepis, Linux Mint, Freespire or any other beginner-friendly Linux release.

For years now we have heard about Linux on the desktop and its need to make a concerted effort to illustrate its value to the end user and whatnot. The point of it all being is that if we expect Linux to become a household name, we must find away to get it into the minds of the typical user, like we have seen with Windows.

I rely heavily on OpenVZ. In this article I would like to share some of my personal experiences in OpenVZ deployment. I assume that the readers already know how to install OpenVZ and the basics of OpenVZ. This article describes some tips on OpenVZ usage via the command line.

While most major server vendors show little interest in Ubuntu, a major Canadian Web host has started offering Ubuntu as a server option to its customers. Here are some quick details about the move, as reported by Works With U, a web site that covers the Ubuntu industry.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

My previous article discussed a set of dynamic menus based upon no more than one, simple web page template, a few appropriate text files and absolutely minimal php code. There is a caveat, I dodged my responsibilities, i.e. I showed no effort to catch failures and errors. This was due to my initial code being flawed, hence, the first article was able to stress the core simplicity of the endeavor. Now, however, I attend to more serious business of both noticing failures and notifying those responsible.

First, storage and CRM moved into the cloud. Now, even open source middleware is moving toward Software as a Service, thanks to a new partnership between Red Hat and Amazon.com. Here are some quick details from MSPmentor, which covers managed services and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Perl script to ping, check ports and create a CGI page report. This time written a bit more complicated than necessary to highlight some uses of Perl.

With openSUSE 11.0 just a few days away, it’s time to look at one of the stars of the show: KDE. In openSUSE 11.0, you get two KDEs for the price of one. Here we’ll take a look at what’s coming in KDE, and talk to one of openSUSE’s KDE contributors, Stephan Binner.

Email: businesses can't stay competitive without it, but the bigger a company is, the more of a headache managing an email server can be. There are plenty of email management tools on the market, but many are expensive or lack easy customization. AtMail recently added an open source option to its product line that offers many of the same features commonly found in other Web mail apps, but for the low, low cost of free.

As the representative for Norway in the recent OOXML ratification process, Steve Pepper has become an outspoken critic of the IEC/ISO process. Pepper is also a passionate advocate of XML, open standards and Topic Maps. Here Pepper, who is in South Africa for the XML in Government workshop, speaks to Tectonic about what happened in Norway, Topic Maps and why open standards are important for governments.