Showing all newswire headlines

The saga of the GCC runtime library has been covered here a couple of times in the past. The library's license is a legal hack which tries to accomplish a set of seemingly conflicting goals. The GCC runtime library (needed by almost all GCC-compiled programs) is licensed under GPLv3; that notwithstanding, the Free Software Foundation wants this library to be usable by proprietary programs - but only if no proprietary GCC plugins have been used in the compilation process. The runtime library exception published by the FSF appears to have accomplished those objectives. But now it seems that, perhaps, the GCC runtime licensing has put distributors into a difficult position.

A new survey by the Public Sector Forums in the U.K. on public financing of IT costs was based on a sample of 168 local authorities.

Text versions of the presentations given at the Linux Symposium 2009 are now available as a PDF file. They provide wide-ranging information on current and future Linux kernel-related developments. The spectrum ranges from profiling using Ftrace, through recent changes to the PCI subsystem intended to make suspend and standby more robust, to the latest developments, such as topology patches, in 2.6.31 and the Kernel Shared Memory infrastructure planned for 2.6.32.

Business software maker VMware Inc has agreed to buy privately held SpringSource for $420 million, its biggest-ever acquisition, to beef up a portfolio of programs that help companies run data centers. VMware said on Monday the deal would hurt non-GAAP profitability through at least 2010, but not have material impact on 2009 revenue.

OK, for $10.000.00 and the grand prize, who is responsible for this quote?: "There is no Linux Community...the best we've achieved is a large group of warring factions who use the vast real estate between us to wage bloody war against each other."

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

With its novel package manager, Slax makes it simple to install new software and easy to build your own distributions. Ideally, building a custom Linux distribution would be as simple as burning a CD. In practice, though, the process is more complex, typically requiring the expertise of a developer or system administrator. Slax is a notable exception.

Most Linux distributions have 64-bit versions for x86_64 processors, such as the AMD Athlon II or the Intel Xeon. Since these distributions maintain their own package repositories, they usually provide binary packages for all of their supported applications. If you are completely content with your out-of-box Linux installation, you may never need to run a 32-bit program. Some commercial Linux software, particularly games, only provide 32-bit versions. In these rare cases, you will need to configure your 64-bit machine to run 32-bit software.

I am of XO For All and over the next few posts, I will explain my initial enthusiasm for One Laptop Per Child, and why I have lost that enthusiasm and stopped updating XOforall.com I became enthusiastic and optimistic with One Laptop Per Child and the XO Laptop headed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT ever since I first heard of the project back in 2005. How could I not be? It had a noble goal, it was tangible, and it had some very bright people behind it.

Server-side Android would push Android into high-value consumer/enterprise VDI spaces, and open up opportunities in server-side rendering for photo realistic gaming.

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That's one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it's just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. "If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux," challenges blogger Robert Pogson, "let them step up."

This is the first in a series of posts on just what the title says: The command line. The main point will be this: Stop worrying about the command line.

jQuery is a JavaScript Library, where you can utilize and develop innovative web reusable components. "jQuery simplifies traversing of HTML document, simplifies event handling, animating and Ajax interactions". Using jQuery, we can develop and add robust web components to our web applications. It is very light weight—about 19KB in size (Minified and Gzipped) and can be downloaded from this location http://jquery.com/. In this article, we will explain how we can develop a Simple Alphabetical Glossary, which can be used in our web projects. A glossary is an alphabetical list of terms with the definitions for those terms. In this example, you can click on the respective alphabet to get you the definition/list of that term with highlighted blue color.

VMware said Monday that it will pay US$420 million for privately held SpringSource in a bid to become a bigger player in cloud computing application management and the open source community.

Yahoo! is losing the founder of Hadoop, that increasingly popular open source grid platform based on Google's proprietary software infrastructure. On September 1, after three and a half years with Yahoo!, Doug Cutting will join Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop startup that launched earlier this year. As reported by the New York Times, Cutting announced his departure from Yahoo! this morning at a company meeting.

Robots can be about as complex a machine as you're ever likely to encounter, but roboticists spend a lot of time solving mundane problems that have already been solved countless times by other robot makers. A recent New Scientist article documents the efforts of researchers around the globe that have begun to collaborate on the Robot Operating System (ROS), which they hope will provide a common platform for robot research, letting its users concentrate on advancing the state of the art instead of reinventing the wheel.

Juraj Šípoš who maintains http://www.freebsd.nfo.sk/ wrote a nice review about Bordeaux on FreeBSD. The original review is at http://www.linuxexpres.cz and can be translated with google translate. Just choose Slovak to English or your language of choice, with a link to the English translation provided.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a free book written by Keir Thomas, the well-known author of Beginning Ubuntu Linux and co-author of Ubuntu Kung Fu, two popular books about Ubuntu Linux. His latest book is called Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference and it is available as a free PDF download from the official website, or as print edition from Amazon.com for USD 11,99.

Back on December 1st of last year the DistroWatch Weekly included a report of a detailed case study of Pardus Linux which was published at OSOR.eu. It detailed how Pardus was being used in both the public and private sector in Turkey and how the distribution was saving Turkish taxpayers millions of euros. [...] I had read a number of positive reviews and comments about Pardus before that and I decided the next time the distribution had a major release I'd take a look at it. That release, Pardus 2009, came on July 18th and I've been running the distro ever since.

Sun's Glynn Foster has announced today on the OpenSolaris Forums that they will be discontinuing the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) builds. For quite some time now, Sun has been providing bi-weekly updates of the latest (Open)Solaris code in the form of an ISO for those interested in testing out the latest work on this operating system.