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LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2008

Here are some pictures I took while attending SCALE 6x this year in Los Angeles.

From his hot, dusty, locust-plagued property in the NSW outback, a software engineer who goes by the name Quozl is doing his bit to help educate 1.5 billion of the world's poorest children. James Cameron has spent the past two years testing prototypes of a low-cost robust laptop called XO designed especially for children in developing countries. He devotes up to five hours a day to his volunteer work for the US charity One Laptop Per Child, which began mass producing the "green machines" in November.

We've covered a lot of ground in the first three parts of this series. Today we stride down that last mile: setting up 802.1Q VLANs, and making configurations permanent...Client configuration is always the same, but switches and routers vary. I'll show you how it's done on the cheap, with a low-end smart switch and an inexpensive, but powerful router built with Voyage Linux on a PC Engines WRAP board.

don’t want to say its the best, but I’ve been using Debian, Ubuntu and other APT based Linuxes for years now. Ubuntu on desktop PC’s and Debian on Servers (only because I have a few servers already on Debian and keeping all identical is worth doing). I don’t run GUI’s on my servers. I pretty much use Debian in favour of other linuxes because it is free, and updates are also free. Why do I personally use Debian on my home servers - the main answer is APT.

The Zonbu PC, a $99 miniature desktop that debuted earlier this year, generated some excitement among those with shallow pockets—at least until they saw the fine print. You have to pay the two-year subscription plan (ranging anywhere from $12.95 to $19.95 per month) up front before you can call the desktop your own. In return, you get around-the-clock technical support, 25GB to 100GB worth of online storage, and the comfort of knowing that you'll never have to update your PC manually again. The plan worked well enough that Zonbu decided to take its subscription-based services on the road, in the form of a laptop. The Everex Zonbu Notebook, which launched earlier this year, loads Gentoo Linux and runs on green, or energy-efficient, parts furnished by VIA.

Two-million primary school children are to be provided with US$ 100-worth laptops under a farsighted initiative. Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped into fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island. OLPC Lanka Foundation has been set up to implement this massive education project aimed at supplying this learning tool into rural children’s hands.

With XenServer 4.1, Citrix is working to integrate its Xen hypervisor and the tools that wrap around it with the sophisticated snapshotting and replication software that is already part of the popular disk arrays that are in use by businesses today. The XenServer 4.1 update will also include support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, 64-bit Linux guest operating systems, and Ethernet network interface bonding.

The LiMo Foundation is making steady progress on its goal to make Linux a popular mobile operating system. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, several key LiMo vendors including Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic announced as promised the first set of LiMo-compliant handsets while LG, Aplix and Purple Labs showed off prototypes and reference handsets. A total of 18 LiMo models were launched at the event, including six from Motorola, four from Panasonic and NEC and one from Samsung. These included Motorola’s much anticipated RAZR V8 and V8 Luxury Edition and Samsung’s SGH-i800.

Alien Arena 2007 is a free/open-source first-person shooter game based on source code released by id Software. Started by COR Entertainment in 2004, the game combines a 1950s-era sci-fi atmosphere with gameplay similar to the Quake, Doom, and Unreal Tournament series. Alien Arena is primarily an online multiplayer action game, although single player campaigns are also available against bots. I finally had the chance to set-up and play Alien Arena last weekend.

ndia's premier event on Linux and Open Source -- Open Source India Week 2008 (OSIW) -- has just got under way, with the stage set and the big shots of the open source world in at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. The CTO Summit -- the first and one-of-its-kind session -- kick-started with the keynote of one of the open source powerhouses, Brian Behlendorf. He is the man behind Apache Web servers that run more than 60 per cent of the world's website.

Newly appointed Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is aiming to bring Red Hat, an open-source vendor with just below $500 million in revenue as of last year, into the billion-dollar range in the next three years. If you recall, Jim Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines, replacing Matt Szulik who stepped down after nine years for family health reasons on January 1. Matt Szulik is now the chairman of Red Hat’s board of directors.

Computer companies want more control over the products they sell you, and they're resorting to increasingly draconian security measures to get that control. The reasons are economic. With enough lock-in, a company can protect its market share even as it reduces customer service, raises prices, refuses to innovate and otherwise abuses its customer base. It should be no surprise that this sounds like pretty much every experience you've had with IT companies: Once the industry discovered lock-in, everyone started figuring out how to get as much of it as they can.

Mobile Linux flagbearer Trolltech appears to be carrying on at a nice clip in the wake of its acquisition by Nokia, and for its Qtopia Phone Edition platform, things just got a little sweeter. The company is using MWC as its stage to announce version 4.3, which is actually a good deal more revolutionary than its one-tenth increment would lead on.

“The Burton Group has denigrated the work and the members of the OASIS Open Document Format Technical Committee (of which I am Co-Chair) with published statements that have been shown to be false. The Burton Group owes us an apology and an immediate retraction. Waiting until after February, after the DIS 29500 process concludes, to make corrections is unacceptable. Since your stated purpose in making this report public was to "advance the debate" in the current OOXML ISO process, withholding factual corrections until after that process concludes would imply that you and the Burton Group see no problems with knowingly persisting in influencing an ISO ballot with false information published under the Burton Group name.”

[Them's fighting words! - Sander]

So you just set up a Linux-compatible webcam. You've tested it with Kopete, and you can send images on MSN and Yahoo! Now what? Here are some fun things you can try.

Fluxbuntu's aim is to be a "lightweight, productive, agile, and efficient" operating system; this review takes a look at Fluxbuntu and whether it lives up to the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience on a tight resources budget. The review discusses included applications, the user interface and ease-of-use, as well as some limitations.

Sun Microsystems has gone very granola by buying desktop virtualization software player innotek. (The small 'i' stands for big innovation or something like that.) Innotek pushes software called VirtualBox (less than 20MB) that lets developers run multiple operating systems and display them side-by-side on their screen. So, you can hop back and forth, testing your code across Windows, Linux, Mac and OpenSolaris. Beyond the development angle, VirtualBox handles basis PC and server virtualization tasks.

Linux comes with many serial text and gui based serial communication programs. My favorite is minicom - friendly menu driven serial communication program. If you are addicted to DOS / Windows TELIX (a telecommunications program originally written for DOS and was released in 1986), minicom is for you under Linux / UNIX. Let us see how to configure minicom for my Soekris net4801 Single Board Computer / embedded Linux device.

Those of you who - like me - are more interested in topics like Free and Open Source, and everything that’s related, will find some good pointers here. All of these great sites provide RSS feeds, so if you’re using modern browsers like Iceweasel or Firefox, you can “live-bookmark” them to see the headlines even without visiting the pages.

Earlier this week, I took a close look at the latest release of Fedora. Overall, Fedora 8 is a really solid distro. But there were specific areas that a lot of other reviews completely missed. In this piece, we will examine these more intimately to get a better understanding of Red Hat's new release.