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LXer Feature: 16-Feb-2009

We start off this week's Roundup with a blast from the past with an article that compared the best Linux distributions of 2000. Its amazing just how far we have come since then. Amazon has unveiled a new slimmer Kindle reader that has more storage and quicker page turns. Priced at a somewhat steep $359, it will keep many who would want to buy it from being able too.

Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.

In my day-job all our Linux boxes (bar 3) are Xen VMs. I wanted a way to take a backup of these with out the risk of the files changing underneath. For performance reasons I am running all of them on Logical Volumes. Within these VMs the DomU OS is once again using LVM for various reasons. This does create some headaches for taking the backup.

After more than 8 months, Inquisitor team presented first public alpha release on brand new Inquisitor v3.1 Live CD - a Live CD dedicated to doing hardware stress tests and benchmarking in a clean, controlled environment. This is experimental build made with Debian package base.

Adobe and Nokia are offering developers a Google-size pile of cash as incentive to write applications for Flash Player and AIR running across different types of devices. The companies today unveil a $10m fund to assist development and marketing of applications that further the Open Screen Project. They are making the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Novell invades China to pen a new deal for their Linux OS. What does China have to gain?

No scripts or Tech Tips today. Just some prep for an experimental post coming up later this week. Today's post is going to be somewhat of a departure from the material you usually read on this blog, although it will fit perfectly when it gets book-ended in the middle of the week by its follow-up.

In what we hope to become a weekly ritual, we bring you an overview of the distributions released in the last 7 days with a little help from DistroWatch.

The free Linux operating system doesn't reveal its charms easily, but charms it has. You just have to know how to make the software work for you. That will become easier next weekend for those in the Los Angeles area, which plays host to the annual Southern California Linux Expo at the LAX Westin hotel.

There are many fantastic Open Source projects out there. But just how do they get the funding they need to continue and expand development? Earlier this week I posted: Why 100% Free Software Destroys Linux. That post, in a nutshell, says : Open Source projects need a way to be funded. Commercial/Proprietary software is the way it has been done so far, and is the way it is likely to be done for the foreseeable future.

In the earliest days of computers, just about everything could be considered free software. Computers were so large, unwieldy and difficult to understand that any reasonably well-written program would be passed around via punch cards or paper tape. Into that free software world Richard Stallman was born. In the 1960s, he programmed IBM System/360 mainframes in PL/I, a procedural language that itself is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. In the 1970s, Stallman worked at the famous MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Along the way, he saw software developers change their attitudes and move away from openness toward the proprietary. It was this shift in the hacker culture, as he called it, that eventually led him to strike out on his own in 1983.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances does make a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. In this case, you need Buddi, probably the most easy to use personal finance manager out there.

With 22 months of development now behind them, the Debian team today released Debian Gnu/Linux 5.0, codenamed Lenny. The release supports no less than 12 processor architectures and includes the KDE, Gnome, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments. It also features compatibility with major standards including the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS 2.3) and version 3.2 of the Linux Standard Base.

Novell has signed a cooperation agreement with China Standard Software Company (CS2C), the leading Linux firm in China. The two companies will promote the development and adoption of Linux in the country, and combine resources on distribution of technology and services for the Chinese market. "Together, we will drive the acceptance of Linux in the industry," said Qin Yong, CS2C executive vice president in a statement. "We are looking forward to closer cooperation with Novell in the future."

There's a bug in virt-install and virt-manager on Ubuntu 8.10 that does not let you run Windows XP as a guest under KVM. During the Windows installation, the guest needs to be rebooted, and then you get the following error, and Windows XP refuses to boot: "A disk read error occured. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". This guide shows how you can solve the problem and install Windows XP as a KVM guest on Ubuntu 8.10.

Green computing frequently makes the news either for its cost-saving potential to businesses, or as a way for eco-conscious consumers to reduce their environmental footprint. But UK-based Aleutia, Ltd takes a different approach, using green to produce ultra-low-power-consumption Linux PCs for classrooms and businesses in developing countries. The company's flagship product is the E2, a compact desktop system that consumes just 8 watts.

It has already become one of the most talked about, and most widespread, worms of recent years. But how do you go about catching the feckers behind Conficker? Conficker is that most typical of tech troublemakers: it relies upon the laziness and stupidity of Windows users. By not bothering to install the MS08-067 patch from last October, they left themselves exposed to infection.

Why does nearly every modern computer – whether it runs OS X, Vista or Linux – take considerably longer to boot than an ancient Amiga? With a hard drive, an Amiga could go from power socket to Workbench in around five seconds. With a modern multicore processor and a 12-month-old installation of Windows, you're lucky if your desktop is responsive before the kettle boils. Even a modern distribution of Linux can take a while. It seems like boot speed is the inverse of Moore's Law.

If you didn’t notice yet, I enjoy doing a lot of “thinking about the past.” Last weekend I walked into a Target and while browsing through their electronics section, I noticed that they were selling a version of the ASUS Eee PC 900. Priced at approximately $250 and coming with a version of Xandros Linux. For well over a year I have been reading of these new sub-notebooks coming pre-installed with GNU/Linux but I had never seen one in person. This notebook is probably the smallest I had seen (8.9 inch). I immediately wanted one but did not get it…yet.

A string is a fundamental part of programs all around us. Data exchange in many forms happens in strings (e.g. user input, command line arguments, web forms, text protocols and what not.) But most programs written in C are plagued by security issues because of their usage of unsafe functions.