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LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2007

Photo printing in Linux is nasty and brutish. What's a devoted Linux geek to do? Buy a Mac?

In my teens I was addicted to playing computer games. The most enjoyable ones were games which had simple controls. Some of the classic games of yore I have immensely enjoyed are Pacman, MS-Pac, Dig Dug, Snake and so on. Two weeks back I had the opportunity to try out another very interesting game called "Runes of Avalon". This game is the brain child of Roman Budzowski the founder of Anawiki Games - a professional game developing firm based in Poland. "Runes of Avalon" game has been released for the Linux platform apart from that for Windows and MacOSX.

VMware, Inc., kicked off an IPO of 33,000,000 shares for its Class A Common Stock priced at $29 per share. Shares began trading NYSE today under the ticker symbol "VMW". Citi, JPMorgan and Lehman Brothers acted as the representatives of the underwriters and, together with Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Deutsche Bank Securities, acted as the joint book-running managers of the offering.

The Ubuntu community is seeking to get approved Local Community (LoCo) teams in all 50 states in the US by the end of this year, and it's making impressive progress. A LoCo team is a local group of Ubuntu users who help promote the operating system in their local community. Activities might include educating users, translating Ubuntu into the local language, or just raising Ubuntu's visibility. Ubuntu LoCo teams are spread out all over the world, but Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon noticed last year that the US just didn't have much going on in the way of LoCo teams.

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program. While some sections of the free and open source community show little interest in the program, program leader Beth Noveck of the NYLC is upbeat, thanks to the interest shown by federal agencies including the Department of Commerce and software companies like Red Hat and Microsoft, and the prospect of replicating the program in other countries.

Now in release 2.0, Mylyn (formerly called Mylar) enhances productivity by seamlessly integrating tasks into Eclipse and automatically managing the context of those tasks as you work. Part 1 introduces Mylyn's task management facilities and integration with repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. You'll learn how context management eases multitasking and reduces information overload in Part 2.

In an overwhelmingly large series of 556 patches, Joe Perches attempted to track down maintainers for a significant number of files within the Linux kernel source tree. He explained,"I grew weary of looking up the appropriate maintainer email address(es) to CC: for a patch", adding a new line format to the kernel MAINTAINERS file parsed by a newget_maintainer.pl script.Much of the feedback was criticism of the large number of patches that flooded the inboxes of all subscribers to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Others suggested that the information would be better extracted from Git than from source files.

Oracle has finally unveiled pricing for its long-awaited next database running on Linux, and it's mixed news for users. The Oracle Database 11g price will remain the same as its predecessor, 10g: expensive. Unless, of course, you want to use some of that new functionality Oracle has been promising, in which case Oracle Database 11g becomes even more expensive.

ZENworks Configuration Management provides advanced policy-based management while reducing IT cost and complexity for Windows environments. The first management solution on the market to natively support both Microsoft* Active Directory* and Novell eDirectory(TM), ZENworks Configuration Management enables identity-based systems management. The product runs on Microsoft Windows*, Linux* and Novell Open Enterprise Server for Linux.

Last year in August PolishLinux.org -- Linux newbie website -- officially started as a English version of jakilinux.org, a Linux vortal popular in Poland. What happened during this year? What are we going to become next year? Read on! And leave some feedback!

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the "Open Source Community's Double Standard on MySQL." I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me.

Durban's drive to improve its support for ICT businesses will see it backing the upcoming SmartXchange ICT Awards ceremony. The second of this event, it is billed as the biggest event on Durban's ICT calendar and will be held on September 27. Entrance is open to any small medium or micro enterprise (SMME) operating in KwaZulu-Natal in the ICT sector.

DELL'S chief technology officer sees a huge future in Linux virtualisation for the once-dominant PC manufacturer. Kevin Kettler told an audience at LinuxWorld that virtualisation and Linux was no longer such an odd combination. "The two play to one another very strongly, particularly in the re-emerging trend of virtualisation." Researchers at Dell Labs are working on embedding the hypervisor, a virtualisation platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time.

Prior to SCO, open source and Linux were still something that, even in the software community, a minority of largely UNIX people spoke about. However, the threats of violence against SCO, the massive denial-of-service attacks got a lot of folks looking at open source who otherwise probably wouldn’t. But I think it burned much of the behavior out, and major Linux players moved to stop it. Now I see most people viewing open source as a means to an end. As we go into next decade I doubt we’ll even talk about open source that much. It will be everywhere.

[So, first Open Source is losing momentum, and now it's everywhere. Somebody hook a dynamo to the man. The spinning could keep a small country powered.—Sander]

There seems to be a common belief that programmers usually work alone. This is completely untrue. Most of them create applications in teams exchanging ideas and sharing the source code through the Internet (or the Network in the office). There are some complex version control systems but they are suitable for large projects. What if you have a small project? Here comes is Gobby. With the help of this little app you can edit files together with other people or create new ones. Everything works remotely.

I still continue to find articles on the internet downplaying the seemingly normal and sweeping adoption and acceptance of the GPLv3 license. This should point out a few things that indicate that GPLv3 is "here to stay". We have quietly passed 5000 GPLv3 projects.

Citrix will announce its acquisition of XenSource tomorrow, The Register has learned. In a bid to expand its software management play, Citrix will grab the developer of the open source Xen hypervisor. The deal will give XenSource heftier corporate backing needed to compete against VMware. Meanwhile, Citrix will be able to expand its own virtual desktop effort revealed in April and its flagship software streaming service.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian is calling for a standardized way to develop Linux applications across multiple distributions (Novell, Red Hat, etc.). Hmmm. Hovsepian’s motivations are easy to understand — Novell badly trails Red Hat when it comes to Linux application support. But will anybody answer his call for help?

I wanted to write 5 reasons to dump windows over linux, but soon I was so overwhelmed by rush of reasons that I could find, that I ended up making a list of 50 reasons. So here it goes...

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat's operations in Japan has been named the number one vendor that customers intend to conduct business with in the future by Nikkei Market Access' "Industry Trends in Intended Use of Products/Services of Major Vendors" study. This accolade adds to Red Hat's already-robust list of vendor awards including recognition from CIO Insight Magazine as the number one vendor delivering value in its annual Vendor Value study for three consecutive years.