Showing all newswire headlines

"Since many alternative approaches to hibernation are now being considered and discussed," Rafael Wysocki began on the lkml, "I thought it might be a good idea to list some things that in my not so humble opinion should be taken care of by any hibernation framework. They are listed below, not in any particular order, because I think they all are important."

OpenLogic on July 11 announced a free tool said to enable the tracking and analysis of thousands of versions of open source software across more than 800 application packages. The tool enables administrators to set and maintain effective software policies in mixed Linux, Windows, and Solaris desktop environments, according to the company.

One of the coolest tools to come out of the Fedora Project is Revisor, which makes it blindingly simple to create your own custom Linux distribution, where you get to choose the packages you wish to include. This week I've been playing with Revisor to generate a Dell Firmware Updates LiveCD. The result is a bootable LiveCD that lets you log in and run 'update_firmware' to flash your system to the latest BIOS on 282 Dell system types.

[In a comment, Matt adds that hopefully it will get released on linux.dell.com in the future. Nice work Dell. — Sander]

Interested in easily monitoring your Linux server from your web browser? Munin creates graphs for just about everything going on in your system. It is simple to install and configure, and is perfect for checking if your server is overloaded. You can view the results in a web browser on the Internet by using a http server like Apache.

HP has been awarded a top international Linux security certification that will help government agencies and enterprise customers reduce costs while implementing secure solutions on the company's industry-standard hardware. The certification, called the Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) Common Criteria security certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, applies to HP servers, workstations and notebooks.

Aside from Java IDE, Eclipse can also work with PHP, Ruby, and Groovy, C, and C++. In this article, you will learn how to build and develop applications in C++ using the Eclipse C/C++ Development Toolkit (CDT), and Standard Template Library (STL). This allows you to streamline the process and take advantage of powerful features C++ offers. This article, which is a follow-up to "C/C++ development with the Eclipse Platform," is intended for C++ developers who want to learn C++ development using the Eclipse CDT.

An impulsive and immediate migration to Linux can sometimes lead to disappointment. Ambitious businesses are sometimes led to believe that their data can merely be be dumped from one platform onto another, but the reality is a little more complex than this. In order for a migration to be successful, one needs to be familiar with native Linux applications, and the data needs to be stored in a format that is independent from just a single application.

The Anaconda installer in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides a way of specifying the installation key in a kickstart file in order to allow for a fully unattended system install.

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of the ultra-popular open source WordPress blogging platform, has issued a blunt edict that"all sponsored themes should be removed from themes.wordpress.net" before the WordCamp conference beginning on July 21, a decree that has met with widespread approval in the WordPress community. In directly related news, on July 10, Mark Ghosh announced that sponsored themes would no longer be promoted on the popular WeblogToolsCollection blog.

[Not directly Linux related, but probably of interest to you since many of you Linux users run WordPress-powered blogs — Sander]

American Fiber Systems (AFS), with headquarters in Rochester, NY, provides fiber optic network services directly to enterprises and to carrier resellers. Bill Ciminelli, vice president of network development and services for AFS, noticed that internal communications were becoming increasingly difficult because the number of mobile company workers like field technicians and salespeople was growing so fast. With an old-fashioned voice messaging system separate from email and other collaboration tools, AFS workers had to manage communications from cell phones, laptops, office workstations, and company phones. Ciminelli began looking for a solution that would move AFS into the 21st century. To his surprise, he found it in Asterisk, an open source product.

While the Avivo driver doesn't yet contain 3D functionality or support a number of features found in the official fglrx driver and the community Radeon driver, it is making steady progress despite its age. Most recently with the open-source R500 driver implementing shadow frame-buffer support, we have experienced a noticeable increase in performance. As we have begun to receive messages from those interested in this driver wondering about the performance capabilities, we have carried out a brief GtkPerf test comparing the Avivo git code to ATI's official binary "fglrx" display driver.

Wyneken belongs in the growing list of note-taking applications for GNOME, along with the Sticky Notes panel apps, Evolution, and Tomboy. Specifically designed for students' needs, it is equally well-suited to the random jottings that anyone might make during the course of their work, as well as letters, reports, presentations, and even man pages. Wyneken is built on LaTeX, so it allows for complex formatting when necessary, with the tradeoff of not having a WYSIWYG display.

Last week I wrote that Linux creator Linus Torvalds called advocates of the Free Software Foundation's GPLv3 license "hypocrites." A few readers complained I had not provided a complete picture of Torvald's feelings. They were right. He also thinks FSF leaders are "controlling," "condescending," and full of "hot air." And he's got more choice words for GPLv3 itself. In a series of postings on the Linux kernel mailing list under the thread 'Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3', Torvalds makes clear his distaste for the third version of the General Public License and its creators--a group led by the Free Software Foundation's eccentric president Richard Stallman.

[A followup to last weekend's InformationWeek story that was quickly shown to be misleading. — Sander]

The iPhone doesn't run Linux, but Intel has begun work to help improve the operating system for future devices of its ilk. The chipmaker on Monday is launching its Mobile and Internet Linux Project Web site, which consolidates a number of new and existing Intel projects to improve the Linux kernel and other open-source components. In addition, the company employs "quite a bit more than a dozen" programmers for coding work, said Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open-source technologist.

On July 16, Open-Xchange announced the immediate availability of Open-Xchange Express Edition. This is a full-featured collaboration designed to make it easy for small and midsize businesses to take advantage of the cost benefits of open source without requiring prior Linux know-how. OXEE (Open-Xchange Express Edition) transforms a bare metal computer into a fully-functional collaboration server running on Ubuntu Linux. The package includes all the tools required by companies to facilitate communication and efficient teamwork. It doesn't require any additional operating system or any other prior software to work.

In response to a recent merge request, Linus Torvalds explained a best practice when moving and changing code,"when doing renames it is generally *much* nicer to do a 100% rename (perhaps with just _trivial_ changes to make it compile - the include statements etc change, and maybe you want to change the name in the comment header too)." He went on to explain,"doing 'move the code and change it at the same time' is considered bad form. Movement diffs are much harder to read anyway, so the general rule is: move code around _without_ modifying it, so that code movement doesn't really introduce any real changes, and is easier to look through the changes; do the actual changes to the code as a separate thing."

The U.K. broadcaster's online video-on-demand service is currently offered to Windows XP users only. But an open source industry group is pushing the BBC to adopt wider platform support.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 96 for the week of July 8th through July 14th 2007.

Presumably, many have done this before and could not bothered to document it because it was considered trifling. Well, I have spent far more time on things far more pointless, and, so, it is in consideration of ye idle sleepless sinners, that I write to you this here, uh, procedure, for taking an Apple IIe and using it as a a serial terminal for your GNU/Linux box. These instructions were written for a Gentoo Linux machine but they should be easily adaptable to any distribution you run, so if you're part of the great gothic hordes of (x)buntu users (Dear hordes: just kidding about the gothic part), you could probably adapt these instructions to your hippie distribution without too many problems (yes, I said it.)

[A nice guide with humor added, but only suitable for those not easily offended. — Sander]

"Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments," said Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute. "The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it's not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki." There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process.