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LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2007

An interview with Dave Wreski CEO of Guardian Digital, makers of EnGarde Secure Linux. I ask him how EnGarde came about, what makes EnGarde different and the effect if any, of the GPLv3 on the software in EnGarde. He answers all these questions and more, in The LXer Interview of Dave Wreski.

Lars Ellenberg started an effort to getDRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Service merged into the Linux kernel. When asked for clarification as to what it was, Lars explained,"think of it as RAID1 over TCP. Typically you have one Node in Primary, the other as Secondary, replication target only. But you can also have both Active, for use with a cluster file system." Earlier in the thread he described it as"a stacked block device driver".

A number of KDE related news stories are floating about the interweb today, so here's a quick round-up. Aaron Seigo writes his KDE e.V. Presidential Address on his blog. Over at Ars Technica, I have an article talking about the future of KHTML and Webkit. Daniel Molkentin has published a new book on coding for Qt 4.x and lastly, I've stumbled across a short visual tutorial for those Mac OS X users among us that are looking to help test the KDE/Mac snapshots.

Find out about the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the open source nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, we demonstrate the Java development environment with a simple programming example. We also survey some of the software development tools available as plug-in extensions. This follow-up to David Gallardo's "Getting started with the Eclipse Platform" offers new information relevant for Eclipse V3.3.

Following the progress of founder and chief maintainer Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is like watching a litter of scampering frisky pups. A fast gestating two months after the prior release, newborn Puppy Linux Version 2.17 -- aka "Dancer" -- was pushed out late last week. Version 2.17 of Puppy Linux -- so named to reflect its small, cuddly, yet very complete persona -- popped out at a mere 82.6MB, says the distro's website.

The FESCo election is over, and the members for the 2007/2008 FESCo are (in alphabetical order): Christopher Aillon, Josh Boyer, Tom Callaway, Kevin Fenzi, Dennis Gilmore, Christian Iseli, Jeremy Katz, Jesse Keating, Bill Nottingham, Brian Pepple, Jason Tibbitts, Warren Togami and David Woodhouse.

Hewlett-Packard announced on July 23 that it would be buying Neoware, a provider of Linux, Windows CE and Windows XPe OS thin client computing and virtualization solutions. HP will be paying $16.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash) of approximately $214 million on a fully diluted basis for the company. In a statement, HP declared that this acquisition as part of HP's strategy to expand in growth markets and further its leadership in personal computing.

Akaza Research has been awarded a Phase II SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health for the OpenClinica open Source clinical trials platform. Read on for the full announcement.

Microsoft's patent agreement with the Linux distributor shuts out GPLv3 and makes Linspire unsuitable for business, claims legal expert.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 97 for the week of July 15th through July 21st 2007. In this issue: fedorapeople.org is now available, Smolt, Open Invitation, Ohio Linux Fest Keynote Address, GNOME Cookbook, Repoview-0.6.0, Mascots and Fedora, Volunteers needed for GITEX, New in Fedora: Jack Aboutboul, Proposed Fedora 8 Features and much, much more.

Navicore is Nokia's GPS mapping and navigation program for the Linux-powered N800 Internet Tablet. The kit comes with a Bluetooth GPS receiver, car-mounting hardware, and a memory card containing the Navicore Personal software and map collection. If you have an N800, it's a great travel aid. Sadly, there is one strike against Navicore that I see no way around for desktop Linux users. The N800 Navigation Kit ships with a memory card containing one region's maps (say, North America). The Navicore Web site contains additional maps for other regions of the world -- but you cannot access or install any of that data without running Windows.

Open-Xchange, the open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange is recognized in the first annual Enterprise Open Source Readers Choice Awards. "We're excited about the award as it is an award based on recognition by our customers and the community," said Gerald Labie, CEO, Open-Xchange. "From a market perspective, the reality is that each nominee in this category -- regardless of whether they won or not -- is part of a major force putting increased competitive pressure on the large, proprietary groupware vendors."

Some would argue this story doesn't belong on a Linux News Site. I may tend to agree with you. The value isn't what you will personally gain from this article...it's who you can pass it on to. We all know one person who might want to take a peek...

When a partition that was previously an ext3 partition is converted to disk dump, the next time the system will boot, it will show a "Token is too" error. This problem occurs and leaves the system in an unbootable state. This is because yaboot tries to to boot from a partition of type “Linux” (Type 83). This error does not occur if the partition is labeled as swap (Type 82).

Learning a new language cannot be complete without a few 'real world' examples. 'Hello world!'s and fibonacci sequences are always nice as an introduction to certain aspects of programming, but soon or later you crave something meatier to chew on. 'Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code' by Kevin C. Baird provides a wealth of knowledge via general to specialized examples of the dynamic object oriented programming language, Ruby. Want to build and mp3 playlist processor? How about parse out secret codes from 'Moby Dick'? Read on!

Zend pitches PHP to the enterprise. PHP is wildly popular in the open source community, but less so in the enterprise. These things are hard to measure, but one indicator is job vacancies.

According to a message posted over the weekend on the Full-Disclosure mailing list, the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.5, contains a password management vulnerability that can allow malicious Web sites to steal user passwords. If you have JavaScript enabled and allow Firefox to remember your passwords, you are at risk from this flaw.

A global survey of open-source enterprise users of Alfresco software has found that deployments of Red Hat Linux have grown twice as fast as those for Novell SUSE Linux since Novell signed its controversial patent and interoperability agreement with Microsoft in November 2006. While Alfresco did not specifically ask community members the reason for their Linux choice, the findings are "not a coincidence and, while we can't be certain, customer unhappiness with the Novell-Microsoft deal is probably the most likely reason for that," Howells said. "There was also a backlash against Microsoft about its patent position during this time."

Alfresco open source barometer survey of 10,000 community members worldwide demonstrates strong preference for deployment on Linux over Windows; Red Hat use growing much faster than Novell SUSE after controversial Microsoft patents deal. “The survey found that the U.S. is leading open source adoption globally,” said Dr Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco Software. “We believe the Global 2000 is seeking innovation and better value for their technology investments whereas in Europe open source adoption is often driven by governments seeking better value for their citizens. The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.”

Have you looked at the HCL (Hardware Compatibly List) for your preferred Linux distribution lately? Do you see it? Exactly, it's a mess. Even with a strong community effort working to keep the list updated and as fresh as possible, it's nearly impossible to make the list worth the page it's rendered on. Today, I'm going to be exploring one idea I have for making this a lot simpler and more effective. Rather than tasking hundreds to thousands of people into making this a reality, why not take a page from the bug reporting side of things?