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LXer Feature: 11-Dec-2006

Mid November, Steve Ballmer said "Linux"uses our [Microsoft Corp.] intellectual property" and "Microsoft Corp. wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation." Many people didn't understand what he really meant, among them the LXer editors. Therefore, LXer sent an Open Letter to the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response team, and two weeks later, the answers are in (no pun intended). Check the full story for the answers a Microsoft Spokesperson gave us, which hopefully can answer some of our questions.

[ Note: The questions may be a bit clumsy, since sending them was a rather impulsive action. - hkwint ]

Phillips has released a Linux SDK system for it's popular dictation software. Although the platform it not Open Source, it's exciting to see vendors supporting Linux.

"Microsoft's Open XML file format may perhaps be one day an OSI standard (who knows, so many things are OSI certified, one day Microsoft may be able to certify its own business practices as the ISO standard for monopolistic position and anti-competitive behaviour) but it will never be an open standard."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of Sega Genesis/Megadrive support in Gamefu. kdegames improvements continue with porting and gameplay work in KBackGammon. OpenDocument master page support in Okular. 'Idle time' detection comes to the 'powermanager' module of the Guidance system utilies. MIDI format support in KTabEdit. The new histogram graphing functionality of Strigi continues to be refined. Following Akonadi, NEPOMUK starts to utilise the power of Strigi. WHATWG audio objects supported in KHTML through Phonon. Appointment printing work in KOrganizer. Kross scripting infiltrates KWord.

I recently reviewed the book that launched Prentice Hall's Negus Live Linux Series for Linux Magazine. Live Linux CDs is an excellent introduction to the wide variety of ways Linux Live CDs can be used (they're not just for Windows users to 'test drive' Linux anymore). I was curious however to see what a series of books based on live CDs would look like. Enter 'Practical PHP and MySQL'.

Jono Bacon (co-author of The Official Ubuntu Book and Linux Desktop Hacks) has taken an interesting approach in writing this book. The premise is to use a Linux live CD to teach the readers how to build eight specific web applications. How he does this is unique.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As hinted earlier, the new openSUSE 10.2 was released on time. One of the most popular Linux distributions on the market, the latest release appears solid and reasonably bug-free, at least compared to version 10.1. We'll take a brief look at the new release, comment on the project's association with Novell, and provide a few handy resources for extending the product. Also in this week's issue: Debian delays Etch, Ulteo releases Sirius, Mandriva prepares a cooker snapshot, and PC-BSD reaches the final round of testing before its updated stable release. Finally, don't miss the new commercial distribution by Technalign: Pioneer Linux. Happy reading!

Here's the latest report from the Iowa antitrust litigation, Comes v. Microsoft, Inc., being held in Polk County District Court. We have excerpts from transcripts of Thursday's and Friday's sessions, including a 2004 email from Jim Allchin to Steve Balmer and Bill Gates in which he says Microsoft had lost sight of what customers need and that he himself would buy a Mac, if he didn't work for Microsoft.

The Open Source Development Labs sacked nine people in 2005, and the explanation offered was "OSDL has reduced its staff in sales, marketing, business development and programming." At the time, well-respected and senior Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman said in his web diary that among those cut loose were "very talented and experienced Linux kernel developers and testers."

This is still my favorite kernel-building reference. It's very detailed with bales of screenshots. It covers both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and is updated periodically. Enjoy!

Last month Intel Corporation had announced their Kentsfield and Clovertown processors. The Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700 was the first processor (and only one at this time) based upon the quad-core Kentsfield. Meanwhile Intel had introduced the Clovertown Xeon 5300 series at Super Computing 2006. With the two Clovertown quad-core processors in hand, we had delivered our launch-day preview back on November 14. The motherboard we had used for those tests, as well as to test the Xeon 5000 and 5100 series, was the Tyan Tempest i5000XT S2696. Now having spent nearly a month with this flagship motherboard we have a few thoughts to share about this Xeon creation.

SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14") CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. The Live CD described here is based on the Slackware Linux distribution and uses Unification File System (also known as unionfs), allowing read-only filesystem to behave as a writable one, saving all changes to memory.

RISC OS should become open source to lure back ex-users put off by the cost of Iyonix and A9home hardware, according to an opinion piece published last week. Ex-RISC OS user Mike Reed said in an article titled 'What would it take for me to consider RISC OS again' that the platform's workstation hardware was "very expensive." He backed efforts by RISC OS Open to reveal the RISC OS 5 source code, which he argued will encourage people to port the operating system to more widely available and therefore cheaper ARM-powered hardware.

Just when the Mono Project was beginning to gain traction, along comes Sun Microsystems to take the wind from its sails. I can’t help but feel it’s a mixed blessing.

Create a working Linux cluster from many separate pieces of hardware and software, including IBM System x and TotalStorage systems. This article, one of a multipart series, covers hardware configuration in the Linux cluster, including understanding architecture, planning logical network design, setting up terminal servers, and updating firmware.

This article will show you how to evaluate the actions of users on the server. You will be able to track the commands they use, the programs they run and how much of server resources they waste. The program is called process accounting. It will provide complete accountability for resources used on the server.

Kishonti Informatics has announced general availability of GBenchmark 1.0, 3D performance benchmark suite for OpenGL ES compatible Brew, Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. The new benchmark not only measures OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 application performance, but also allows direct comparison of native OpenGL ES and Java based mobile 3D implementations.

Interface21, provider of the open source Spring application Framework, and Tangosol, provider of reliable data grid solutions, introduced Coherence Data Grid for Spring, bringing enterprise-class data availability to the Spring Framework. With Coherence Data Grid for Spring, Spring applications can directly tap into the full power and scalability of the data grid to meet increasing information access demands.

Birmingham City Council released a case study for their open source desktop trial. Buried in the 67 page document is the reason for choosing KDE: quick to configure and the bouncing launch feedback cursor. *** For developers Trolltech released Qt 4.2.2 and Kitware released CMake 2.4.5. For users Basket 0.6 makes your clipboard fun. *** Turkish speakers can read about the history of KDE in new online magazine Enixma. *** Finally, showing that free software can work with commercial, CD label buring app LightScribe announced support for K3b. Quotes from Sebastian Trueg within.

Technalign, Inc. has released its new Pioneer Linux operating system to the community. The first release is the 32-bit version to be followed immediately by the 64-Bit Version. The community edition includes many features found previously in Frontier and is available for download at the http://www.tapioneer.com website. Both Pioneer 32 and 64 include Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird and Kmail email clients, OpenOffice.org, and many others such as K3b for CD/DVD burning.

The cold, hard realities of introducing newbies and Linux to each other.