Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In a study not likely to cause controversy, Christian Perrier has published the results of his analysis of the number of Debian developers per country. He ran the analysis last year for the first time, so one can see the progress or recession in the last year. No matter where you call home, the numbers are quite interesting.

A few months back we reported that the IA64 and SPARC versions of Ubuntu were in trouble and would be decommissioned if no individual(s) were to step-up and maintain these ports of Ubuntu Linux for these architectures that are much less popular and common than x86 and x86_64 hardware. Well, there still is no one backing the Intel IA64 and Sun SPARC versions of Ubuntu Linux so they are being dropped completely.

As I've noted, I don't claim to have any insight into how this lawsuit will conclude, whether it will blow up into a long and bloody battle between Oracle and Google, or whether it will be concluded by some quick and relatively amicable solution. But I do believe that whatever happens, whatever it might nominally "win", Oracle has certainly and irrevocably lost more in terms of trust and goodwill within the free software world than it will ever understand. The message is clear: Fork all the main open source projects that Oracle owns or transfer energies to a replacement.

A critical vulnerability in the Linux kernel that gives attackers access to root via X server has been patched by Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile, kernel developer James Morris reports on the first-annual Linux Security Summit (LSS), which covered topics including usability, hardening the kernel, and API standardization.

Installing a Linux server is easy, especially if you download one of the latest CentOS ISOs. There’s a nice wizard to walk you through the installation process, and it’s perfectly acceptable to do a standard default install. But, if you intend to do any serious hosting or expect production quality performance out of the system, or if you are just as particular as I am, than a bit of customizing of the install at the beginning could save you lots of time later on down the road.

In a post on their Connect blog, security specialist Symantec reports on a new trojan for Android that masquerades as a free Tap Snake game, while secretly transmitting GPS coordinates to a server in the background. These coordinates can then be retrieved and displayed in Google Maps via the GPS Spy Android app sold for €5 by the same vendor, Maxicom. According to Symantec, the Tap Snake process can't easily be killed and continues to run in the background.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Monday that multitouch support and gesture-based interaction will arrive in Ubuntu 10.10, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. The feature will be tightly integrated in Unity, Ubuntu's new lightweight netbook environment.

KDE 4.5 is a milestone release that took several months to complete, fixing over 16,000 bugs. While it also added new features, the selling point of this release is the stability that typically comes with a x.5 version of KDE. The desktop, applications, and development platforms have matured, and many of the outstanding bugs have been resolved.

In the 1990's Novell's NetWare dominated the networking industry with over 70% of the global market share. Their technical certifications were the industry's gold standard and offered titles such as Certified Novell Engineer, Master Certified Novell Engineer, Certified Novell Directory Engineer, and Novell Administrator. Just ten years later, the networking giant of the 20th century would find itself in a struggle to maintain relevance in the new millennium. The solution came as a change in strategy that would shift the company's focus from networking technologies to low level software and a new venture into an open sourced operating system of their own.

Many open-source developers and business people are upset that Oracle is suing Google over Java patents in Android. These people have reason to worry. This case could change not just how they use Java but how open-source development is done at all. So why would Oracle, a Linux-supporter in its own right, introduce the evil of software patents into open-source programming? My answer: Because Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, thinks the company can profit from it.

Canonical released a multitouch/gesture stack for Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat"). The uTouch 1.0 stack is equipped with a gesture recognition engine and gesture API for Meerkat, which recently arrived in alpha 3, offering Software Centre improvements and a Netbook Edition revamped with Canonical's new "Unity" interface.

This demo shows you how to import the Java servlet application files into the Rational Application Developer workspace, edit a few classes, and deploy the application on a WebSphere Application Server. Finally, you get to see the solution stack work in a real life scenario. This 4-part demo series shows you how to implement the solution stack (Rational Application Developer, WebSphere Application Server, and DB2 Express-C) on Ubuntu Linux, as well as how to integrate them in a Java application.

So I have been writing code of one sort or another for over 15 years (mostly Perl) and there is still one thing I don’t get ... what is the advantage of object oriented programming (OOP) over procedural programming (PP)? I want to have an open discussion on the topic. Obviously I deal with both OOP and PP, but I am strongly in the PP camp. I am wondering “did I miss the boat”? I heard that Perl 6 will have very strong OOP and possibly will be pure OOP only, so if Larry Wall (way smarter then me) thinks it is a good idea, I must have missed something.

Google has vowed to fight Oracle's patent lawsuit over use of Java patents in Android, claiming that Android's Dalvik implementation is not covered. Meanwhile, Java creator James Gosling blogs that neither side in the lawsuit is without blame, but calls the suit a victory for "ego, money and power" at the expense of open software development, says eWEEK.

There was a time when open-source software was the domain of computer geeks and do-it-yourselfers with more time than money. But, as Oracle's legal salvo against Google highlighted last week, those days are long gone. Oracle (ORCL), through its purchase of Sun Microsystems, has become one of the largest purveyors of open-source software in the world. Google (GOOG) makes the open-source and increasingly ubiquitous Android smartphone operating system. Their fight revolves around Java, a programming language Sun made predominantly open-source several years ago, but which Oracle's founder and CEO Larry Ellison now calls "the single most important software we've ever acquired."

The next version of Ubuntu Linux aims to support for multi-touch as part of an effort to expand the Linux desktop user experience, potentially bringing the sorts of interactivity popularized by devices like the Apple iPad to tablets and netbooks powered by Ubuntu. But the plan isn't to stop with Ubuntu alone, according to the distribution's founder, Mark Shuttleworth.

Linus Torvalds has released the first pre-release version of Linux 2.6.36 and closed the merge window – the first phase in the development cycle, during which the bulk of changes for a new kernel version are merged into the main development tree. The usual announcement mail for the new kernel is currently nowhere to be found, but the RC1 is tagged in the Kernel Git tree and available for download on Kernel.org.

An internal Oracle memo that was released last week provides a detailed summary of the company's plans for the Solaris operating system, which Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun. The memo offers a mix of good and bad news for Solaris enthusiasts. It reveals that Oracle is strongly committed to advancing the Solaris platform and intends to increase the availability of resources for Solaris development. The bad news is that Oracle plans to discontinue Sun's community-centric OpenSolaris distribution.

LaTeX, pronounced “La-Tec”, is a document preparation language that treats creating many types of document files like constructing a shell script. LaTeX uses a “What You See is What You Mean” interface, far removed from the WYSIWYG word processors like Word and OpenOffice. LaTeX is a programming language, but don’t let that scare you away. Like many things in open source, the learning curve may be steep, but the view from the top is fantastic.

In this conclusion to my survey of algorithmic music composition systems for Linux I present Christopher Ariza's athenaCL.