Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Not all servers can--or should--be virtualized, says Novell cloud computing CTO, Moiz Kohari, who urges cloud service providers to focus on making their heterogenous setups work as one.

Tapping into a new revenue source, Ubuntu Linux's corporate backer Canonical has signed a partnership to use Yahoo's search results by default in the version of Firefox it ships.

Alfresco has announced that it is changing the licensing of the community edition of its enterprise content management system from GPL to LGPL. The move was announced by the company's CEO, John Newton, in a posting on his blog. He explained that the company had initially gone with the GPL licence three years ago as it was the "most widely used open source license and provided a fairness of use that meant we could comfortably grow the project, company and brand".

Extended discard support means that Linux now supports ATA TRIM, which can increase SSD lifespan and throughput. New additions to the Linux kernel include HA solution DRBD and drivers for HP, LSI and VMware storage hardware. The new kernel version, expected in early March, also includes many minor improvements to the code for the Btrfs, Ext4 and ReiserFS file systems.

It all started with upgrading a CPU. It should have been a simple, inexpensive task, but it has taken on a life of its own, resulting in battles with warranty service and shopping for yet more new parts. Will the madness ever end?

One of Silicon Valley's last true characters has signed off - Sun founder Scott McNealy has sent a final goodbye memo to his staff. In his own words McNealy is "a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip" and his swansong email does not disappoint. He said the last four years (since he left the company) had "not been without serious withdrawal". He said: "So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company." He said he hoped the rest of the US economy would fall in love with capitalism again soon.

Audio processing and synthesis plugins are always a lively topic for musicians. Many contemporary music-makers rely completely upon their plugin collection for all their sound sources and processing routines, and it is not at all uncommon to discover that some of these composers have never learned to play a traditional instrument. However you feel about audio plugins they are a fact of life in modern music production.

It's the thought experiment we all like to engage in. What would life be like without Microsoft Windows? To listen to the free open source software crowd, the demise of Windows -- and by extension, Microsoft's hegemony over the PC universe -- would signal a kind of rebirth for information technology. Software would finally be free of the corporate shackles that have stifled innovation and dragged down the best and brightest among us. Such thinking is naïve, at best. Rather than freeing IT, the demise of Microsoft would plunge the industry into an apocalyptic tailspin of biblical proportions -- no visions of hippie utopia here. The withdrawal of the Redmond giant's steady hand would cause today's computing landscape to tear itself apart at the seams, with application and device compatibility and interoperability devolving into the kind of Wild West chaos unseen since the days of the DOS big three: Lotus, WordPerfect, and Ashton-Tate.

[The author's take is nothing short of hilarious. - Scott]

The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging - check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.

The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn. Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.

Red Hat has a new website, opensource.com, where they intend to explore how open source affects more than just software, and they're publishing articles on open source in education, business, law, and government. And life. It's designed to be a community forum, one way to give back to the community, as expressed by Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst in his welcoming article, and they hope you'll join in the conversation.

There are many days when I show my age with Linux. In some instances, I just refuse to embrace some of the more modern applications. In many ways, I fully accept the modern computing desktop. (I use a full-blown Compiz desktop with all the bells and whistles now.) But there are still some holdovers that will have to be pried from my cold, dead hands. I thought it would be fun to list 10 of these old-school Linux tools and then see what other people refuse to let go of (regardless of platform). Not only will it be a trip down memory lane for some users, it might show others a tool they hadn’t thought of that could solve a perplexing problem.

Improving the performance of the kernel is generally a good thing to do; that is why many of our best developers have put considerable amounts of time into optimization work. One area which has recently seen some attention is in the handling of soft page faults. As the course of this work shows, though, performance problems are not always where one thinks they might be; sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, possibly dumping a lot of code in the process.

The Open-PC project, which developed an open source Linux PC based on community survey requests, says its KDE-flavored nettop will ship next month. The Open-PC is equipped with a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom N330 with 3GB RAM, but the nettop's high $500 price has stirred some controversy.

Back in 2007, Adobe's Mike Melanson, who is responsible for much of the Linux work on the Adobe Flash Player, had blogged about the jungle of audio output methods. Linux audio has been a mess with so many choices and each project like PulseAudio having its advantages and disadvantages. Things have improved somewhat over the past three years, but Mike is now focusing his attention on the Linux video acceleration APIs. Melanson has published a new blog post not calling the video APIs a jungle, but rather a thicket.

Google has announced the official release on Windows of Chrome 4, an updated version of the company's Web browser. It offers a handful of significant improvements, including support for extensions and bookmark synchronization. Due to Chrome's rolling development model, these features have been widely used by testers for quite some time. The official release means that the new functionality will be rolled out to regular end users through the stable channel. In addition to the major feature enhancements, Chrome 4 also brings a performance boost. Its score in the Dromeo DOM benchmarks is a 45 percent improvement over the previous version.

Novell has come up with an integrated software solution that makes data storage easier and more economical to manage.

The KDE team is getting very close to a final release of KDE 4.4. The second release candidate came out yesterday as a testing platform for users and developers to find and squash bugs before the final release date of February 9th.

SourceForge has confirmed that it is now blocking access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria to its open source project hosting site. The access blocks come as a result of the company moving to comply with US export restrictions, which make it illegal to transfer or export certain technologies to countries on the US government's sanction list. Failure to comply with the sanctions list can incur penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment.

Canonical's Rick Spencer has written about two small changes that are happening to Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04. The first is the default Ubuntu home-page with its search box in Firefox will now follow whatever the user has set as their default search engine in Firefox. The second change is that Canonical is changing the default search engine for Firefox in Ubuntu to Yahoo.