Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week brought the arrival of a new Linux kernel, version 2.6.33. With it, came quite a few changes likely to interest device developers. So, here is a breakdown of the most significant mobile/embedded updates to come in the latest kernel. For instance, Android patches were dropped from the staging tree, due to lack of maintenance. Many were surprised that Google has apparently opted to maintain its kernel patches "out-of-tree." However, the ensuing discussions certainly stand to raise the general awareness level around embedded Linux best practices, which generally start with "work your changes upstream.

Just a week and a half after signing a patent licensing deal with Amazon covering the e-tailer's use of Linux, Microsoft announced it has inked another Linux patent licensing agreement, this time with a Japanese hardware company. Neither Microsoft nor the Japanese company, I-O Data Device, revealed details of the agreement. However, in a short joint statement, the two said the deal "will provide I-O Data's customers with patent coverage for their use of I-O Data's products running Linux and other related open source software."

The North Korean government appears to have developed its own graphical Linux-based "Red Star" operating system, though its people still prefer that symbol of Yankee high-tech imperialism, Microsoft Windows. That's according to the blog of a Russian college student, 'Mikhail,' studying at a university in North Korea's capital city, Pyongyang. According to translations of the blog by Russian satellite news channel, Russia Today, as well as Google's Translate tool, installation DVDs of Red Star can be freely purchased in Pyongyang for $5 and come in both client and server versions.

The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation has endorsed a new Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) industry group established by mobile carriers to devise a common app format. The WAC format will build upon two web-based mobile widget standards: the Open Mobile Terminal Project's BONDI and the Joint Innovation Lab's JIL initiative.

The topic of the difficulties women face in the open source community comes up often. Here at OStatic we've discussed everything from the gender bias and harassment some women say they face, to highlighting the projects that are helping change the way females experience the developer community. A new project has gotten underway recently that aims to foster a healthy and respectful environment between female PHP developers and the PHP community. PHPWomen has teamed up in a partnership program with six open source projects that it feels represents the best the community has to offer in terms of an open, respectful, and friendly community.

Ever wondered how attackers know what ports are open on a system? Or how to find out what services a computer is running without just asking the site admin? You can do all this and more with a handy little tool called Nmap. What is Nmap? Short for "network mapper," nmap is a veritable toolshed of functionality to perform network scans. It can be used for security scans, simply to identify what services a host is running, to "fingerprint" the operating system and applications on a host, the type of firewall a host is using, or to do a quick inventory of a local network. It is, in short, a very good tool to know.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world's most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla's Firefox browser has given Microsoft's Internet Explorer strong competition over the years. Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone?

Vermont has become the latest government to enact an open source software policy, after Secretary of Administration Neale F. Lunderville recently signed a policy developed under state CIO David Tucker's leadership. The policy says the Vermont Department of Information and Innovation and other departments should look at open source solutions as part of the procurement process, and are directed to calculate the total cost of ownership for an open source system, including "fixed costs (direct purchases and licensing) and operational costs for support, testing, upgrades, maintenance and training," as part of the procurement process.

Institutional stock holder/Hedge Fund Elliot Associates wants to buy Novell and take it private. Sean Michael Kerner thinks this is a good idea, and a good deal for Novell.

If you're like most Internet-connected people these days, the amount of information you take in from your favorite news sites, tech blogs, and the like is just staggering. The only way to stay on top of everything is with a solid feed reader to help aggregate everything you want to read. Of course, many folks rely on Google Reader to get the job done but if you're looking for an open source option, here are five of our favorites.

Hedge fund Elliot Associates has made a bid to acquire software vendor Novell. In a public letter to the company's board of directors, the hedge fund offered $5.75 per share (a 49 percent premium), placing Novell's value at $2 billion dollars. Elliot Associates is already one of the largest institutional shareholders of Novell, with roughly 8.5 percent of the company's stock.

Stable kernel update announcements posted on LWN have a certain tendency to be followed by complaints about the amount of information which is made available. It seems that there is a desire for a description of the changes which is more accessible than the patches themselves, and for attention to be drawn to the security-relevant fixes. As an exercise in determining what kind of effort is being asked of the kernel maintainers, your editor decided to make a pass through the proposed 2.6.32.9 update and attempt to describe the impact of each of the changes - all 93 of them. The results can be found below.

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

My good buddy Preston Gralla would have it that "Windows doesn't just dominate the desktop, but the server market as well." Eh... I don't think so. For proof, Gralla points to the latest IDC (International Data Corporation) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. This report covers the worldwide server market's factory revenue. But Gralla and other critics are missing that IDC is not measuring what server operating systems are being used; it's measuring what server operating systems people are buying, and those are bundled with their hardware purchases. Specifically, to quote IDC, the researchers are measuring "server revenue includes components that are typically sold today as a server bundle, including frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communication boards, and OS."

The details of Apple's patent offensive are now public, and it's clear that while HTC is the target, it's Google's Android that has got Cupertino so annoyed. The patents on which Apple is claiming infringement include obvious things such as the use of a gesture to unlock and rotate the screen based on device orientation, but they also cover deeper concepts such as thread-to-thread communication and interactions between an object-orientated GUI and a procedurally developed OS.

The success of open-source software raises a tantalizing question: Could the same design philosophy work for tech gadgets? Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world's most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla's Firefox browser has given Microsoft's Internet Explorer strong competition over the years.

Somebody better tell Microsoft that it's still March, because the suggestion of an "Internet usage tax" to fight Windows-powered botnets must be an April Fool's joke let out a month too early. According to Robert McMillan's piece on ComputerWorld, Scott Charney (Microsoft's veep for Trustworthy Computing) suggests that one way to fund fighting botnets is to tax users. "You could say it's a public safety issue and do it with general taxation." You could, but let's not.

[This is going to be good.. - Scott]

Orange has given its thumbs-up to the Intel-Nokia Linux venture Meego, the OS formerly known as Maemo and Moblin. The mobile phone network essentially said it would develop its applications, marketed under the Signature brand, to run on the operating system, allowing it to offer customer user experiences on anything from netbooks to smartphones.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has insisted that one day, the company's Google-battling Bing search engine will actually make money. "Search is going to be an ever-growing share of Microsoft's profits," the big man bellowed - literally bellowed - during a wide-ranging question and answer keynote this morning at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Silicon Valley. "First, we've got to get to break even. And then we're got to get to profitability. And then we've got to grow share. That's how I do my math."