Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you need a quick web server running and you don't want to mess with setting up apache or something similar, then Python can help. Python comes with a simple builtin HTTP server. With the help of this little HTTP server you can turn any directory in your system into your web server directory. The only thing you need to have installed is Python.

“The Gutsy Geeks” radio show (www.gutsygeeks.com) landed an exclusive interview with Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, Ltd., founder of the Ubuntu Project.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the open source kernel has become "bloated and huge," with no midriff-slimming diet plan in sight. During a roundtable discussion at LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon this afternoon, moderator and Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley asked Tovalds whether Linux kernel features were being released too fast, before the kernel is stabilized. Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. "Is this a problem?" he asked. "We're getting bloated and huge. Yes, it's a problem," said Torvalds.

IBM says that battling for desktop market share against Windows is a "dead-end" for Linux. Bob Sutor, IBM's vp of open source and Linux for IBM, opened the inaugural LinuxCon conference held in Portland, Oregon on Monday with predictions for the open source desktop, telling developers they won't thrive unless they specialize. Given his connections to Big Blue, Sutor unsurprisingly (and justifiably) praised Linux for its cloud, mainframe, and hardware-specific ubiquity. But he opined that winning hearts in the general market is a different story altogether.

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2009

The founder of Linux distie Ubuntu has outlined plans for the platform’s next release (10.04), which is expected to land in April 2010. Mark Shuttleworth said in a video message to attendees of the open source outfit’s UbuCon Atlanta meeting yesterday, that the next version of the distribution carries the code name Lucid Lynx.

When Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison hosted a webcast last week to unveil the next generation of his company's Exadata appliance, a label reading "Oracle-Sun" was prominently displayed on the high-end database and storage system. Analysts said the arrival of the jointly built package shows that engineers at Oracle and Sun Microsystems Inc. have started working together in advance of the closing of Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun, now expected in January.

Malware developers are going open source in an effort to make their malicious software more useful to fraudsters. By giving criminal coders free access to malware that steals financial and personal details, the malicious software developers are hoping to expand the capabilities of old Trojans. According to Candid Wuest, threat researcher with security firm Symantec, around 10 percent of the Trojan market is now open source.

Cloud computing is a relativity new computing concept where resources are provided via the Internet instead of on the local computer or network. It's virtualization over the Internet. Eric Geier introduces eyeOS, the do-it-yourself cloud that keeps control in your hands.

I’ve been really silent lately and I haven’t communicated much with the community on what I was working on and what was happening. I was in France this summer on a 3 months unpaid leave. This gave me the opportunity to see how my life would be affected if I was to leave my job and I’m happy to say the experiment was a total success. So more on that later, but I just wanted to apologize for being absent, as a lot of things are happening around here and they’ve kept me away from this blog.

A group of developers at the Digital Technology Group (DTG), formerly the Laboratory for Communication Engineering (LCE), at the University of Cambridge have released two Android applications that allow users to browse the web anonymously using The Onion Router. The Onion Router, commonly referred to as Tor, is free software designed to provide internet anonymity to users while browsing online. It does this by bouncing the communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers from all around the world, preventing visited sites from learning a users physical location.

At the Atlanta Linux Fest, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 10.04, the next major release of Ubuntu after version 9.10 Karmic Koala, will be code-named Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 10.04 will also be a Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Debian-derived Linux distribution.

The Enterprise LAMP Summit for CTOs (Nov. 5-6) will feature a case study about the use of several parts of the LAMP software stack in a sophisticated and highly effective patient white board developed by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Informatics Center. The Enterprise LAMP Summit (Nov. 5-6) and Big LAMP Camp for developers (Nov. 7), featuring global leaders in open source software, will focus on the business value, security and enterprise readiness of the LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python and Perl).

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA.

The free software community has produced a wealth of tools for the manipulation of image data. For simple changes, such as cropping, resizing, or basic contrast tweaking, any of a number of programs can be used. More complex changes will require falling back to tools like the GIMP, krita, or cinepaint. Anybody who has tried to join together two or more independent images in those tools will have discovered, however, that certain manipulations fall into a class of their own. For that kind of work, hugin would appear to be the only choice. Your editor has long intended to play with hugin; the threat of having some real work to do finally provided the necessary motivation.

Why is it that Linux distros divide and multiply? And do we have a better name for how and why that's done than, say, "forking"? That question goes through my mind when I look at the ever-changing Top 100 list at DistroWatch, and when I look, for example, at the many children of Debian, including grandchildren through Ubuntu.

Yesterday afternoon, the Google Chrome team released another update with performance gains for platforms, but Mac and Linux users will see the greatest boosts and new, useful functions. Every OS version received some tweaking, including improved New Tab load times and changes to how Chrome handles extensions.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The goal is to educate the people around the world about the benefits of using FOSS in education, in government, at home and everywhere else. So wear your favorite FOSS t-shirts, burn a couple of disks of your favorite distro to give away and tell the world how FOSS is the wave of the future!

On the outskirts of the OpenSUSE Conference, core developers revealed details on the new openSUSE version 11.2. Although it will have Kernel 2.6.31, browser users will have to wait a bit longer for YaST.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to propose a new so-called net neutrality rule Monday that could prevent telecommunications, cable and wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to sources at the agency. Genachowski will discuss the rules Monday during a keynote speech at The Brookings Institute. He isn't expected to drill into many details, but the proposal will specifically be for an additional guideline on how operators like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can control what goes on their networks. That additional guideline would prevent the operators from discriminating, or act as gatekeepers, of Web content and services.

[Not really FOSS related but certainly of interest to our readers. - Scott]