Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Mint development team has announced the release of Linux Mint 7 XFCE, a Community Edition code named 'Gloria'. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media CODECs.

If you have not stopped by the #linuxjournal IRC channel yet, I would encourage you to do so. You never know who you will meet or what sort of new ideas will germinate. For example: the other day, while having !coffee and a danish, I was chatting with our fearless Editor-in-Geek, Carlie, and she was commenting that someone had left the radio on. No, not that radio, the Amateur radio. This got my attention as I was not aware Carlie had her ticket (she does not - I am working on her - browbeating is the term my XYL uses, but I digress). As many of you know, I too am an Amateur Radio operator - a ham. [I should note that personally, I don't like the term...it does not mean anything, but it is what most folks know us as so...]. And we started chatting.

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2009

Technologies such as filesystem journaling (as used with ext3) or RAID are generally adopted with the purpose of improving overall reliability. Some system administrators may thus be a little disconcerted by a recent linux-kernel thread suggesting that, in some situations, those technologies can actually increase the risk of data loss. This article attempts to straighten out the arguments and reach a conclusion about how worried system administrators should be.

The Ford motor company has harnessed technology from the F22 fighter jet as part of its bid to make its new Taurus "America's smartest full-sized sedan".

[The article states that the software is open source but has no details on it. - Scott]

Long before multiple monitors were popular (or financially feasible), there were virtual desktops—applications that allow you to swap your entire workspace with another for easy compartmentalization of your work. Here's a look at five of the most popular virtual-desktop managers.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world. It's useful, therefore, to try to understand what exactly the company's open source strategy is, in order to head off some of its worst aspects, and to build on any positive elements. The trouble is, I don't think Microsoft has an open source strategy any more.

Last November we detailed the Wayland Display Server, which came about as a lightweight alternative to the X.Org Server and leveraged the latest Linux graphics technologies (primarily kernel mode-setting), and is designed elegantly with the rendering and compositing all being done by Wayland. Quite a bit of work was going on with this project early on to the point of running two X Servers within Wayland and then talk of a Clutter back-end for Wayland, but over the summer there has not been much to report. However, with the KMS page-flipping ioctl going into the Linux 2.6.32 kernel -- which is used by Wayland -- there should be some renewed activity with this project shortly.

Maintaining a complex web application that uses a lot of Javascript for client-side, "AJAX"-style interactivity is rather difficult. The clumsiness of the Javascript language itself, as well as the various tricks needed to make an application work consistently across multiple browsers, all of which must be wrapped up inside HTML, makes for a jumble of issues for the application developer. Pyjamas is meant to ease that development, by allowing client-side applications to be written in Python, then translating that code to Javascript for use by the browser.

Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. Having created PHP as a bunch of hackish scripts to support his website in 1995, he turned it into a powerful, fully fledged language that's now used by millions around the world. Linux Format magazine caught up with him to find out more about his position in the PHP camp today and the decisions he made early on that made the project a whopping success.

FOSS adherents are happy to discuss all the reasons that open source is attractive to users and to other developers, from "it's free!" to "the philosophy of open source." Sometimes, they talk about the reasons that people avoid open source, such as "I want a phone number for tech support." But the hard fact is that sometimes people try an open source application — such as yours — and they end up not using it. I realize this is hard to imagine. But it happens, and not merely because the users have evil in their hearts.

A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet of sorts and used to distribute malware to unwitting people browsing the web. Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware.

360.000 IBM workers have been told to stop using Microsoft Office and switch to the Open Office-based software Symphony.

For those of us on the outside of Sun Microsystems, the future of the Sparc processor and its related server platforms has been the subject of much speculation and debate. But for Sun's largest customers, the mystery has been over since sometime in June. That's when Sun's execs made the rounds to the biggest Sparc shops in the world and gave them a preview of the Sparc roadmap over the next three years. Under non-disclosure, of course. Like that was going to hold, considering all of the curiosity in the wake of Oracle's pending $7.4bn (net around $5.2bn) acquisition of Sun.

A survey of 118 enterprise IT and development executives conducted by open source solution provider OpenLogic concludes that the "Open Core" model for open source licensing trails behind dual licensing and open source with commercial support, in terms of acceptability to the enterprise.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released earlier this year, but unlike in years past and contrary to their original six month release cycle, there will not be another OpenSolaris distribution release in 2009. Instead, the next slated release is OpenSolaris 2010.02, which should be out in early February of next year. It is far too early to speculate everything that this next Sun operating system will have in store, but we do have some screenshots off a recent SXCE build and other details.

Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn't been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we'll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something's missing here: MySQL.

One of the highlights of the behind-the-scenes changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the addition of Grand Central Dispatch. Apple have now open sourced the code to Grand Central under an Apache 2.0 licence. Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware.

Bash functions, unlike functions in most programming languages do not allow you to return a value to the caller. When a bash function ends its return value is its status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. To return values, you can set a global variable with the result, or use command substitution, or you can pass in the name of a variable to use as the result variable. The examples below describe these different mechanisms.

In a surprise move, Apple has open-sourced its Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) technology under the Apache 2.0 public license. Baked into the recently released Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, GCD eases the programming challenges that developers face when coding for multicore processors. You can download a PDF of Apple's half-marketing, half-technical description of it here.