Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel. This makes the quality of those aspects more apparent, so this tends to lead to an improvement of the quality.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality. The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

The PostgreSQL developers have published a first release candidate for version 8.4 of the free database system with a final version due later this month. The release candidate from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group includes a number of bug fixes to the previous beta release, including the elimination of some crashing bugs and changes in the handling of NULL values being passed to internal functions to prevent denial of service attacks.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

After almost two years of relying on Kubuntu and Ubuntu, your editor has had enough. Farewell faithful *buntus, hello and welcome PCLinuxOS. Will PCLinuxOS work out better? Will I pine for the good old alliterative animal days? Will I become dissatisfied with PCLinuxOS and swap it out for something else? Is any Linux good enough?

After a nuclear holocaust, the only thing left alive will be roaches... and the SCO Group. The company that thinks it owns some lines of Linux – and that everyone else thought was fated for Chapter 7 bankruptcy death this week – has instead revealed to the world that it is the immortal Highlander. Just before a crucial liquidation hearing in bankruptcy court today, SCO Group chief executive Darl McBride inked a life-saving deal with a company called Gulf Capital Partners. The investment firm is backed by the high-profile equity investor Stephen Norris, the very man who pondered buying SCO the last time it faced bankruptcy destruction.

The Swiss Open Systems User Group and the canton of Berne treasurer's office have reached a rapprochement. The open source advocacy group had criticised the fact that a contract for revamping the canton's 14,000 workstations was awarded to Microsoft without a tendering process. Although the canton is insisting that the contract should stand, the Swiss Open Systems User Group has decided not to pursue the case in the courts.

One of the biggest problems with open source is understanding what it means out in the real world. I'm not talking about understanding the actual technology. I'm talking about the impact of open source, how it is actually useful. What's clear to me is that open source is not an end in itself. Open source is an enabler. It's a catalyst. It allows other things to happen. It's the fulcrum upon which can be rested the lever that will move the world. But it isn't the lever itself.

The fifth version of EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server will facilitate easier migrations for Oracle applications, according to the company. In addition, its new Infinite Cache feature lets users dynamically expand their database cache to the terabyte range.

Using a Windows VPN client is a security oxymoron of epic dimensions, but often a necessity due to a lack of reliable Linux clients. Fortunately there is vpnc, the Linux client for the Cisco 3000 series VPN/firewall. Charlie Schluting is our guide to obtaining and setting it up.

An employee of Google has expressed himself regarding the disadvantages of OGG Theora in comparison with H.264 in a discussion on the mailing list of the web hypertext application technology working group.

A few days ago Opera launched a placeholder website which said they were going to "reinvent" the web, on June 16. Well, it's June 16, and Opera has announced Opera Unite, a technology which allows individual Opera users to connect to one another, turning every machine running Opera Unite into a web server.

While watching David Hollow of ICT4D Collective present his evaluation of OLPC Ethiopia at the recent Africa Gathering I was struck by his observation that teachers were banning XO laptops from their classrooms. David found a clear perception by teachers and even parents, that the XO laptop is a toy, not a tool, and children's usage of these computers was actually a detriment to their education. Teachers disliked them enough to ban them from the classroom and parents discouraged their use at home, thinking the laptops were taking away from study time.

With Linux being used as the foundation for numerous smartphone and mobile internet devices, it is tempting to suggest that this movement is going to open the doorway to desktop Linux. Tempting, but not accurate. Linux, the kernel and its immediate subsystems, has never been healthier and its openness has made it relatively easy for developers and manufacturers to get an operating system onto a new class of mobile devices. However, consider the two leading strains of mobile Linux; Android and Moblin. Both start with Linux at the core, but if you move up to the user interface, they diverge.

In yet another bizarre twist in the interminable legal dispute over source code allegedly illegally copied from UNIX System V into Linux, the SCO Group, which claims ownership of the disputed code, has secured a last-gasp reprieve from the threat of liquidation. Immediately before the crucial liquidation hearing in the bankruptcy court, SCO CEO Darl McBride signed an agreement with a company by the name of Gulf Capital Partners, backed by well-known investor Stephen Norris. Caught out by the surprise development, all parties have agreed to postpone the liquidation hearing until the 16th or the 27th of July.

Developers have released the Linux kernel version 2.6.30, adding support for new file systems as well as performance improvements and new hardware drivers. The Linux kernel is the core used by GNU/Linux operating system distributions from Red Hat, Novell Suse and others. The new release was finalized last week, and was publicised in a newslist post from Linux developer Linus Torvalds on the next day.

In March, the ever-innovating Linux Foundation announced a new program aimed at bringing the brains behind Linux together with developers-to-be in order to supply the increasing need for Linux talent. Now the program is going online, with the first two courses set to call roll by mid-month. The original sessions of the Linux Foundation Training Program, held at the annual Collaboration Summit, took the form of in-person, hands-on training, a method that provides students an unmatched learning opportunity, but limits the number of students the program can reach. The addition of online courses takes the program to the students, complementing the continued on-site courses offered at Linux Foundation events, local training sessions in select U.S. cities, and by request, specialized training for corporate developers.

In part 1 Eric Geier introduced us to Open-Mesh, and showed us the basic setup for covering a wider area such as a farm, warehouse, or neighborhood. Now we'll discover the captive portal options offered by the Open-Mesh routers so we can display a disclaimer or terms of service, or require a payment or account.

No one can watch everything all the time in the fast-paced IT sector. But it's pretty hard to do something - or not do it - and get it past the readers of El Reg. Recently, a reader told us that server maker Hewlett-Packard was no longer offering support for the Debian distribution of Linux on its servers. And according to HP's website, that appeared to be the case. But as it turns out, HP is still supporting Debian (in a sense). What it doesn't offer is formal support for Ubuntu. And it has no plans to.