Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 15-Jun-2009

Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth is itching for a clean fight with Microsoft on netbooks. Shuttleworth once told The Reg he can't wait for Windows 7 on this sub-laptop class of machines because it'll finally give Ubuntu the opportunity to compete fairly against Microsoft's operating system in this emerging market.

Ahead of the UK Ingres Users Association conference, Ingres held a two day code sprint last week to bring together customers and Ingres engineers to develop new features for the Ingres database. The results of the work on the Sunday and Monday appear to be impressive.

The free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia is beginning its licence migration today. In the future, the content of Wikipedia will be dual licensed, under the current GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) and under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA). The update is beginning with the English Wikipedia projects, as a reference implementation of the licence change, and will expand to Wikipedia in other languages in the near future. From this point on, GFDL-only licensed content will no longer be accepted.

Suse Linux and Windows will become more closely integrated next week, when Novell releases a product allowing Microsoft management tools to monitor the open source operating system. Novell said in a statement on Wednesday that joint sales of Linux support certificates over the past six months have increased, which the company ascribes to the current uncertain economic conditions.

The question of Linux vs. Windows suckiness riled the blogosphere this week, with fans questioning the drivers behind the perception that Linux isn't ready for the desktop and is only suitable for the technologically superior few. Is it a question of user skill levels or marketing talents?

Embarcadero Technologies, having itself been been bought by private capital in 2006, acquired Borland Software's CodeGear division just over a year ago. CodeGear's developer products include Delphi, a RAD tool that creates native code Windows executables, and the JBuilder Java IDE now based on Eclipse. These products have an illustrious past, but the deal had a strange smell to it: Borland had been looking to offload CodeGear for some time while database tools company Embarcadero brought a hint of the classic "yeah, we can make this work" VC attitude to the table. So where are products now, and what's in their future?

Last fall, the openSUSE Project achieved an important milestone: the first-ever openSUSE Board election. Two new members joined the two victorious incumbents and the Novell-appointed chairman to form the project's first elected board. Now the composition is changing once again, as one of the board's original members takes a step back.

Your editor is widely known for his invariably correct and infallible predictions. So, certainly, he would never have said something like this: Mistakes may have been made in Xen's history, but it is a project which remains alive, and which has clear reasons to exist. Your editor predicts that the Dom0 code will find little opposition at the opening of the 2.6.30 merge window." OK, anybody needing any further evidence of your editor's ability to foresee the future need only look at his investment portfolio...or, shall we say, the smoldering remains thereof. Needless to say, Xen Dom0 support did not get through the 2.6.30 merge window, and it's not looking very good for 2.6.31 either.

Modern mobile phones and PDAs have increasingly sophisticated data/internet connectivity. The globe-trotting Juliet Kemp gives us some good tips on how they can liberate us from the server room, and allow us to roam freely.

It's not just the new design and updated software that brings a sparkle to the eleventh version of Fedora (Leonidas), there are also a whole raft of technical enhancements. Fedora once again finds itself in the vanguard – expect to see many of these changes coming to other Linux distributions in the near future.

The Ubuntu team this morning released a second alpha of the upcoming Karmic Koala operating system, also known as Ubuntu 9.10. While it is still early days for Karmic, this release does give some insight into plans for the final release, scheduled for October this year.

In the last six months, Microsoft and Novell have signed more than 100 new customers for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as part of their 2006 collaboration agreement. According to Microsoft, this is double the sign-on rate for the first two years of the agreement with Novell.

Linux and open-source companies have made much about how the recession is creating opportunity at the expense of proprietary and licensed-based software as IT budgets are cut. For proprietary and license-charged, read Microsoft and Oracle.

Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released with hundreds of changes from the previous version, including a new architecture for suspend and resume that Linus Torvalds says switches the kernel to a "new world order." "Hopefully now done with the suspend/resume irq re-architecting, and have switched to a new world order," Torvalds announced to the Linux kernel mailing list. "Although I suspect lots of details will still change, of course." "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x."

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.

In the previous two installments of this series we learned how to create a simple, colorful screensaver in PythonGTK. Today Akkana Peck leads us into some key fundamental concepts of programming: objects, code re-use, and making our program respond to user input.

Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar has written in to report that he and his team at the Interactive Computing Lab in ENAC, Toulouse have been successful in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainlinue X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7), there is now multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions.

In its mission to bring to world+dog the joys of Hadoop - that open-source grid-computing platform based on Google arrogance - Cloudera has out-Amazoned Amazon. Today, the star-studded Hadoop startup told the world that its commercial stuffed-elephant distro can now be run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in tandem with so-called Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volumes. EBS volumes are mounted directly onto EC2 server instances.

A small but intense code sprint took place in Oslo last weekend. Peder Osevoll Midthjell, Sveinung Dalatun and Anders Sandven, who work on mobile broadband connections for Linux as their thesis project, met with Darío Freddi, Will Stephenson and Frederik Gladhorn of KDE. Knut Yrvin spent his weekend with us to make us feel comfortable at Qt Software.