Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Netbooks are selling at a nice clip -- IDC predicts more than 20 million units sold by year's end -- as consumers and education buyers wolf up these streamlined, low-cost laptop alternatives. Next up: the enterprise. Netbooks is a "category with legs," says Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with Seattle-based consultancy RedMonk, pointing to recent market activity as an indicator of the netbook's viability. Most obvious, he says, is Google's decision to build a separate Linux-based operating system -- Chrome OS -- specifically for netbooks. Meantime, Microsoft is grappling with "hard questions about its OS pricing relative to netbooks," and virtually every major hardware maker, apart from Apple Inc., has an offering in the category.

Recently LifeHacker had an article talking about five things they would like to see in Ubuntu. The article is very supportive of Ubuntu, and we appreciate that LifeHacker folks, and I wanted to follow up with a few notes about each of the five areas they focused on, particularly with relation to the recently released Alpha 5 development snapshot of the up-and-coming Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Having your Linux distribution suddenly disappear from the internet would put a strain on anyone. It does happen from time to time, however, something the team at Fedora can testify to. Announcing in advance that your distro will pull a David Copperfield would prove far less stressful, and that's exactly what the good people at openSUSE have done.

Back in 2007, it seemed like the SCO nightmare was done; the company had suffered a summary judgment depriving it of its claim to the Unix copyrights and it had gone into bankruptcy proceedings. In the latter half of 2009, though, SCO is still here. Now, an appeals court has ruled [PDF] that part of the 2007 judgment was erroneous and must be reconsidered; some worry that SCO could come back, zombie-like, to terrorize again. The real threat may not be SCO, though, but what comes after. The agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation was a mess which never clearly spelled out what was being sold. It is far from surprising that Novell and the company now known as the SCO Group disagree on its particulars. The lawyers involved in making that agreement, quite simply, did not do their job. Even so, the district court, in 2007, was able to obtain enough clarity from this document to conclude that there was no question at all of whether the Unix copyrights had been transferred to SCO. The result was a summary judgment throwing out SCO's claims regarding those copyrights. That judgment was welcomed in the community, but there may be justice to SCO's claim that it was a little too hasty.

Oracle Corp. ended it silence Thursday on its post-merger plans for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix systems in an advertisement aimed at Sun customers to keep them from leaving the Sparc and Solaris platforms. Oracle's ad to "Sun customers," makes a number of promises that includes spending more "than Sun does now," on developing Sparc and Solaris, as well as boosting service and support by having "more than twice as many hardware specialists than Sun does now."

IBM has begun offering a free version of its Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) tools, so developers can build dynamic web applications without getting their hands dirty using HTML or JavaScript. Big Blue's new EGL Community Edition is an Eclipse-based development tool based on code plucked from IBM's Rational Business Developer workbench, which the company has been selling for years. EGL applications or services are written, tested and debugged at the EGL source level, then compiled to Java, COBOL, or JavaScript.

Charlie Schluting helps admins decide if Xen is a viable alternative to VMWare. Why move away from VMWare? Xen is open source and less expensive. But will it do the job?

VirtualBox is a free, powerful and versatile virtualization program which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows hosts, and can virtualize many different Operating Systems. VirtualBox was originally developed by Innotek, but was purchased by Sun and renamed Sun xVM VirtualBox. There are several versions of the program, but I use the free closed-source version, since it has more features than Virtualbox OSE.

Nominations are officially open for the 9th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 14th-18th AMIA Fall conference in San Francisco, CA. Deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group.

The CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities, launched today, September 10, 2009. Incorporated as a 501.c6 non-profit, the CodePlex Foundation was created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities. Initial funding for the Foundation comes from Microsoft Corporation.

[It is going to be very interesting to see how they use this new tool of theirs. - Scott]

The controversy continues to heat up around Microsoft's misleading anti-Linux training materials designed for Best Buy salespeople. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin has alleged that Microsoft tried to spread anti-Linux FUD by dumping 22 Linux-related patents in the hopes they'd be purchased by "patent trolls."

The latest version of Linux offers a whole host of new features – for example a USB 3.0 infrastructure, drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi, KMS support for Radeon chips and improved versions of Btrfs and Ext4. As is traditional with new Linux versions in the main development branch, however, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it's released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time -- in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.

A planned maintenance for the transformers for the openSUSE servers at the Nuremberg office will bring down the critical services for a few days over the 9/11 weekend.

A message on the Chromium Blog indicates that Google are beginning the process of rolling out extensions for Google Chrome. Although Chrome and Chromium are regarded as good browsers, critics have pointed to the lack of Firefox style Add-ons as a reason for it not being adopted more widely. Google have been working on implementing extensions and have now moved to turn on the extensions system in the Dev channel builds of Chrome and Chromium.

With four billion connected mobile phones on the planet - compared to one billion PCs - handhelds offer developers the mother of all opportunities: ubiquity and mass market. But the reward comes at a great price: market fragmentation, thanks to so many different devices using so many different hardware configurations. To bridge them, we've had Java 2 Micro Edition, CLDC, MIDP and the OSDL's Mobile Linux Initiative that promised to abstract away the differences in hardware design or provide a common set of APIs that worked on a large number of platforms. Offered as the next "big answer," they've invariably compounded the problem by adding to the infinite soup of API configurations.

The perl5-porters recently saw a rather acrimonious discussion on how the Red Hat and Fedora distributions choose to package the Perl language and associated modules. Things have calmed down (the parties have essentially agreed to disagree), but an interesting issue remains: what can development projects do if they're unhappy with how distributors are treating their code?

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux operating system, but it's where the dream of a usable, completely free desktop is closest to reality. If every Ubuntu developer were assembled at one place, here are five things we'd ask them to accomplish.

Microsoft has been making overtures to the open source community of late, but suspicion abounds, and it was only heightened by Redmond's legal challenge to TomTom earlier this year. In an effort to stockpile ammunition against Redmond if it should declare war on the FOSS movement, a Linux-friendly group of companies have bought 22 patents Microsoft recently sold to a patent trust.

With the Linux 2.6.32 kernel merge window opening up this month, open-source developers around the world have been busy working on their code that they wish to push into this next major kernel update. There is already 3D and KMS support coming to the R600/700 hardware from ATI with this next kernel release along with the KMS page-flipping ioctl and other graphics-related changes, but now Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman has written a lengthy message detailing the status of the different drivers in the staging tree for Linux 2.6.32.