Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

CentOS is alive. Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints.

The cross-platform Qt GUI framework now runs on Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system, although it currently still requires a separate X11 server to be installed. The Qt developers point out that this version of Qt will probably never run without being customised for each respective version of VxWorks.

Fun with NULL pointers, part 1 took a detailed look at the long chain of failures which allowed the kernel to be compromised by way of a NULL pointer dereference. Eliminating that particular bug was a straightforward fix; it was, in fact, fixed before the nature of the vulnerability was widely understood. The importance of this particular problem is, in one sense, relatively small; there are very few distributions which shipped vulnerable versions of the kernel. But this exploit suggests that there could be a whole class of related problems in the kernel; there is a definite chance that similar vulnerabilities could be discovered - if, indeed, they have not already been found.

Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.

This week there were several interesting stories at Phoronix, if you happened to miss any of them. We started off by sharing that proper multi-seat support for Linux / X.Org is on the way with the new VGA arbitration code coming about. With this new implementation, multiple X Servers can be run side-by-side without needing to use Xephyr or any ugly hacks.

Modern all-purpose Linux distributions require a lot of RAM and disk space. What's going on, is it lard? Functionality? Have the bytes themselves gotten porky? Paul Rubens investigates the Case of the Portly Linux.

As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses. The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project. A flexible software tool kit, Eclipse can integrate the products of several vendors as plug-ins, for example for modelling, development and software tests; for some time now, Eclipse hasn't just been about Java.

If you're in the mood for Linux — and who amongst us isn't — September may be your month, as the Linux Foundation presents the inaugural LinuxCon in Portland. Just shy of two months ago we sounded the call to rise, shine, and catch the early bird rate — sadly, the early bird's worm is no more. It's still possible, though, to grab yourself a spot and shave a nice slice off the price.

Red Hat will step up its efforts to help drive developer contribution and remains unfazed by desktop competition, according to its chief executive Jim Whitehurst. Addressing local students during his address Friday at UniSim, Whitehurst provided updates of Red Hat's Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative launched just over a year ago.

A group of developers has released open-source software that gives administrators a hand in making the Internet's addressing system less vulnerable to hackers. The software, called OpenDNSSEC, automates many tasks associated with implementing DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions), which is a set a set of protocols that allows DNS (Domain Name System) records to carry a digital signature, said John A. Dickinson, a DNS consultant working on the project.

I didn't make it to OSCON this year, so I missed out on more than a few nifty events. One was a panel chaired by Matt Asay of Alfresco, where he cited research to show that companies do switch to open source as a way to save money, but that there are other, much larger goals beyond that.

According to a recent IDC study, the market for open-source software has been accelerated by both the slow economy and increased acceptance from enterprise customers The IDC study, "Worldwide Open Source Software 2009-2013 Forecast," showed that worldwide revenue from open-source software (OSS) will grow at a 22.4 percent rate to reach $8.1 billion by 2013.

Mozilla's popular Firefox web browser is quickly approaching one billion downloads for all versions since it was officially launched. According to the Firefox Download Guesstimator, the total number of downloads should reach one billion between 13:30 and 15:00 GMT today.

Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks' chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially: OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database migration tool and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

They call it the Zii EGG handheld, the first device running on the Plaszma open source platform (built on top of Linux) and utilizing the ZMS-05 chip. Apart from the amazing Zii stuff, it also comes with an accelerometer, WiFi, GPS, BlueTooth, 32GB internal storage, and an SD expansion slot. This being Creative, it also comes with Creative's X-Fi audio processing chip. Pretty darn impressive.

The headline says "Why Code For Free", but it's really more complicated than that because there are many FOSS developers who are paid to work on FOSS projects. In this final part of our series, more developers speak on the rewards of being part of the FOSS community.

Last week's story about Nicholas Negroponte saying that Sugar should have been an application and the inevitable subsequent Slashdot story created a lively discussion in many places. Among them was also the OLPC devel mailing-list where Carlos Nazareno asked a related question: "Is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?"

When does free speech become a club that actually stifles the free flow of ideas? That's just one potential ramification of the question posed to the FOSS community this week: What makes someone a "shill"? This negative label can come with a pretty sharp sting. Does concern over negative criticism and even ostracism cause some people to keep their good ideas to themselves?

Online media company Phoronix Media has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and the pre-release of PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (code named "Gernlinden"). According to Phoronix founder Michael Larabel, Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (beta) will both be available on the 4th of August.

This post is part of a series of articles I am writing about SUSE Studio and software appliances. In my last post, I gave an overview of software appliances. In this post, I’m going to get more technical and boast a bit about one of my favorite features in SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio is a web service that makes it fun and easy for anyone with a couple of years of Linux experience to build a software appliance, or your own custom Linux distribution, in less than ten minutes.