Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The popular DD-WRT router software project (firmware replacement for consumer-level wireless routers, such as the Linksys WRT series) uses GPL software, but its Web interface has a restrictive proprietary license,and it bundles other questionably-licensed software. Aaron Weiss reports on the accusations and controversy that dog this popular software.

Red Hat is expecting to deliver the final release of Fedora 11 in just less than one month, but today they have offered up a preview build of this next open-source Linux distribution update that is known as Leonidas

Many manufacturers have now joined the Open Handset Alliance to cooperate on developing Android; an operating system originally tailored to mobile phones, with a practical browser and a lot of applications. The obvious next move is to adapt it for netbooks as well. Computerworld.com reports that Skytone, a previously unknown Chinese manufacturer, has just announced an Android netbook with an ARM processor that is to cost around $250.

One of the most popular open source programs (technically Free Software) in the world got a major boost this week. GCC 4.4 adds in lots of new features the biggest of which is the Graphite Framework.

Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that three of the eight patents cited in Microsoft's lawsuit against TomTom have been posted for prior art review by the Linux community. The evidence is being compiled to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that the patents are invalid.

The ProBook offers users a number of new features, including an optional Linux-based operating system pre-installed -- Novell Inc's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 -- for those seeking an alternative to the dominant Microsoft Corp Windows platform. It is HP's first-ever Linux pre-install on a standard business laptop, the company said. The PC maker does offer some netbooks with Linux. "It's pretty much a natural evolution," said Carol Hess- Nickels, HP's director of marketing for worldwide business notebooks. "We want to provide a different option ... it's probably a little time yet before we'll know exactly what the demand is, but we did think it was something worth trying."

The European Research Council will provide an additional 2.5 million euros to fund development of the Minix 3 operating system for a further five years. The funding will bankroll the workPDF of three academics and two developers. The UNIX-like operating system, which emphasises stability and reliability, is the brain child of computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum says that there are fundamental flaws in the design of all current computer systems and that radical change is needed in future designs to achieve necessary levels of stability and security. His goal is to create a system capable of repairing itself in the event of failure.

When you have to pay people to do your open source development, even development that is in their interest to have done, you are naturally going to take a proprietary attitude toward what results. You may indeed wonder what the excitement of open source is all about - is it just taking your work for nothing? It's not, but Microsoft has never gone far enough down the open source incline to know any different and I wonder if it ever will.

The second and final day of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop was held in San Francisco, California on April 7. Conflicting commitments kept your editor from attending the entire event, but he was able to participate in sessions on solid-state device support, storage topology information, and more.

LXer Feature: 27-Apr-2009

The biggest story of the week was by far the purchase of Sun, not by IBM but Oracle, which has many FOSS proponents worried about the Open Source projects that Sun is an integral part of. I agree with SJVN's take on it and it explains why Oracle had "Dr DBA" himself appear on stage at the MySQL annual conference only days later.

With Oracle ready to annex Sun Microsystems, there may finally exist a true, full and global counterweight to IBM's hegemony. Who else loses? Microsoft, SAP and Cisco -- and maybe even Amazon. If HP plays along and aligns with Sun and Oracle, together they could create a full-service IT powerhouse.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

Last fall, T-Mobile became the first wireless provider to offer a handset based on Google's Android platform: the T-Mobile G1. And the world rejoiced. Now, some six months after that debut, Samsung has jumped in the game with its own Android offering.

The Tiny Core developers have announced the release of version 1.4 of their minimal Linux distribution. Tiny Core is only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. Version 1.4 now includes Tiny Core Virtual Disk (TCVD) support and an updated watcher, which now supports the no swap option.

Today Eric Geier shows us how Zeroshell makes it easy to set up your own wireless access point with the strongest authentication and encryption, and nice user-management features so you can easily maintain control of who has access to your wireless network.

Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope has bounded onto desktops, and reaction in the Linux blogosphere is mostly thumbs up. There are some who wish the Ubuntu distros didn't come in such quick succession, however, arguing that there's not enough time to stabilize them and get into serious application development. Still, if it's all part of a hellbent for leather effort to compete with Microsoft, it may just be working.

The openSUSE developers have announced the release of Milestone 1 of the upcoming openSUSE 11.2. The release includes the latest 2.6.29 Linux kernel and version 2.4 of Mono, an open source alternative to Microsoft's .NET framework. Milestone 1 includes the KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26 and Xfce 4.6 desktop environments.

Sugar Labs, the maker of the software for the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, has announced the release of a first beta of Sugar on a Stick. Sugar on a Stick is a version of the free open source Sugar Learning Platform that can be installed to, and booted from, a USB flash drive on a conventional desktop, notebook or netbook computer. Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs says "Sugar on a Stick lets you start a computer with Sugar and store a child’s data on the stick without touching the host computer’s hard disk,".

Crowdsourcing has been touted as an efficient and inexpensive business practice, but can it really be a win-win proposition? Critics are vehemently urging people not to work on a crowdsourced basis, calling it the equivalent of slave labor and lamenting the jobs lost as a consequence of the practice.

The first major update for Google's Android platform, based on the Cupcake development tree, was released today in source form at the project's git repository. Now it's up to the OEMs and carriers to deploy it, and the community to port it to other platforms. Dig in for a list of new features.