Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji's role is to make sure open-source programs in use can work in conjunction with Microsoft software. That way, just because a company is using the MySQL open-source database, it will not feel compelled to put it on top of the Linux operating system.

Microsoft is criticizing the drafting of what it has characterized as a secret "Cloud Manifesto" that sets guidelines for interoperability among cloud-computing networks. In a blog posting attributed to Steven Martin, Microsoft spilled the beans on a document it said has been drafted privately and that it was asked to sign without revisions. "Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input," according to the post.

The chattr (change attributes) command allows you to view and change the attributes of the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, such as setting the immutable bit, synchronous writes, and append-only. Juliet Kemp shows us how.

What was Richard Stallman's greatest achievement? Some might say it's Emacs, one of the most powerful and adaptable pieces of software ever written. Others might plump for gcc, an indispensable tool used by probably millions of hackers to write yet more free software. And then there is the entire GNU project, astonishing in its ambition to create a Unix-like operating system from scratch. But for me, his single most important hack was the creation of the GNU General Public Licence.

An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say. They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries. They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama - Tibet's spiritual leader.

[An entire article about computers and hacking and not one single mention of what OS they were running? Interesting.. - Scott]

When it comes to gaming, the most popular platform isn’t the Nintendo Wii, but Flash, the interactive browser plugin that now boasts 99 percent market penetration on nearly a billion PCs. (Flash game advertising network Mochi Media currently counts 100 million players across its system alone.) That huge audience has led to a lot of games, but most of them are rudimentary at best, the product of amateur enthusiasts working with limited resources. That’s why I was excited to hear about PushButton, a Flash game engine from a team of seasoned game developers that’s free, open source, and associated with an innovative revenue model that should help spur its adoption.

The merge window for the Linux 2.6.30 kernel is now open and Linus has already accepted a horde of new patches for this next quarterly Linux update. Among what has been pulled in so far is the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support for a new Intel chipset. This new Intel IGP is described by Intel's Shaohua Li as "a G33-like desktop and mobile chipset." The patch adds in two new product IDs (0xa001 and 0xa011) for the desktop and mobile version and makes some clock-related changes. Within the code, the chipset is referred to as just an IGD (Integrated Graphics Device) rather than being more descriptive like the I945GM, I965GM, and GM45 defines.

As many LinuxJournal.com readers will know, a number of the Linux Journal crew hail from Houston. Thus we were particularly pleased to learn that the Houston Zoo has just installed Firefox — but not quite how you think.

In late December AMD had released open-source R600/700 3D code and a month later they released the 3D documentation that covers these Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards. The initial code drop didn't do much good for end-users as they couldn't do much more than render a couple triangles, but over the past few months the open-source developers have been working on the proper Mesa support for the R600/700 graphics cards in a private code repository. Now this code may finally be pushed out to the general public in the near future.

Only four freshmen showed up at the University of Virginia in 2007 without a computer of their own, and the school has decided that it's no longer worth the expense of running campus computer labs. What's the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That's a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

Thanks to Ed Cherlin for your reference to the OLPC trials in Ethiopia and and the challenge of a rote-learning based culture per Eduvision's Ethiopia Implementation Report. This is a very useful report. As I read it I found myself thinking -I recognise what they are saying - it could have been written for Nigeria.

Microsoft today sits comfortably atop the growing netbook market, with Windows garnering 90% of netbook sales in November, December and January, according to research firm The NPD Group. What about Linux? With just 10% netbook market share, the open-source operating system is a toothless tiger for now. But Linux-based netbooks may encroach on Microsoft's success in the near future. Two looming threats: Google may decide to run its operating system, Android, on netbooks and low-power processors from smartphone chip licenser ARM may take off in netbooks.

Device and hardware makers are discovering the flexibility of the Linux stack as the foundation of a platform for mobile applications that bring value to the wares they want to sell. Complications exist, but manufacturers are working through them to further drive the adoption of the Linux stack.

It's hard to write a bash script of much import without using a pipe or two. Named pipes, on the other hand, are much rarer.

Installing Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on a Macintosh is a slightly different process than installing Ubuntu on a more traditional PC. Various differences in the hardware, particularly the use of the EFI firmware system, mean that some extra effort is required to get your favourite distro up and running on your favourite hardware.

The open source Java servlet container, Jetty, is now an incubation project at the Eclipse Foundation, following the move of the core components of Jetty 7 into the Eclipse repository. The move carries through on Greg Wilkin's proprosal to move Jetty under the Eclipse Project's umbrella. Jetty is to be part of the Eclipse Runtime top level project, but will also continue to be a Codehaus project, making it available under both the Apache 2 and Eclipse Public Licence (EPL).

Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT. Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school's faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort. Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers. "What's important here is that it's giving the university a formal role in how publications happen," Abelson said. "Some of the faculty said, 'You're calling this an open-access resolution but actually the way to think of it is as a collective bargaining agreement.'"

Linux'ers who thought they had erased all traces of their latest Ponzi scheme, beware: MacForensicsLab's desktop forensic tool has moved to Linux. Designed to help law enforcement, E-Discovery, and IT professionals quickly extract suspect information, version 2.1 of MacLockPick now runs on Linux, says the company.

Sugar Labs has released a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform, a Linux-based software environment for education. The new version includes new programs and improvements to the environment's file journal system.

A number of senior kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, Ted Ts'o, Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar, have been squabbling over the sense or otherwise of journaling and delayed allocation in Ext3 and Ext4. The trigger for the discussion was a response from Jesper Krogh to Torvalds' announcement of kernel version 2.6.29, in which he described massive delays in writing out the file system cache on Ext3 file systems despite fast RAID arrays on computers with lots of RAM.