Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

There are never adequate words to describe tragedies, especially those that involve loss of life. Today we find ourselves struggling for words to report the apparent suicide of LXLabs founder K. T. Lingesh on Monday.

Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 2.6.30, adding several new filesystems, including the NILFS2 log-structured filesystem. Linux 2.6.30 enhancements include a local caching layer for NFS data, the RDS server cluster communications protocol, the Tomoyo security module, and support for LZMA and BZIP2 compression algorithms.

The idea of memory compression—compress relatively unused pages and store them in memory itself—is simple and has been around for a long time. Compression, through the elimination of expensive disk I/O, is far faster than swapping those pages to secondary storage. When a page is needed again, it is decompressed and given back, which is, again, much faster than going to swap.

Due to a long succession of pleasing experiences and unfettered software freedom, Carla Schroder hereby nominates today, and every day, as Linux/FOSS Gratitude Day. You don't have to kiss a programmer, but you might take the time to thank some of the folks who have made all of this wonderful software freely available.

The NetBeans developers have announced the start of the NetBeans 6.7 Community Acceptance Survey and are asking users to provide feedback on the current release candidate. The survey is part of the Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) for NetBeans. The goal of NetCAT is to get early feedback from users and the NetBeans community on the main features and quality of the product, before release.

The world of open source development could be divided if the European Commission (EC) succeeds in passing a law extending consumer protection rules to software, according to experts. The EC proposes software companies be held liable in the European Union (EU) for the security and efficacy of their products. David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT Research at Ovum, thinks this may lead to a situation boosting current open source vendors' business models, but making it more difficult for independent developers to thrive.

For an outfit that calls itself “the world's largest business software company”, the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world. With 51,500 employees, a turnover of 11.5 billion euros ($16 billion) last year, and operating profits of 2.7 billion euros ($3.8 billion), SAP is clearly one of the heavyweights in the computer world. Given that huge clout, SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend or its foe.