Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux blogosphere had its fair share -- perhaps more than its fair share -- of techie trickery on April Fools' Day, but some of the real news was almost as hard to believe. Citigroup buying Red Hat? Surely, you jest. As odd as that might seem, the prospect of Oracle buying Red Hat might be even harder to swallow. And what's up with Microsoft's latest effort to reach out to losers?

Sometimes, even the best job can call for extraordinary sacrifices. Even grumpy editorial jobs. Let it never be said that your editor is unwilling to take one for his readers; why else would he choose to spend four hours in the company of around 100 lawyers gathered to talk about software patents? This event, entitled Evaluating software patents, was held on March 19 at the local law school. The conversation was sometimes dry and often painful to listen to, but it did provide an interesting view into how patent attorneys see the software patent regime in the U.S. The following is a summary of the high points from the four panels held at this event.

MIDs (mobile Internet devices) may be the channel for Linux to reach mainstream consumers in Asia, according to an analyst. Ian Lao, senior analyst, mobile technologies at In-Stat told ZDNet Asia in an interview, MIDs are expected to do better in the region than in others, and that Linux will likely grow alongside as a result.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" said Dickens, and he could well have been talking about Silicon Valley in 2009 — while some firms are setting up venture capital funds, others are looking for a buoy just to stay afloat. Such is the case for Silicon Graphics, as the once power-player revealed last week it will be sold to Rackable Systems for just half the cost of some of its systems.

Last weekend, the Birmingham Perl Mongers group hosted and was main financial sponsor of the 2009 QA Hackathon, which was held at the Birmingham City Inn. Key developers in the Perl Quality Assurance world flew in from as far afield as Sydney, Portland, OR and Birmingham itself to spend 3 days hacking on all aspects of the Perl and CPAN toolchain. If the hackathon proved anything, it's that while Internet time is fast, face time is faster.

One of the must-haves in the toolkit of any serious free software enthusiast is a decent partitioning tool. This week we take a look at the newly released Parted Magic 4.0, a live CD for managing hard drives. In the news, Intel hands control of Moblin, a distribution for netbooks and mobile devices over to the Linux Foundation, rumours about a possible purchase of Sun Microsystems by IBM spur speculations about the future of OpenSolaris, Debian announces support for kFreeBSD i386 and amd64 port, and Mark Shuttleworth talks about the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.04. Also in the news, first hints about a possible major and more adventurous update of the GNOME desktop, version 3.0. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com March 2009 donation is smxi, a project developing a variety of useful scripts for Debian and Debian-based distributions.

IBM's talks to acquire smaller computer and software rival Sun Microsystems Inc broke down on Sunday after Sun rejected IBM's $7 billion offer, a source with knowledge of the matter said. The collapse of negotiations, if final, is likely to hurt Sun's shares as a buyout was seen as a means of survival for the once-storied Silicon Valley company, which has been losing market share. A deal would also have helped IBM compete more effectively against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co.

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

Dr. Tony Shannon; Chair, Clinical Review Board, openEHR Foundation has released details on the Clinical Knowledge Manager to aide in the development and governance of archetypes (clinical knowledge units). His full announcement is below the fold.

KDE4 is a radical rewrite, and it lays the groundwork for a long and sustainable future. The long-term vision for Gnome is conservative and careful. While radical changes are upsetting, Gnome's conservatism could lead to an increasingly crufty and un-sustainable code base. Bruce Byfield gazes into his crystal ball and predicts what the future holds for both.

If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VideoLan released on Thursday version 0.9.9, a bug fix release that corrects a few issues with the previous version. The best media player just got better and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status.

Reports surfaced late this evening that computing giant IBM — which has been in talks for some time to buy Sun Microsystems — has pulled its $7 billion offer to buy the struggling company. According to reports, IBM withdrew the offer after Sun's Board of Directors made "onerous" requests following IBM's decision to lower its offer for the firm. IBM initially offered $9.55 per share, but dropped that offer to $9.40 — less than a $1.00 premium on Sun's current stock price — due in part, it says, to the discovery that far more senior employees than originally expected are covered by "change of control" contracts. Such agreements cover senior executives — who often face replacement on acquisition — should the company be bought or otherwise come under the control of someone other than its Board.

SUSE studio is a web front-end to customize and build your own personal distribution in as many ways you could possibly think off. There are other similar services and applications that helps you make custom distribution but none of them are as extensive in customization options as SUSEstudio or as easy.

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

The Fedora project has announced the availability of the Fedora 11 beta release. Fedora 11 includes several compelling new features such as support for kernel modesetting, Ext4 by default, and faster boot time.

The maintainer of the Linux stable series has released kernel version 2.6.29.1. It contains nearly 50 fixes and minor enhancements for the ten day old Linux 2.6.29 which saw Tuz the Tasmanian devil stand in temporarily as mascot. In the release mail, kernel hacker Chris Wright specifically points to fixes in the network subsystem which some users of 2.6.29 had problems with.

Microsoft may view its legal settlement with TomTom as a patent victory of sorts but it’s a hollow and meaningless win in the eyes of some in the open source community. Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt said the settlement announced yesterday was anticipated and expected and he is “nonplussed” with the result. He said Microsoft’s effort to build a series of tiny “totem” patent cases to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about using Linux is futile. "This [settlement] says nothing about the validity of the patent ..... the community provided support in the best way possible and that support facilitated an interim settlement," he said, adding that the commercial success of mobile Linux will not be derailed by legal posturing. - Paula Rooney, ZDNet

The Gnome Foundation has laid out a roadmap saying it's time to depart from incremental updates. The team said it's realized it's not enough to simply organize a collection of individual sub-projects and that a project-wide roadmap is needed. Gnome is the default environment of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, and initially the goal was for a version 2.30.0 - that will now become 3.0 due next March. Responding to growing criticism of Gnome's "lack of vision," the team said its 3.0 release will focus not only on streamlining the platform, but "revamping the user experience."

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren't cool enough, it's portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive. Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn't bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

I've got to hand it to Dmitry Brant, the man writes a mean utility. DiskDigger (free) is more than the usual undelete utility offered gratis as a leader product. It goes "beneath the file system" (Dmitry's line, which I plan to borrow regularly in the future) to recover data on a sector-by-sector basis from hard drives, thumb drives, etc. Think of these sectors as little boxes containing data that are arranged in tracks/circles on your hard drive.