Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

There are quite a variety of tracing options for Linux, with SystemTap being the most prominent, but that particular solution has yet to become easily usable, at least partly due to its many dependencies on user-space configuration and tools. Another choice, which originally came from work on realtime Linux, is ftrace. Ftrace is a self-contained solution, requiring no user-space tools or support, that is useful for tracking down problems—not only in the kernel, but in its interactions with user space as well.

More than two years ago the South African Revenue Service (SARS) began a process to migrate its desktops to Linux by calling for a proof on concept. Two years on the desktop migration has not happened but the tax-collection arm of government has made some progress towards wider open source use, including wide use of Suse Linux. We take a look at exactly what has been going on.

While backup and recovery solutions are considered paramount in most organisations, they are possibly one of the most overlooked procedures in company security policies, mainly because they seem to try to achieve the opposite. Security demands strong encryption and overall policy control over employee and enterprise-wide information, while backup software tries to simplify the data centre recovery process regardless of platform, location and user, anywhere on the network.

There are lots of Linux distros being touted as great desktop operating systems for PCs. However, there's only one that I can wholeheartedly recommend to business owners as a Windows replacement: Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED). SLED 11, which was released on March 24, stands above its competitors because it works and plays well with existing Windows business networks, data files and application servers. You can, of course, add this functionality to other Linux distributions -- if you're willing to do it manually. SLED gives you pretty much the full deal out of the box.

Imagine owning a smart phone that you can hack just as freely as a PC. OpenMoko is an embedded Linux-based mobile platform, and the Neo Freerunner is OpenMoko's slick little touch-screen smart phone that runs OpenMoko. Unlike other mobile platforms that are open in buzzword only, OpenMoko is a genuinely open hardware and software platform. Carla Schroder investigates this radical new approach to mobile devices.

Linux distributions (the Linux kernel plus a desktop and applications) come in many flavours. Here's an overview of just a few of the recent releases. While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

With apologies for returning to the theme of patents, I'd like to direct your attention to a long and interesting piece that has appeared on the Digital Majority site asking a very important question: “Did Red Hat lobby for, or against software patents in Europe?”

Next month should see the first steps from the Canonical camp that will let you run an Amazon-style cloud behind the firewall on Ubuntu. The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.

Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .NET applications. The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing and virtualisation. One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .NET-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial support for Mono means Suse Linux Enterprise 11 users can migrate their existing .NET applications across to the Linux platform.

You're not really supposed to love an operating system. It's like your car's hydraulic system, your digestive system or the global financial system. It's supposed to do its job -- and not get in your way while you're doing yours. But like your car, your guts and the economy, computers are more complicated than they seem. And so are our feelings about them. As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. If that's not the basis of a lasting love, I don't know what is.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006.

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast? With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

A project that has no goals — no bugs to fix, no features to implement — has only stagnation to look forward to. The best prevention for this kind of stagnation is an active community of users who are quick to share what they want with the developers — even if there is the occasional users vs. devs feature stalemate. The KDE Project has no shortage of community-contributed ideas, and to keep the concepts flowing freely, the powers-that-be have implemented a new feature of their own: A designated section of the KDE Community Forums christened The "Brainstorm" Forum.