Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS. Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said in his blog yesterday (26th February) that the Microsoft patent infringement suite against TomTom, at least at present, does not appear to be a covert attack on Linux. Microsoft have made assurances that their dispute is solely with TomTom and Zemlin says there is no reason to doubt that is the case, or to suspect a move against the Linux ecosystem.

One Laptop Per Child program has a new twist for small deployments. Rather than selling XO's to already funded projects wanting 100 or so XO's for programs that have committed community buy-in and long-term project plans, OLPC is going to develop: OLPCorps Africa - $3,500,000 for 100 teams of college students to get $35,000 in support for 10 week projects in Africa. Each group gets 100 XO laptops, assorted hardware, a $10,000 stipend, and 10-day training in Kigali, Rwanda, before being sent out to projects they need to have arranged by March 27th. While the OLPCorps Africa is a great idea - similar to the Peace Corps or Geekcorps - 10 weeks is wastefully too short, college students, while meaning well, are the wrong implementers, and $3.5 million could be much better invested in small deployments.

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK.

As the global economic crisis deepens, companies are considering options they might once have rejected out of hand in order to cut costs. Open source vendors have long waved the lower-TCO banner, and the recession seems to fueling business in the sector. It's not quite clear, though, whether a switch to open source will result in cost savings in the long run.

This interview with lead developer Stefan Kost continues my report on the development of Buzztard. As the interview reveals, Stefan's work on Buzztard represents only one level of his deep involvement in Linux software development.

It has been a number of months since CrossOver Games was last updated, but this morning CodeWeavers has issued a new update for this software based upon WINE that allows gamers to run their favorite DirectX and OpenGL Windows titles on Linux.

Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced an expanded partnership in which HP will become a key distributor of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. According to Jeff Carlat, Director of Marketing in the HP software group for the ProLiant and BladeSystem platforms, "Customers have been demanding increased levels of support for Solaris 10" and this partnership is the result. Sun previously signed distribution deals with IBM and Dell in 2007. HP, certified with Solaris since 1996, will be distributing and providing support for Solaris on its ProLiant server and BladeSystem platforms.

Trolling around the Linux blogosphere, one can't help but come across repeated references to this company in Redmond, Wash., that makes a similar operating system. They're putting this Windows thing in dual-boot laptops over at Dell, and Red Hat just signed an interoperability agreement with these Microsoft people.

Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom alleging that the device maker's products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem. This marks the first time that Microsoft has enforced its FAT patents against the Linux platform, a move that some free software advocates have long feared could be disastrous.

Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said that the company's legal action against TomTom over Linux was specific to that company, but he declined to say whether other suits over the open source operating system might follow. "I wouldn't speculate at this point," Horacio Gutierrez told CNET News in an interview late Wednesday. Gutierrez did add that Microsoft's patent suit against TomTom, which includes three claims related to file management techniques used in the Linux kernel, was specific to that company.

The number of open source projects targeting mobile platforms is rising sharply, according to Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software. Black Duck spiders the Internet collecting open source and other downloadable code into a repository it calls the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

In 2007, Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, hit an all-time low. Users were leaving it behind in favor of Ubuntu and openSUSE. Well-known Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond, after looking at the latest release, Fedora Core 6, dismissed Fedora as junk. Raymond wrote at the time, "Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what a near-unassailable lead was at one time in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels."

Sometimes open source projects "fork." Disagreements over direction cause a splinter group to hive off and maintain their own separate code base. This is going to happen with well-known heavyweight FOSS staple, MySQL, after the original author quit Sun Microsystems earlier this month.

How do you take a project with 40 million lines of code that's shipping on millions of devices around the world and make it open source? That's the Everest of a problem facing the Symbian Foundation as they start to deliver on the promises made when Nokia brought Symbian under its wing.

For simplicity's sake, I keep all of my general-purpose boxes running the same Linux distribution. That minimizes conflicts when sharing applications and data, but every substantial upgrade means downloading the same packages multiple times — taking a toll on bandwidth. I used to use apt-proxy to intelligently cache downloaded packages for all the machines to share, but there are alternatives: apt-cacher, apt-cacher-ng, and approx, as well as options available for RPM-based distributions. This article will take a look at some of these tools.

With a new government policy on open source announced, The H sounded out open source vendors for their reactions. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems was the first person The H called. He was pleased to see the updated policy, "It's a great thing to see it published, as the 2004 policy didn't help very much". The new policy had "a lot of good things in it" such as the costing in of exit, or as Phipps calls them, sundown costs and the preference towards open source because of, as the policy puts it, "its inherent flexibility". Phipps explained "Open source has inherent benefits in that it gives a CIO control of the complete life-cycle. The four freedoms put the CIO in control".

The logic bomb episode at Fannie Mae is an illustration of the destruction that's possible when enterprises fail to properly monitor user privileges. IT managers must be aware of who has what privileges and determine the appropriate level of access for all users.

We are certain that many of you want to try Linux to see what it is like, but have no idea where to start or how to get into it. This article is the first installment in a four-part guide that will gradually introduce you to the Linux environment and how to adjust to it if you are a new user. One of the hardest things to do while starting out is finding a distro that is right for you. Many users try several before settling on one of two that they really like. Once they find a distro that feels right, they are often reluctant to switch unless the distro becomes unsuitable for their needs for whatever reason.