Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 24-Aug-2008

This week we have Anti-Linux sites to follow, old flame wars, scientific software for Linux, Microsoft and Novell renew their pact, Microsoft attempts to save face with Vista advertising campaign, Linux myths debunked and I wrap it all up with a really bad patch cable and a nice nugget of FUD.

The Linux 2.6.26 kernel had featured updated Intel and ATI DRM that added the needed kernel support for the ATI R500 and Intel GMA 4500 3D support. While the merge window for the Linux 2.6.27 kernel has already closed, we will hopefully see a few more Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) patches. We've already seen DRM file restructuring early on in the 2.6.27 cycle, but David Airlie has requested Linus Torvalds incorporate a few additional patches.

Not long after Joichi Ito uploaded a photo he had taken of Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia last year, he noticed something odd. Most of the Internet luminaries and technology gurus who had write-ups on Wikipedia had poor-quality photos or none at all. It wasn't just that."I realized that some famous people have no free photos online," says Ito.

We all know that Linux is about choice. Everyone has the choice of what they use and how they use it, provided they have access to a tame hacker with suitable programming skills. A consequence of this is that there's a huge range of software out there. If there's a popular favourite for a given task, you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be at least one alternative. You've only to look at the package selection options in most distro installers to see just how many choices you can make before you even start using your distribution.

A French robotics start-up called Wany Robotics has announced two mobile, mini-ITX-based sensor robots that run Linux. Aimed at educational and R&D applications, the PeKeeII robots are based on Via C3 or Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and offer sensor telemetry, ultrasound, and laser detection. Wany offers "Advanced" and "Ultimate" robots, both of which are built atop the same "Essential" PeKeeII model. Supplied without an onboard computer or OS, the Essential model is equipped with dual 12V DC motors running off of a 12V 7A/h NiMh battery. It has two odometers, 360-degree bumpers, and light and temperature sensors.

Opera Software has patched seven vulnerabilities in its flagship Opera browser, but declined to provide information about one of the bugs. The Norwegian browser developer hinted that other programs, not yet unpatched, were also affected by the flaw. Wednesday's update to Opera 9.52 fixes multiple bugs - seven in the Windows version, five in the Mac edition and six in the Linux browser - that range from "extremely severe" to "not severe" in the company's five-step threat ranking system.

Microsoft has dropped another ton or three of cash on Novell and in celebration they issued a joint press release announcing this new phase of their relationship. I was never a fan of the original deal, feeling that it violated the spirit if not the letter of the GPL. Some purport that it has increased the usage of Linux in the enterprise; that's a claim for which I don't have the numbers to verify or debunk. Honestly, I sort of doubt much of anyone really does.

Garry Saddington is ICT co-ordinator at Skegness Grammar School. It is a specialist sports college and a specialist maths and computing college with nearly 800 pupils, and has a boarding provision for around 60. Alistair Crust is responsible for serving the technology needs of the Skegness Grammar School community. All the school’s 180 curriculum computers run GNU/Linux. These run as thin-clients using the Linux Terminal Server Project, which uses low power clients with most of the processing being done on fewer, more powerful, servers.

KDE, GNOME, and Xfce are without doubt the most well-known desktop environments for Linux at the moment. They are utilized by majority of Linux Distributions simply because they are very much stable and usable. But did you know that there are other capable Free and Open-source desktop environments that you probably haven’t heard of?

Earlier this week, we ran a story on GoboLinux, and the distribution's effort to replace the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard with a more pleasant, human-readable, and logical design. A lot of people liked the idea of modernising/replacing the FHS, but just as many people were against doing so. Valid arguments were presented both ways, but in this article, I would like to focus on a common sentiment that came forward in that discussion: normal users shouldn't see the FHS, and advanced users are smart enough to figure out how the FHS works.

Are there enough Linux experts to go around? Here’s an interesting article in ComputerWorld from this week: “Linux unchained.” Author Mary Pratt investigates the claim that Linux growth is outstripping the supply of actual Linux-proficient techs.

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court.

A sliding share price and gloomy forecasts have prompted speculation that Sun Microsystems might be a tempting takeover target for acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu or another tech giant. A sale would be momentous, involving billions of dollars and spelling the demise of one of Silicon Valley's most venerable companies. But no one has confirmed any talks.

The Linux-Embedded discussion list has been abuzz the last two days over a flash filesystem designed to support binary code execution (sometimes called XIP, or "execute-in-place"). When combined with forthcoming "Phase Change Memory" products, the "Advanced XiP Filesystem" (AXFS) could radically change the way Linux is embedded on consumer devices.

The TALPA malware scanning API was covered here in December, 2007. Several months later, TALPA is back - in the form of a patch set posted by a Red Hat employee. The resulting discussion has certainly not been what the TALPA developers would have hoped for; it is, instead, a good example of how a potentially useful idea can be set back by poor execution and presentation to the kernel community.

Since its inception, we've tried to make collections of tips, pointers to free tutorials, and advice on the best applications a regular part of the editorial content here at OStatic. These have included screenshot-driven guided tours to how to use top tier OSS applications, pointers to free tutorials on everything from AJAX to OpenOffice, and guidance on finding free open source webinars on topics such as MySQL and Ubuntu. We're in the process of putting up a dedicated repository for all of these, but in the meantime, here are 12 of our most popular educational roundup posts.

Unlike a lot of open-source supporters, I don't turn red with anger at the very thought of Novell working with Microsoft. Like it or not, getting Linux and Windows to work better together makes good, hard business sense. What I do find annoying is that Novell is continuing to feed Microsoft's FUD machine about Linux. In an e-mail interview with Ian Bruce, Novell's public relations director, Bruce wrote me that customers wanted the Novell/Microsoft package, in part, because it "provides IP (intellectual property) peace of mind for organizations operating in mixed source environments." It does? Since when?

The Master view in Impress is the equivalent of page styles in Writer. It's the view where you can set elements of design that appear throughout your presentation, such as the slide background and foreground colors, any reoccurring elements, and the fonts. By creating the master slides you need before you add content, you can automate your work and free yourself to focus on content.

It's been literally impossible to escape the news that Intel demonstrated its next generation Classmate design at IDF in San Francisco this week. And I have to admit the machine seems quite impressive and apparently Intel has also done some pretty neat things in terms of overlaying a simplified UI over the vanilla Windows XP installation. But let's take it step-by-step, shall we?

Sun Microsystems is setting out to create an open source, royalty-free video codec. Given the considerable head start of well-known, royalty-free video codecs like Dirac and Theora, you might ask why the world needs another. The answer, according to Sun, is the process the company will use to develop it -- starting with a full-on, careful examination of the patent situation. I spoke with Gerard Fernando and Rob Glidden about the project, which was unveiled in April. Fernando is a senior staff engineer at Sun, and Glidden is the company's global alliance manager for TV and media.