Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There are some in this world who believe that Linux is the king of all operating systems. In some ways I agree with them because Linux certainly is a big player in the server world. It may lack in market share in the the desktop sector, but that doesn't mean it's a lesser operating system. The GPL has been instrumental in this as Linux has grown, starting with a simple, barely functional kernel, and slowly, patiently evolving into the giant it is today.

Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, yesterday patched five bugs in its Thunderbird e-mail client to fix flaws that were disclosed more than a month ago. Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 patches vulnerabilities in the Firefox engine, which the open-source e-mailer uses to render HTML. The same holes were closed in late March for the Mozilla Web browser.

It is not long now until the first Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, to be held in Oakland, California from 13-15 May 2008. This upcoming event got me thinking about the role of open source in grid and cluster computing, in the past, present, and future.

The other day, Vincent Untz requested a git repo to house all freedesktop.org specs. I liked the idea a lot. Coincidentally, I was simultaneously involved in a conversation via private email with a few other freedesktop.org people about the processes around creating specifications (or lack thereof), so I took this as a cue to step back and really think about it a bit. freedesktop.org is one of the key points where the the free software world comes together to document the things we share so that integration and consistency (from the user's POV) can be achieved, so keeping it healthy is really important.

Stephen King once observed that the first review of his books was important because later ones often borrowed its opinions. Who did the first review of Ubuntu 8.04 – better known as Hardy Heron – is debatable, but something of the same consensus seems to have hit tech journalists, with the majority proclaiming that the release shows that GNU/Linux has finally producer a challenger to Windows.

This month's Harvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore

For years, device and peripheral builders could get away with ignoring the Linux desktop market. It was too small to matter, they would say. Things have changed. At the Linux Foundation meeting in Austin, Texas, last month, major PC vendors ASUS, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo said they would be telling their chipset, component, and peripheral OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that they were going to demand Linux-compatible hardware from them. It's one thing when Linux users ask for support; it's an entirely different thing when multi-billion-dollar companies demand it. This is an offer that the OEMs can't refuse.

Git is a program for Source Code Management (SCM) whose complexity has been blown out of proportion. This may be due to the fact that early on it was primarily used by Linux kernel hackers who, needless to say, do not represent most users of SCM tools. Regardless of its past, today the UI is quite simple and there are only a handful of techniques a user needs to manage their code base with git–in ways that are nearly impossible to do with the mainstream alternatives. These techniques, which are mentioned in the order of their suggested usage, focus on improving the overall quality of the code base throughout the life of a project.

F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up. No packages exist for phpfspot for Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE. I built it from source using version 1.4 and installed phpfspot on the desktop machine that I have F-Spot installed on. If you're running Debian Etch you might like to see this HOWTO for installation. phpfspot requires PHP 5 with GD and SQLite3 extensions, as well as the Calendar and HTML_AJAX PEAR extensions and the Smarty template engine.

The One Laptop Per Child Project appointed a new president and chief operating officer on Friday to run daily operations at the nonprofit effort, sending a signal that it could be recovering from the loss of top personnel over the past few months. Charles Kane will move from the part-time role as chief financial officer to oversee the organization's operational matters and distribution of the XO laptop on a day-to-day basis. Kane will provide OLPC the leadership needed to deliver on its commitments to partners and governments, said Nicholas Negroponte in a statement.

Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table. Citing an unnamed source, The New York Times insists the two giants are now in "active merger talks." Apparently, Microsoft made that outrageous Yahoo! bid even more outrageous, raising its valuation of Jerry Yang and crew "by several dollars" a share. So, Microsoft is saying that Yahoo! is worth somewhere between $46bn and $52bn. Yesterday, word was that Ballmer and the Ballmerettes were mulling a raise to $33 a share, before some large Yahoo! shareholders insisted on $35 to $37.

If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view. The $5.3 billion figure from a year ago included $1.2 billion of presales prior to Vista’s release, which actually took place in the previous quarter. So it is more accurate to view it as a revenue decline from $4.1 billion to $4 billion (2.4%) in a market that’s growing at around 12%.

Last week I got a press release about a new utility called Paragon Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite. It described a Mac backup and data recovery program, now in public beta testing, and invited potential testers to download a bootable disk image that could be burned to a CD and try the software out. The developer plans to offer this free Lite version as well as a paid full version later on. That all sounds fine, and I'm always interested in learning about new Mac utilities, especially when backups are among their capabilities. I'd previously written nice things about the company's NTFS for Mac OS X software (see "NTFS Options for Mac Expand, 2007-12-09), and I had high hopes for this new utility. But as soon as I downloaded the Paragon Rescue Kit disk image, I knew something was very different. It contains no Mac software at all - it's a Linux disk image.

Recently I’ve noticed an increases in the number of people I know who are migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Either my tireless advocacy is grinding them down, word is starting to spread. Perhaps they’ve actually seen Vista in action and decided to jump ship now. Either way there are some things they are going to miss when they make the leap.

Optimism and take-up is growing around the platform-independent code with the industry taking more notice of this fast growing area. Open source technology is far from a new concept, but the market has been making increased noise about its future success. According to IDC, the market for standalone Open Source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage and adoption will accelerate through to 2011 as barriers to adoption get knocked down.

Mandriva S.A. has announced the availability of an unofficial "Xfce" edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1: "Thanks to the efforts of the Mandriva Linux Xfce development community, an Xfce edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 One is now available. Just like the KDE and GNOME editions of One, this is an installable live CD edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1, but this time featuring Xfce as the desktop environment. As with the other One editions, three images are available, with different sets of languages on each. This is an unofficial release, but the Xfce development volunteers will attempt to address any problems or questions about this release.

In November 2007, we reported on the GNOME Board Elections of 2007, where Jeff Waugh was getting serious slack flack from some people in the GNOME community. One of the complaints centred around Waugh's apparent inability to properly take care of requests to be syndicated on Planet GNOME, or other maintenance issues related to PGO. Six months later, this complaint is still valid, according to Rodney Dawes.

If you need to administer a remote server but don't feel like installing a complete, complex application like Webmin, try Web Console, a modern, over-the-Web, AJAX-based solution that's easy to configure and use. The GPL-licensed Web Console lets remote users access a shell and execute any commands -- subject to their rights, of course. You can also use the Web interface to upload or download files to or from the server, edit files there, and back up and restore files or databases. In other words, you can do any task you could do if you were sitting in front of the server itself. Other interesting features include a simple installation process (which doesn't even require root permission), secure connection using HTTPS, and quick refreshes using AJAX technology, for a user experience that closely matches an actual console.

The fact that the General Public Licence, better known as the GPL, is oft misunderstood, even by those who could be expected to know better, came home to me with a vengeance yesterday. What led to this conclusion was an article on a site called InteropNews, where a gentleman named Jeff Gould attempted to discuss the topic "Is Ubuntu selling out or growing up?"