Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The OpenBSD team traditionally makes available a new song with each new release of its software. The songs, though often of dubious lyrical quality, typically embody the current thinking of the development team, in particular that of team leader Theo de Raadt. In the past the songs have railed against proprietary software developers and corporates and the challenges they throw in the way of free software. This time, however, the target is the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman.

With all the Linux distributions available, trying out more than one can be tempting. By installing a virtual environment, you can run several operating systems on your machine, keeping them completely isolated from each other in their own sandboxes. Here's a look at how get started with three popular virtualization environments: VMware, VirtualBox, and QEMU. In a virtual ecosystem, a host operating system runs one or more guest virtual machines in a simulated environment. Each guest believes it has all of the host's physical hardware at its disposal.

These days, effective document management means accessibility from anywhere on the planet, electronic storage, reliable backup, and instant document modification updates. KnowledgeTree offers all that and more. It's available in several editions, including an open source community version (which we reviewed last year) that businesses can tailor to their individual needs.

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.3," began OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt. "This is our 23nd release on CD-ROM (and 24rd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install." He added, "as in our previous releases, 4.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system". Four platforms were listed as new or extended, including: sparc64 gained SMP support, "this should work on all supported systems, with the exception of the Sun Enterprise 10000"; hppa K-class servers are now supported; mvme88k gained SMP support on a couple of systems, and support for the 88110 processor was added.

Qumranet, a rather small software company, wants to make a very large play in the virtualization market with a new product. It's looking for Solid ICE to go up against the desktop virtulization wares from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and a host of start-ups. Those of you in the open source kingdom will know Qumranet best as the corporate sponsor of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which had made its way into major Linux operating systems as the default server virtualization package. Canonical, the, er, corporate sponsor of Ubuntu, is perhaps the most vocal backer of KVM.

Sun says the open source version of its Java development kit has been picked up by two popular Linux distros. Canonical's Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution and Red Hat's forthcoming Fedora 9 both include OpenJDK, with the latter also to offer NetBeans 6.0, Sun's open source IDE (integrated development environment). Additionally, Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several of Sun's x86-based hardware systems, the companies announced.

Does it matter who pays the salaries of Linux kernel developers? If so, how much, and in what ways? The threads fan out from Linux Kernel Development (April 2008) — a report by Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet and Amanda McPherson.

"Btrfs v0.14 is now available for download," Chris Mason announced, adding, "please note the disk format has changed, and it is not compatible with older versions of Btrfs." The project has gained a new wiki home page on the kernel.org domain, where it is explained, "Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone."

After several years of development, SymphonyOS this month released SymphonyOne 2008.1, the first stable version of its distribution. When SymphonyOS first emerged three years ago, it offered a Linux desktop experience unlike any ever seen before by structuring the computer desktop to function more like a real-life desk instead of just another system folder. Featuring the Mezzo desktop environment, Symphony simplifies the desktop concept for users. This release brings a new level of stability to the design, making it a viable alternative to KDE, GNOME, or Fluxbox.

Sony Ericsson is planning to offer developers the opportunity to embed Flash Lite applications inside J2ME midlets, in the hope that two mobile phone application platforms will prove better than one. Flash Lite has proved popular for highly-graphical mobile phone applications, and is supported on quite a range of handsets. J2ME is more widely supported and flexible, but suffers from compatibility issues and isn't very graphic artist friendly.

There are two kinds of Linux people in the world, those that will help people fix their Windows spyware problems, and those that will not. I land squarely in the former camp, and I think that it's important for us all to consider doing the same.

This tip shows how to add logging to your PHP script and how to add configuration so you have basic, configurable logging. The PHP script requires two PEAR packages, Log and Config. To use the code in shown in this tip, you'll need to PEAR installed along with PHP and you'll need to install both the Log and the Config PEAR packages.

With vncthumbnailviewer you can see many VNC desktops at once and jump in to control any of them with a double click. vncthumbnailviewer acts like many VNC clients, so it can help you monitor many VNC servers. vncthumbnailviewer was created for monitoring desktops in a computer lab environment. It uses the TightVNC Java code, and is thus fairly stable and glitch-free. There are no vncthumbnailviewer packages for Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Fedora. vncthumbnailviewer is written in Java, so you need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed in order to run it. For this article I used version 1.4.1 of vncthumbnailviewer with IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21) 64-bit as my Java runtime.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the launch of a beta version of the VIA Linux Portal as part of an initiative designed to extend collaboration with the Open Source community. The VIA Linux Portal will initially offer graphics drivers for the VIA CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution. Documentation and source code for these drivers will be released over the coming weeks, with official forums and bug tracking scheduled for implementation later this year. The VIA Linux Portal will also adhere to a regular release schedule that is aligned with kernel changes and the release of major Linux distributions.

In this installment of our co-published Fedora Interviews, Jeremy Katz, David Cantrell, and Chris Lumens talk about the improvements to Anaconda in Fedora 9.

On April 4, CERT put out a scary advisory about the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). This advisory raises some interesting issues on when such advisories are appropriate, what programmers must do to write secure code, and whether compilers should perform optimizations which could open up security holes in poorly-written code.

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), Linux's own baked-in virtualization program, has been gaining popularity. Now, Qumranet, the company behind KVM, is releasing a commercial virtual desktop called Solid ICE based on KVM technology. Solid ICE is designed to run multiple virtual desktops in a KVM on servers. While the servers need to be running Linux 2.6.20 or higher, Solid ICE can be used to deploy Windows or Linux desktops on either thin clients or repurposed PCs. The servers must run on x86 processors that support virtualization extensions. These include Intel's VT (Virtualization Technology a.k.a. Vanderpool) and AMD's AMD-V (a.k.a. Pacifica) technologies.

A year and a half ago, the excellent Linux music player Amarok added extensive support for Magnatune. The programmer, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, did this on his own initiative, simply because he thought it'd be a neat thing for his favorite music player to have, and because he liked Magnatune's business philosophy.

Ah, how the mighty have fallen. In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's software on an open platform like Linux magically removes the proprietary lock-in of the application.

As Juror No. 7, schoolteacher Vince Dunn sat a foot or so away from Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer whom Dunn and 11 other panelists convicted of first-degree murder on Monday. In an interview Tuesday with Wired.com, the 61-year-old fifth-grade teacher recounted his six months of jury duty, some of which required sitting next to the 44-year-old defendant's immediate right during his 11 days on the witness stand. Hans Reiser is escorted from the courtroom following a Tuesday court appearance setting his sentencing date. "I was looking at his eyes," the Oakland man said in a telephone interview. "He was faking it."