Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according toGreenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.

The Red Hat Crash Utility is a kernel-specific debugger. It is usually used for performing postmortem system analysis when the system panicked, locked up, or appears unresponsive. In this short article, Eugene Teo will give a quick overview of how you can install crash and how you can use it to get important information from the crash dump files for debugging and root-cause analysis purposes.

IBM's customer training and support group SHARE is holding a week-long seminar and conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt here this week. SHARE dates back to 1955, and the folks gathered in San Diego include programmers, sysadmins, and IT directors who have spent decades running mainframe systems for the world's largest companies and governments. Most of the classes and labs focus on"big iron" products like the mainframe operating system MVS and the CICS transaction server, but Linux is getting strong promotion as well. IBM champions Linux for its zSeries mainframes as the industrial-strength virtualization platform, and judging by the turnout at the Linux and VM program sessions, interest is high.

This month's Open Tuesday took place last night with guest speaker Anton de Wet giving an informative talk offering tips on how to start up and succeed with an open source business, peppered with entertaining anecdotes.

Jeff Campbell (aka "Mr. Zonbu") has updated the blog chronicling his experiences with Zonbu, a mini-sized Linux-powered network computer for home users. The latest posting, based on two weeks with the device, finds Campbell happy but still full of suggestions.

Managing one site on a Web server can be tough enough, and the job is even harder if you have to host multiple client sites on a badly configured setup.

System administrators need to secure their systems while avoiding locking them down so strictly that they become useless. Bastille is a software tool that eases the process of hardening a Linux system, giving you the choice of what to lock down and what not to, depending on your security requirements. It bundles many of the tasks routinely done to securely configure a Linux system into one package.

In a surprise move, Google quietly released StarOffice in its Google Pack of free downloadable programs. StarOffice is Sun Microsystems' commercial office suite. A version of it, OpenOffice, is the most popular open-source desktop suite. StarOffice 8 was released in 2005. In eWEEK Labs' tests of StarOffice 8 at the time, the labs were pleased with the suite's word processing (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation (Impress) and database (Base) functions. In addition, the Labs had generally good results opening and creating Microsoft Office-formatted documents with StarOffice.

MySQL has defended a decision to end free community access to the latest source code for its popular database in an attempt to snag paying customers. Chief executive Marten Mickos said MySQL remains in full compliance with the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), adding the company's decision will help build a "well-funded business model" capable of producing yet more GPL software.

In the first two articles in the series, we chose to use existing tools in a non-traditional way in order to solve a problem. This time, we’re going to use an often overlooked tool exactly as it was meant to be used.

Faced by technical inferiority and an inability to compete on price, Microsoft has resorted to spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, says the Linux creator.

"Either people really are calming down, and figuring out that we're in the stabilization phase," Linus Torvalds began in announcing 2.6.23-rc3,"or it's just that it's the middle of August, and most everybody at least in Europe are off on vacation." The actual source-level changes can be browsed via the kernel.orggitweb interface. Linus went on to summarize:"Regardless of why, -rc3 is out, and doesn't have the tons of changes that -rc2 did. But there's some scheduler updates, sparc64 and powerpc changes, and random driver updates (the lpfc SCSI driver kind of stands out in the diffstat).Shortlog appended, I don't know what I can add to it.. Please do give it a good testing, unless you're on a beach sunning yourself (and who are we kidding: you're pasty white, and sand is hard to get out of the keyboard - beaches are overrated)."

DesktopLinux.com launched its 2007 Desktop Linux Survey on August 13, asking users of Linux desktops to identify what distributions they use, as well as their choice of windowing environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.), web browsers, email clients, and Windows-on-Linux solutions.

A project aimed at building a Linux distribution for media center PCs has achieved a major new release. LinuxMCE 0704 is based on Kubuntu, and offers lots of flashy features, such as whole-house high-definition video distribution, optional alpha-blended graphics, gyroscopic remote control, and much more.

Government calls for tender to conduct nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards, including Open Document Format, in the country's public sector ICT deployment.

LXer Feature: 12-Aug-2007

Some of the big stories this week are the ruling by the Judge in in the SCO case that Novell actually owns UNIX still, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony resigns, why Microsoft might want to help get rid of patents, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explains his company's deal with Microsoft in his keynote address at LinuxWorld, Vista is helping Linux uptake and the author of one of our FUD articles uses his own recipe to cook up some good non-facts.

Greg KH and Chris Wright have been maintaining a -stable 2.6.x.y patchset for the 2.6.x and 2.6.(x-1) kernels since March of 2005. Thus, with the current stable release being 2.6.22, they maintain -stable patches for 2.6.22 and 2.6.21. 2.4 stable kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau noted the currently high patch rate in each of the 2.6 -stable trees and decided to maintain -stable patches against the 2.6.20 tree until things calm down. Adrian Bunk also continues to maintain a -stable 2.6.16 branch of the Linux kernel.

In this article, discover how to track several events on AIX(R) with auditing, a major feature of AIX security, and learn how to use auditing to keep track of the read and write operations on a file. Also examine commands, such as ls or istat, to check a file's time stamp.

"BACK UP ANY IMPORTANT DATA," began the Linux 0.10 installation instructions. "Linux accesses your hardware directly, and if your hardware differs from mine, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Doublecheck that your hardware is compatible: AT style harddisk, VGA controller." The installation guide explained that there were five major steps in getting Linux installed and running on your computer, including the above first step of backing up the system. The second step was to use Minix and the mkfs command to create a new filesystem on an empty partition of your hard drive. Third you used dd to write the 'boot' and 'root' Linux disk images to floppy disks. The fourth step was actually booting from the floppies, "having a floppy as root-device isn't very fast (especially on a machine with less than 6MB total ram -> small buffer cache), but it works (I hope)."

ngo Molnar pushed a series of patches to his Completely Fair Scheduler code upstream that were merged into the mainline kernel. He explained the reason for so many small patches, "the main reason is the safe and gradual elimination of a widely used 64-bit function argument: the 64-bit 'now' timestamp."