Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For long-time watchers of Larry Ellison, the revelation that Oracle is looking at launching its own version of the Linux open source operating system has aroused a suspicion: is the software industry’s most acquisitive CEO stalking his next target? Mr Ellison made the comments in an interview with the Financial Times this week, laying out strong reasons why the database software company should embed a version of Linux into its existing software.

If you think setting up and using a printer in Linux is too much trouble, take heart -- you're not alone. To come to grips with a wide range of Linux printing-related issues, the OSDL-sponsored Portland Project has just held the first Desktop Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of international organizations whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has grown to 138.

Chinese domestic software company Redflag Linux has set up a joint venture company with Japan's Miracle Linux and South Korea's Haansoft to jointly promote the Linux operating system.

Open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond is reporting that his name and copyright information for a bit of MIT-licensed code called the GIFLIB library are included in the end user license agreement of a Microsoft application called Expression 3.3.

Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday, and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the latest Linux kernel.

A week before the spring LinuxWorld tradeshow got underway in Boston in March, Novell's chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, was quoted in the trade press as saying that eventually, when all the dust clears, there would only be two commercial suppliers of the Linux operating system: Red Hat and Novell.

Open source advocate Bruce Perens has launched an initiative to discourage owners of undeveloped Web domains hosting them on servers running proprietary software. Perens wants domain owners and resellers to redirect unused Web domains — which have been registered but not yet developed — to OpenSourceParking.com. Perens says this site will always run on Apache, the popular open source Web server software.

Andrey Savochkin leads the development of the kernel portion of OpenVZ, an operating system-level server virtualization solution. In this interview, Andrey offers a thorough explanation of what virtualization is and how it works. He also discusses the differences between hardware-level and operating system-level virtualization, going on to compare OpenVZ to VServer, Xen and User Mode Linux.

Andrey is now working to get OpenVZ merged into the mainline Linux kernel explaining, "virtualization makes the next step in the direction of better utilization of hardware and better management, the step that is comparable with the step between single-user and multi-user systems." The complete OpenVZ patchset weighs in at around 70,000 lines, approximately 2MB, but has been broken into smaller logical pieces to aid in discussion and to help with merging.

To enable channel partners in the usage of open source software and promote it aggressively, Red Hat has joined hands with Intel to form a global program to help customers plan for, accelerate and optimize their deployments of Linux solutions.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that Oracle may be considering buying a Linux company in the future. After considering open-source and Linux's pluses and minuses, Ellison has concluded that for Oracle, "We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source," Ellison reportedly said.

Genesi has quietly announced a new line of tiny PowerPC- and OpenFirmware-based boards and systems. The Efika 2 line will ship in mid-May, and comprise three models that mix and match Altera FPGAs, onboard graphics chips, and PCI slots. The systems will run Linux, standard Java, and "Polaris," a PowerPC port of OpenSolaris. [I want to get one and run DSL on it! - Scott]

A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.

China, South Korea and Japan plan to set up a joint venture next week to develop and sell an Asian version of Linux software products, a Beijing-based software company said yesterday. The joint venture, called Asianux, will be formally launched at a news conference on Monday, said Chase Fan, market manager at Red Flag Software Co.

Thanks to one of our readers, NewsForge has obtained a copy of the widely reported Windows/Linux cross-platform "proof of concept" virus. News reports thus far on the code have contradicted themselves: some reported the virus can replicate itself on both Windows and Linux, others saying it has a viral nature only on Windows. Testing by both NewsForge staff and Hans-Werner Hilser may reveal why the confusion.

Ever wonder if that ISO or backup CD or DVD you burned last year is still good? This week we'll take a look at a small command-line utility called cdck that checks the condition of data on the media and let you know if it's still good.