Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Bug trackers are great. They are a critical tool for open source development – as a collaboration medium for teams, as a way for projects to communicate back-and-forth with users, and as an organizational tools for individual developers. But as open source software spreads further and further, one inevitably finds oneself with a bit of a Web 2.0 problem – every major project uses its own, separate bug tracker. The more projects you're involved with, the easier it is for information to get lost among all the clutter and noise. That's where Entomologist comes in, providing one interface for multiple bug-tracking systems, whether you are a developer managing your code or a user following progress.

How successful is the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal? Well, in a recent interview, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert noted that nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to the platform, and it powers more than a million online sites. The White House, NASA and Twitter use it, and OStatic is also built on Drupal. In an interview we did with Buytaert, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." Getting started with Drupal can be daunting at first, but there are a lot of free resources for it. Here several good ways to get going with this powerful CMS.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers. MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

In the latest study by the Linux Foundation, Microsoft only just misses out on a spot among the top 20 groups and companies contributing to the Linux kernel. It has, however, achieved this only by dint of delivering bad code and then slowly improving it.

Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer who's the lead developer of the Btrfs, just finished a session at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about his promising and feature-rich file-system.

The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor applications deal with the kernel directly. Instead, almost all interactions with the kernel are moderated through the C library, which is charged with providing a standards-compliant interface to the kernel's functionality. There are a number of C library implementations available, but, outside of the embedded sphere, most Linux systems use the GNU C library, often just called "glibc." The development project behind glibc has a long and interesting history which took a new turn with the dissolution of its steering committee on March 26.

Almost two years ago, The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program to help companies manage their end-to-end open source license compliance processes. We have continually added papers, training, tutorials, and dedicated Legal/Compliance session tracks at conferences like Collaboration Summit to help make compliance processes easier to understand, and more cost-effective to implement.

- OpenStack®, the open source cloud operating system, today released “Essex”, the fifth version of its community-driven software, with a focus on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments. OpenStack Essex allows users across the globe to leverage pools of on-demand, self-managed compute, storage and networking resources to build efficient, automated private and public cloud infrastructures.

With the help of its embedded farm, set up in November 2010, the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) has tested and analysed Linux's experimental real-time (RT) capabilities. The OSADL analysed a total of 73 billion automated test cycles recorded over the last 12 months on more than 50 computers running mainline RT kernels on a range of CPUs.

When you work for the Linux Foundation you get a lot of questions on just how Linux is built. Given the massive scale of the development and ubiquity of Linux today, some of us in the community might think everyone understands how the largest collaborative project in computing works. How you submit a patch. How maintainers work with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. But because of Linux's unprecedented growth in mobile, embedded and cloud computing, among other areas, new companies and developers are looking to participate. More than ever before, actually.

Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of Wikimedia, has announced the launch of a new project called Wikidata. According to the non-profit organisation, Wikidata – the first new Wikimedia project since 2006 – will "provide a collaboratively edited database of the world's knowledge" and, once completed, will be used by its other projects including the free Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.

Gentoo released 12.1 on April Fool's Day. I included it in my jokes roundup. But the Gentoo announcement has added a message to users and jokesters today: The installer is real. I said in that post that the best jokes are the ones you almost believe. But perhaps that wasn't quite accurate. Maybe the most crafty of all are those that are real but seem like a joke. That's the sum of the Gentoo installer. A Gentoo installer is a difficult beast to construct, I understand that. At one time the very nature of Gentoo conflicted with the traditional binary installer. However, the Gentoo team has been promoting Stage 3 installs for quite some time. What is a Stage 3 install? It's the nearly complete install of a binary system from a tarball that needs to be rebuilt before adding all your goodies. So, why not have an install wizard like Sabayon?

The GNOME Project has dropped another update to the GNOME 3 platform, just a year after the first release of GNOME 3. The second update of GNOME 3 offers a few new features, applications, and improvements that might make it worth a second look for GNOME traditionalists. To test GNOME 3.4 as it approached its final release, I installed the Fedora 17 alpha. As usual, if you really want to ride the leading edge of software development, Fedora is a good place to start. (Which is not to say other distros aren't good for leading edge software, by the way.) I also checked out the GNOME 3.4 live CD provided by the GNOME folks.

If first person shooters aren't your thing, you are not interested in Trine 2, or just too impatient waiting for Source games on Linux, there's a new Linux game that was released today: Linux Tycoon.

The open database of the corporate world, OpenCorporates, has announced that it has passed the milestone of having 40 million companies in its database. It also noted that the fifty-second jurisdiction, Mauritius, has been added, and that it is moving from alpha to beta, though it admits it should have done that "some time ago".

The Linux Foundation has released its annual report on the state of the software, and reports that Microsoft has made it into the Top 20 of companies that sponsor development of the Linux kernel – quite a change for the operating system Steve Ballmer used to dismiss as a cancer. For contributions made to the kernel since version 2.6.36, Microsoft ranks 17th, with Redmond's contribution estimated at 1 per cent of the whole. The top contributing companies were Red Hat, Intel, and Novell. Samsung and Texas Instruments were also named as fast-growing contributors, reflecting an increase in interest in Linux for mobile and embedded systems.

PubSubHubbub is an open protocol of web hooks for notifications of updates to news feeds in a publish/subscribe framework. It is defined as a set of HTTP server-to-server interactions integrated into Atom and RSS extensions. Despite the odd name, PubSubHubbub is fairly straightforward to use for designing applications with a lot of information updates. Learn about the standard and open-source implementations and support software for PubSubHubbub.

Google's Go programming language has reached version 1.0. Go represents Google's attempt to combine the best attributes of dynamically typed language with those of statically typed, compiled langauges. "Google's computer scientists believe there's a better mousetrap and they're right, but ... they have to be aware that [widespread adoption is] going to be a long process," said IDC's Al Hilwa.

The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.

Developer Dmitry Grinberg has apparently managed to boot Ubuntu Linux up to the shell on an Atmel 8-bit microcontroller; this has led some to ask if he's a genius or a madman. Since normal Linux distributions expect to find a 32-bit processor and a memory management unit (MMU), Grinberg had to overcome several obstacles. For example, he didn't hesitate to write an ARM emulator (ARMv5TE) for the ATmega1284p, which is slightly overclocked at 24 MHz. The developer said that he chose ARM because he was already familiar with this technology and because Linux runs on ARM processors.