Showing headlines posted by dave

In preparation for this month's Linux Audio Developers conference at Karlsruhe, Dave offers a status report on the state of Linux audio.

As Open source begins to overtake commercial software in functionality and squeezes out the commercial competition, and license compatibility between Open Source projects becomes a real impediment to progress, what becomes a way forward?

The GTRC aims to become the focal point of research and development in the grid communities in Japan and Asia-Pacific region," Satoshi Sekigucki, director of the GTRC, told LinuxInsider. "The cluster provided by Linux Networx and SGI will be a key contributor to the success of the Grid program and we look forward to advances the cluster will make in our research programs.

"Microsoft and Sun have a new common enemy: Linux" - writes The Economist this week. "When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that 'we do both believe in intellectual property,' this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic," the influential weekly continues. "Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation." The Economist is very widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.

Linux may be cutting-edge software, but it runs just fine on hardware that would make Microsoft's current operating systems beg for relief. I took four different distros and installed them on a five-year-old rebuilt IBM ThinkPad 600E supplied by LinuxCertifed. They proved that Linux on older hardware can be a cost-effective combination.

Between last week's BioIT World conference in Boston, and the ClusterWorld conference in San Francisco this week, there should be enough announcements for users interested in Linux-based high performance computing news. The BioIT World show focused on technologies used in the biomedical research and development industries, where Linux clustering has become a popular tool.

Scorched 3D is vulnerable to a format string attack in the chat box that leads to Denial of Service on the game server and possibly allows execution of arbitrary code.

Andrew Morton released the third -mc patchset [story] reminding, "this is the queue of things to go to Linus next week." Among the updates that Andrew is sending to Linus and that will most likely be found in the upcoming 2.6.6 kernel is Jens Axboe's CFQ I/O scheduler [story].

The CFQ, or Complete Fair Queuing disk I/O scheduler was first released back in February of 2003 [story], designed to maintain a minimal worst case latency on all IO reads and writes, ideal for multimedia desktop usage. The scheduler has been tested in numerous patchsets to date, including Andrew's -mm patchset [forum], Con Kolivas [interview]'s 2.6 -ck patchset [forum], and Marc-Christian Petersen [interview]'sWOLK patchset [story].

Read on to see all the changes queued up for the 2.6.6 kernel.

Multiple vulnerabilites have been found in pwlib that may lead to a remote denial of service or buffer overflow attack.

The X.Org Foundation has announced its first official release of the X Window System, effectively trumping rival XFree86, from which it originally forked over a licensing issue. Called X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7), a windowing system for computers with bitmap displays, the release is the first since X.Org became a Foundation in January of this year. Linux distributors Red Hat, SuSe, and Debian have endorsed the X.Org Foundation's latest; foundation sponsors include IBM, SUN, and HP.

ClusterWorld Conference & Expo announced last night the winners of the 2nd Annual Excellence in Cluster Technology Awards at their event, held this week at the San Jose Convention Center.

Oracle Corp. today announced a world record TPC-C performance benchmark result for Oracle Database 10g running with Linux-based SMPs. Using NEC's Express5800/1320Xd with 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors at 1.5 GHz with 6 MB L3 cache running on Novell's SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9, Oracle Database 10g achieved 609,467 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price-performance ratio of $6.78/tpmC.* This is the best TPC-C 32-way result on Intel processors. Today's announcement demonstrates Oracle's ability to support the scalability requirements of the most demanding enterprise applications.

A very serious security flaw was discovered by Ralf Spenneberg in racoon, the IKE daemon of the KAME-tools. Racoon does not very the RSA signature during phase one of a connection using either main or aggressive mode. Only the certificate of the client is verified, the certificate is not used to verify the client's signature.

Heimdal contains cross-realm vulnerability allowing someone with control over a realm to impersonate anyone in the cross-realm trust path.

The iproute package allows local users to cause a denial of service.

Maynard Kuona takes a look on Gnome 2.6-pre and discovers a whole new world of new features and well-crafted interfaces built-in on every Gnome-bundled application.

PolyServe says its new clustering solution is unlike popular NAS clustering solutions that only support clustering for high availability. The PolyServe NAS Cluster solution provides highly-available file services cluster-wide, and the ability to add performance on demand with modular building blocks for computing and storage.

The proliferation of the Linux open source operating system through a growing number of U.S. defense systems poses a serious and urgent security threat, Dan O'Dowd, CEO of Green Hills Software Inc., said today in a speech to the Net-Centric Operations Industry Forum in McLean, Va.

Use Linux today, all the pundits proclaim. The cost seems right, the scale seems right... there's just one problem: what's the best way of actually migrating to this open-source OS? Recently, more vendors are stepping up with clear guidelines and toolkits that can make the move to Linux a lot easier.

One of the mainstays of Navy firepower, the Aegis Weapons System, has been reconfigured into an open-source architecture to make modifications easier. Lockheed Martin said this week the shift to open source allows the Navy to use commercial computer technology when making software changes and other upgrades to the Aegis, which is a primary fire-control system aboard ships, subs and aircraft.