Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 14-Nov-2010

In the LXWR this week we have why Wayland is good for the future, Apache tells Oracle they are leaving the JCP, a music player with an ugly name, does Linux competing with Windows matter anymore? and 24 things we would change about Linux. Enjoy!

Jon von Tetzchner is the founder and former CEO of Opera Software, the web browser maker from Oslo, Norway. During a recent visit to Seattle, he discussed the company’s U.S. expansion, his affinity for the Seattle region, and Opera’s battles with Microsoft in the marketplace and the European Commission. Continue reading for edited excerpts from the interview.

A month ago there was the 1.0 beta release of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which are the software libraries created to help in the development of the E17 desktop. EFL 1.0 also marks a point of API/ABI stability and is being used by projects outside of E17 proper, such as with Samsung's Enlightenment usage. Today the second beta of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is now available.

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the first major update for RHEL in over three years. RHEL 5 debuted in March 2007 and used the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. Although incremental updates have added a number of kernel updates and new features, RHEL5 is starting to look aged. Of course much of the appeal of an enterprise distro is precisely that it ages well - ten years in RHEL's case.

The litigation battle between Google and Oracle continues to heat up. The search giant fired the latest volley with a filing that outlines twenty separate defenses against Oracle's claim that Google's Android mobile platform infringes intellectual property that Oracle obtained from Sun. Google argues that no infringement has transpired, and that it isn't responsible even if evidence of actual infringement is found.

Google has accused Oracle of doctoring the code samples that allegedly prove Mountain View pilfered Oracle's copyrighted Java code in building its Android mobile operating system. Late last month, as part of its ongoing lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, Oracle waved six pages of Android code at a federal court (see below), claiming they were "directly copied" from copyrighted Oracle code. But, on Wednesday, Google responded with a court filing of its own, and among so many other things, Mountain View said that in submitting the code, Oracle "redacted or deleted...both expressive material and copyright headers." Google called these omissions "significant elements and features."

The Apache Software Foundation’s latest statement on the Java Community Process highlights continued dissatisfaction and dissent from Oracle’s stewardship and involvement in open source software.

In Part 1 Gimp guru Akkana Peck showed us how to cut arbitrary objects out of images. Today we learn advanced techniques for seamless blending into new images.

Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 7, a prerelease build for users who want to help test the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. It includes JaegerMonkey, Mozilla's enhanced JavaScript engine. During our tests of the new beta, we were consistently impressed by its outstanding performance and greatly improved responsiveness. It delivers highly competitive performance and puts Firefox back on an even footing with its rivals. The beta also brings the Firefox 4 theming overhaul to Linux, including the new tab position above the address bar.

Red Hat announced a major new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, adding cloud support, performance improvements, and energy savings. Meanwhile, Red Hat also released a RHEL 5.6 upgrade to its 5x platform, adding support for BIND 9.7, improved DNSsec, and PHP 5.3.

If you are the type of person who can’t live without internet, wake up every morning and check your Facebook account before having coffee, always tweet a new update every 15 minutes and have a large circle of friends on social media websites – you are going to love RockMelt. RockMelt is a new web browser, backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, which aims to bridge the gap between social sharing and web surfing. The browser is build around your social circle, feeds, search results and friends.

Security researchers have demonstrated two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to install apps on Android and its vendor-specific implementations without a user's permission. During normal installation, users are at least asked to confirm whether an application is to have certain access rights. Bypassing this confirmation request reportedly allows spyware or even diallers to be installed on a smartphone.

Network File System (NFS) has been around since 1984, but it continues to evolve and provide the basis for distributed file systems. Today, NFS (through the pNFS extension) provides scalable access to files distributed across a network. Explore the ideas behind distributed file systems and in particular, recent advances in NFS.

It's been two years since the release of Urban Terror 4.1, an open-source first person shooter powered by the ioquake3 engine that started out originally as a Quake 3 mod. Extensive work has been made towards the next release, Urban Terror 4.2, with significant improvements being made from new maps and visuals to a new graphics renderer. However, this past week the Urban Terror developers announced some rather surprising changes, which includes Urban Terror no longer being distributed as an open-source, GPL game.

Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of independent Linux vendor ZaReason, Inc., is a keynote speaker at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels on Feb. 5-6, 2011. FOSDEM bills itself as "the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community."

Oracle‘s Java ambassador Henrik Ståhl has reacted to reports from various media outlets about a dual license for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) based on a merger of the JRockit and HotSpot virtual machines. As presented at JavaOne in September, this "united" JVM is to consist of the best features of the two JVMs. The result is to be incrementally implemented in OpenJDK, although a number of components – such as Sun’s Java for Business and Oracle’s JRockit Mission Control, JRockit Real Time and JRockit Virtual Edition – will continue to be sold as proprietary, commercial premium extensions.

While the discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server and Canonical's plans to deploy Ubuntu atop Wayland continue to be ongoing within our forums (here, here, and here) and elsewhere, some new technical capabilities and plans for Wayland have been discussed. Here's two features that Wayland is set to have that is not currently supported by the X.Org Server.

ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, and Tcl, announced today a robust sales revenue growth rate of 43% for the third quarter of 2010 and an average revenue growth rate overall from last year, year-to-date (YTD) of 19%. These strong revenue growth rates were led by a stellar line up of new Business and Enterprise Edition customers in the second and third quarters this year over a wide range of verticals including high-tech, financial services, healthcare, and aerospace companies: BNP Paribas, Cardinal Health, Daiichi Sankyo USA, Health Now, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Northrop Grumman, Research Affiliates, Standard Chartered Bank China, Tesco Bank, Vodafone, Omnitel.

Having just discussed replication in Linux -- what it is, how it can be used and how it's not the same as a backup -- it's time to tackle a simple example of one of the replication tools: rsync. You will be surprised how easy it is to use rsync to replicate data to a second storage pool.

You read the Fastest Flash article so you already know Ext4 can turbocharge your thumb drive. But you run Linux, so of course want even more! Is there anything else to do? Yup. Use a GPT (GUID Partition Table) rather than the usual MBR scheme. It will hop up flash performance on almost any filesystem -- not just Ext4.