LXer Weekly Roundup for 20-Jul-2008

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2008 In this week's Roundup, the judge in the SCO v. Novell suit finally hands down a ruling, a member of the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML standard speaks out, debunking the Linux virus myth, a review of 12 web browsers for Linux, finding the fastest filesystem, a test drive of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and what Linus Torvalds thinks about BSD developers. On the lighter side, we end with a review of the Linux Hater's Blog by Steven Rosenberg and Unix and Linux humor - know your SysAdmin.

In this weeks Roundup, the judge in the SCO v. Novell suit finally hands down a ruling, a member of the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML standard speaks out, debunking the Linux virus myth, a review of 12 web browsers for Linux, finding the fastest filesystem, a test drive of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and what Linus Torvalds thinks about BSD developers. On the lighter side, we end with a review of the Linux Hater's Blog by Steven Rosenberg and Unix and Linux humor - know your SysAdmin.

Linux in schools: a teacher speaks: Catching them young is a popular slogan and one that yields dividends too, no matter whether one applies it to the adoption of software or the learning of a language. And with a small window seemingly open for Australia's FOSS community to push for the use of free and open source software in schools, the question arises - how does one go about making the first inroads?

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 First Impressions: A first impression of Mandriva Linux 2009.0, and a bit of a retraction of some of the things I've said about KDE4.

Finding the Fastest Filesystem: Part of my "economic stimulus check" went to a 500GB SATA drive. My original intention was to buy two of them, so I could claim, "over a terabyte of disk space!". Alas, I got a little ahead of myself; my system had only one open hard drive bay. With a slightly bruised ego, I returned the unopened second hard drive and began to ponder how to exploit my super-roomy disk space. I quickly settled on one goal: find the fastest journaling filesystem (FS) for my SLAMD64 dual-core computer, with 2G of memory. My testing focused on three main areas: filesystem, disk I/O scheduler, and CPU speed. Frankly, the final results stunned me.

Test drive OpenOffice.org 3.0: OpenOffice.org 3.0, the next major release of the open source office suite, is scheduled to be released in September. Which means that it is pretty much guaranteed to be included in the next release of Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009 and Fedora 10, all of which are due out in October. Until then it is easy enough to test out the beta releases of OpenOffice 3.0 without removing your existing 2x OpenOffice installation. Installing OpenOffice 3.0 beta also means you can test out Sun�?�¢??s PDF import extension which is also still in development.

One Down...Three To Go: Take one small town, one small group of dedicated Linux Geeks and what do you get? You get a town that is destined to run Linux on their computers. The first session of Lindependence 2008 set sail for the history books yesterday and there were some surprises for those who put on this event...and even more for some of those who attended.

Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID: Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware RAID card to your new server is likely to give you? You can benchmark the performance difference between running a RAID using the Linux kernel software RAID and a hardware RAID card. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results.

What went wrong with the KDE 4 release?: When KDE 4.0 was released in January, it was supposed to be the foundation for a new era of desktop development. But as 4.x versions began finding their way into distributions, negative reactions began to obscure other ones. With the upcoming 4.1 release due at the end of this month, it's hard to avoid wondering: what happened? To a degree, the answer seems to implicate everybody involved, from KDE and the distributions that ship it to the free software media and users.

12 Web Browsers for Linux - Review: Review of 12 web browsers for Linux, graphical and for command line. The article includes Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Kazehakase, Dillo, Epiphany, Galeon, lynx, elinks, links, links2 and w3m.

Judge Kimball Rules at Last!: Judge Kimball rules in SCO v. Novell! Here it is [PDF] at last! I haven't read it yet myself, just quickly skimmed it enough to see that SCO owes Novell some money ($2,547,817 plus interest probably -- SCO can oppose -- from the Sun agreement) and it had no right to enter into the Sun agreement, but it did have the right to enter into the Microsoft and other SCOsource agreements. Requests for attorneys fees are separate, and that part comes next. Then appeals.

Debunking the Linux Virus Myth: Linux and UNIX-like operating systems in general are regarded as being more secure for the common user, in contrast with operating systems that have "Windows" as part of their name. Why is that? When entering a dispute on the subject with a Windows user, the most common argument he tries to feed me is that Windows is more widespread, and therefore, more vulnerable. Apart from amusing myths like "Linux is only for servers" or "does it have a word processor?", the issue of Linux desktop security is still seriously misunderstood.

What Linus Torvalds thinks about BSD: Linus Torvalds - the creator of Linus and its current maintainer - is by all account a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric). It's soo rude that it's 'funny' - that is if you're not an OpenBSD developer or have a particular affection for monkeys.'

Will hypervisors make Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems obsolete?: Computing is on the verge of a major paradigm shift with the modern rise in prominence of virtualisation. Fuelled by big corporates interested in the consolidation and energy saving potentials, improvements in virtualisation have hit the point where Linux could be a casualty.

OpenXML: Finally the hidden agenda is emerging: Since I participate in the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML, I have the distinct impression that a hidden agenda have guided the decisions of the JTC1 and more recently the SC34 at ISO. Not so long ago, the major evidence for me was the number of countries that changed their votes in the last days OpenXML voting, signaling a major political agreement for the approval of standard, but now, a few months later more strange thing is happening.

Linux Hater's Blog actually well worth reading: Whatever your feelings are about Linux (or Windows, or OS X , or ...) you really should check out the Linux Hater's Blog. It's actually farther from all-out-flaming than you'd think and basically challenges the Linux community to do better.

More Unix and Linux Humor - Know Your SysAdmin: Someone once said (and then a million people, like myself, have been repeating it ever since ;) that laughter is the best medicine. After this week of crazy debate on this blog, I think a little humor is called for. I've got tons of it on my computer and I'm always surprised at the places I find old stuff that I figured wouldn't even be available online anymore.