LXer Weekly Roundup for 22-May-2011

LXer Feature: 22-May-2011 In the LXWR this week we have PJ officially handing over the daily operations of Groklaw to Mark Webbink, Graham Morrison thinks Linux needs rebranding, Miguel de Icaza starts up a company to keep Mono going while almost simultaneously Attachmate names a new head for SUSE. Ever wanted to run Linux in a web browser using a JavaScript emulator? Well now you can. Enjoy!

What’s up with ARM: Over the course of the last month or so, numerous people have asked me for my opinion on what’s going on with the ARM architecture in Linux. It seems time to broadcast those thoughts more widely. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, the short version is this: Linux on ARM is a victim of its own success and, as a result, is going through some growing pains. That has created a lot of noise, but all that’s really needed is a bit of house cleaning.

This week at LWN: Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition): Back in 2006, LWN looked at the rather complicated story around the maintainership of the RPM package manager. Given the importance of this tool for any RPM-based distribution, the lack of a clear story on how it was being maintained was somewhat discouraging. Later that year, the Fedora project announced the creation of a new, community-oriented project around RPM. Since then, things have been on the quiet side, but recent events show that the RPM story has not yet run its course.

Linux needs rebranding: Thinking back, I was 10 years old when I saw my first real home computer. It was a dark winter's evening, sometime in the early '80s, and in the corner of a friend's bedroom sat a small CRT television screen, complete with scrolling bands of interference and a 50hz buzz. Underneath the screen was the totally underwhelming body of a Sinclair ZX80, but this didn't interest me. What did interest me was the flashing grey cursor on the screen.

As of Today, It's Mark Webbink's Groklaw 2.0: I announced in April that as of today, I wouldn't be writing any more articles for Groklaw. I intended to finish the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits as text and perfect some of our other collections and then I would retire from Groklaw, knowing as I did that the research we have done together will remain useful no matter what happens in the future. I was immediately bombarded with messages asking me to keep the community going or to tell you where to assemble elsewhere. A lot of you asked me to at least keep News Picks going. Groklaw is all of us, not just me, and I have always taken your input as seriously as you would expect me to. So I thought about it, and I realized you are right.

Groklaw - The blog that made a difference - Q&A with Pamela Jones: Groklaw began life in 2003 as the personal blog of Pamela Jones, better known as PJ. "At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software," she has said. "I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote... I started covering the McDonald's 'I'm fat and it's your fault' litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked."

Miguel de Icaza Starts New Company To Drive Mono: Two weeks back I broke the news that Attachmate was laying off all of the Mono developers following their recent acquisition of Novell and SUSE. Today this news has been confirmed by the Mono creator himself, Miguel de Icaza, in announcing the formation of a new company to further drive Mono into the new future...

Another Reason to Love Linux: Computers have long been a rather expensive luxury for those who could afford them. Desktops have drastically fallen in price, but with a cost of roughly $300.00 for a modest machine the price is still nothing to laugh at. Laptops have fallen in price as well, but $500.00 is still a lot of money. Worldwide, our economies are not in the best shape. Along with coffee, people tighten their technology budget. It's a natural reaction. Food, water, gasoline, car maintenance, and home maintenance are far more important in the survival sense. The tightening of that budget may negatively impact children who are interested in technology. It's also rather obvious that there are parts of the world that are not quite as well off as others. Luckily, their are some very bright, very clever people in the world. It just so happens that a few of them love technology and Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK based charity that has found a solution to this problem.

JavaScript: Now powerful enough to run Linux: Step aside, Google Docs, there's a new JavaScript tour de force in town. I'm talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser. The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn't have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system's core--2.6.20--runs on the foundation.

Wanted: A Virtual Machine OS: Currently, you create virtual machines (VMs) using standard operating system (OS) installation media. You use the same Windows DVDs, Linux CDs and DVDs or ISO files for installing VMs that you do for installing physical systems. Sure, a VM can do almost anything a physical system can do but shouldn’t we have the option of using a fully-optimized virtual machine OS? An operating system specially formulated to play well on a hypervisor. Be it Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or some other ill-conceived lump of bits and bytes, a true virtual machine OS is what we want.

10 Things That Make Ubuntu The Best Alternative Operating System: In recent years, Ubuntu Linux has become increasingly popular as a replacement for Windows. Ubuntu is an operating system which features a number of advantages that make it an appealing alternative for everyday users. Here are 10 reasons why Ubuntu beats Windows hands down.

Screwing the end user and seeing how far you get: I had naively believed for years that Microsoft was balancing between the demands of shareholders and OEM relationships and its user base. Somehow the balance teetered one way or another, but in the end I assumed I would benefit from purchasing their expensive licenses. Using my laptop which was running Vista, I finally got around to taking my DVD minidisc movie of our summer vacation and trying to properly burn it as a DVD movie we could watch on our big screen.

Attachmate names new SUSE head, touts commitment to SUSE Linux: Attachmate named Nils Brauckmann president of its new SUSE business unit -- and also affirmed its commitment to SUSE Linux, the OpenSUSE project, SUSE Studio, and SUSE Manager. Aside from shedding the Mono project, all SUSE projects will be continued, and there are no plans to change packing or pricing, says the company.