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Last week's story about Nicholas Negroponte saying that Sugar should have been an application and the inevitable subsequent Slashdot story created a lively discussion in many places. Among them was also the OLPC devel mailing-list where Carlos Nazareno asked a related question: "Is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?"

When does free speech become a club that actually stifles the free flow of ideas? That's just one potential ramification of the question posed to the FOSS community this week: What makes someone a "shill"? This negative label can come with a pretty sharp sting. Does concern over negative criticism and even ostracism cause some people to keep their good ideas to themselves?

Online media company Phoronix Media has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and the pre-release of PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (code named "Gernlinden"). According to Phoronix founder Michael Larabel, Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (beta) will both be available on the 4th of August.

This post is part of a series of articles I am writing about SUSE Studio and software appliances. In my last post, I gave an overview of software appliances. In this post, I’m going to get more technical and boast a bit about one of my favorite features in SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio is a web service that makes it fun and easy for anyone with a couple of years of Linux experience to build a software appliance, or your own custom Linux distribution, in less than ten minutes.

The headlines in the US media warble every day with dispatches of how the government wrestles with the question of providing better healthcare for the nation's residents. The debate now in Congress has proven to be a lengthy one, and there is little doubt it will be contentious right up to the passage of any legislation (and, most likely, beyond). But as the US watches this debate unfold, many constituents may not realize that steps have already been taken to improve the US healthcare system, both with recent legislation and with 30-year-old software code--code that one company is harnessing with open source practices to improve clinical care across the country.

The only references to software source code that I found in TomTom’s prospectus related to a discussion about copyright protection of source code (as opposed to “object” code, not open source code). I searched via a .pdf “find” and admit that even after apparently illegally obtaining the TomTom prospectus, I did not read it. In fact, TomTom appears very concerned with its intellectual property (IP) rights, particularly patent protection. TomTom’s position would appear to be a no-no among true-believer open source companies (if you believe there is such a thing) and FOSS zealots.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, July 29, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. On today's newscast . . . an unholy alliance (or a really good one, depending on who you ask), Yahoo turns B-movie monster, Alfresco cosies up to Ubuntu, TUX is in your pocket, and "What are you? Color-blind!"

CentOS is not dead or going away. The signers of the Open Letter are fully committed to continue the CentOS Project. Updates and new releases will continue.

What will happen as Linux continues to grow, and especially as it reaches increasing numbers of unsophisticated users? Doesn't common sense dictate that it will suffer increasing levels of attack and compromise?

Ever since I started working with OpenSolaris (release 2008.05 to build 118: 2010.02), I have been suffering through some of the longer load times. While the distribution is maturing fairly well and quick, the boot times are just horrible. And to my understanding the culprit is ZFS. OpenSolaris utilizes ZFS as its default file system. On top of that, one thing that I still cannot understand is why GRUB defaults its timeout value to 60 seconds. 60 seconds! Why!?! Who needs this 60 seconds and/or who wants to be constantly annoyed to hit enter to the default kernel image, initiating the boot process? Either way, this can be modified. On OpenSolaris, editing the GRUB boot options is a little different from your traditional UNIX/Linux operating system. Note that this article is for Intel architectures and not SPARC.

By now, most readers will be familiar with the local kernel exploit recently posted by Brad Spengler. This vulnerability, which affects the 2.6.30 kernel (and a test version of the RHEL5 "2.6.18" kernel), is interesting in a number of ways. This article will look in detail at how the exploit works and the surprising chain of failures which made it possible.

Market research firm Foote Partners has updated its survey of the most sought-after IT skills (non-certified) and ranked Linux experience and skills as the second most sought after by US and Canadian employers.

Apple realized some time ago that people might want to dual-boot their new machines so they created Boot Camp. Indeed, Boot Camp does make it easy to dual-boot and they even give you all of the drivers needed to make Windows support their hardware... but what about triple-booting? Maybe someday the Boot Camp developers will implement triple-booting but for now it only supports dual-boot. What is needed is a set of clear instructions for creating a triple-boot setup... and here they are.

According to six concerned CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone is poised on the edge of the abyss. In an open letter posted to the CentOS website and the project mailing list, six fellow developers accuse project co-founder Lance Davis of putting the entire project at risk by disappearing from everyday involvement without ceding control to others.

One of the common questions we get here at linuxjournal.com is how we produce our videos. Shawn produced a howto video on some ways of doing it. The following describes how I capture my videos and also the script that I use to add the Linux Journal logo watermark to it.

PortableApps.com founder John T. Haller has announced that his site for portable applications has reached its 100 millionth download milestone. PortableApps.com allows users to easily install various popular open source applications to a USB flash drive or external hard drive. Once installed, the applications can run completely from the drive and be used on any Windows computer.

Emacs, the extensible editor of the GNU project, is available in version 23.1. The release adds countless modernizations to the traditional program, such as font anti-alising and support for D-Bus and zeroconf.

The Fedora Project is one of the most popular Linux distributions, however its position on non-free software and proprietary codecs isn’t for everyone. But thanks to Fedora’s ability to create Remix versions of the disto with anything you like, Omega attempts to bridge the divide.

In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren't updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris 1.8.2 was released with support for Microsoft Office 97, 2000, 2003, Visio 2003, Project 2003, Internet Explorer 6, Adobe Image Ready 3, Adobe Photoshop 7, Adobe Image Ready 3, QuickTime Player 6.5.2 and IrfanView 4.25 (Image support only at this time). There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliablity of all the supported applications.