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LXer Feature: 24-Dec-2008

The Debian project has packaged and produced some really great software and the latest project, code named "Lenny" has resulted in a couple of really outstanding derivatives, AntiX and its parent SimplyMEPIS. In addition, the Debian project "Sid", has led to the creation of an awesome cutting edge system called sidux. Any of the three would make a great Christmas gift for the Linux geek in your life.

SCALE fills all main speaker tracks; space still open in specialty conference tracks. The 7th Annual So Cal Linux Expo is shaping up nicely. In spite of adding an additional track to the weekend conference, all four tracks have been filled. The Expo received 148 submittals , all of which were excellent, for 45 speaker slots. The speaker selections have been completed and the speakers are being notified. Keynote speaker selection is in progress.

[Yours truly will be there for the third year in a row, I can't wait! - Scott]

Linux may already be the operating system of choice for many people, but it can still be so much better. Here are five dreams for Linux in the coming year.

People who write good howtos and documentation the finest people there are. Tina Gasperson, Bruce Byfield, and Carla Schroder share some tips on improving your writing skills, and building a body of work to be proud of.

At a time when new and buggy features cloud basic computer functions, it's refreshing to see a new release of a distro like Slackware that stays true to its core philosophy. Slackware has an unfair reputation of being a distro only for experienced users. Granted it doesn't sport many graphical configuration tools, but it balances that with stability and speed.

Recently I finally got enough hardware together to build a new computer that will be used to test all the latest games and windows software on. When I built the new machine that meant I had my old main machine to do something with.

USA Today and other major media outlets are starting to suggest that Windows 7 — the successor to Windows Vista — could arrive in time for Christmas 2009. Frankly, that sounds like a holiday nightmare to The VAR Guy.

Current balloting for Debian Lenny's future has led to strife in the organization. Secretary of the free project, Manoj Srivastava, has resigned his position. A possible consequence is that the next version will undergo further delay in its release.

Red Hat is reporting an increase in revenues and income for it third quarter of its fiscal 2009 year. The most interesting part of the Red Hat numbers (for me at least) was the disclosure by CEO Jim Whitehurst that one of the top 25 deals closed by Red Hat during the quarter was one where the user moved from a Free version of Linux to a paid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Whitehurst pegged the deal at "6 figures" for a single year - so that means $100,000 plus.

Last week, the Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project achieved version 11.1 of its community-supported Linux distribution. Because the release includes watershed changes like a new license, new build system, and significant upstream integrations, DesktopLinux collared Community Manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier for perspective about what it all means.

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu's next release. You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop's pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways.

With 2008 coming to an end, heise online UK picks what was full of win, who was waiting for the failboat, and who just made us go meh. So in no particular order, here are the Wins, the Fails and the Mehs of Open Source from 2008.

Last week, we launched the Linux Foundation video site. As part of the video site, we will also be holding a Linux video contest that kicks off in January. The contest reaction hasn’t been without controversy. Many emails and articles have asked, “Why are you copying Apple? Linux should be original!” My answer is that I originally thought of this contest while sitting through multiple Apple and Windows ads during a football game. It occurred to me that messages about operating systems are everywhere, but that Linux, by nature of its distributed organization, is not well represented in the video realm.

Microsoft came clean and admitted its SQL Server database software is vulnerable to code injection attacks. It's not a new flaw but the same bug in the database software that emerged around the time of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday update earlier this month. In an advisory, Redmond's security gnomes confirmed that code has been produced that exploits a security bug affecting Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Windows Internal Database, in certain configurations.

Any .1 release of a Linux distribution is generally meant to fix bugs which were present in the .0 release, not to introduce new features. In this respect, OpenSUSE 11.1 differs sharply from other distributions. And the news is not all good either. Novell acolytes please note, this is NOT a review, just some sundry observations. The cancerous Mono has spread its tentacles further into the GNOME Desktop environment which is present on the GNOME live CD, to the extent that removing mono-core results in the removal of Evolution as well, the default mail program.

OLPC Learning Club DC member Mike Cariaso popped up on my Google Talk one night last week to tell me he had arrived at the Elaine & Nicholas Negropnte School in Reaksmy, Cambodia. This is the school featured in the May 2007 60 Minutes report on OLPC, and where Nicholas Negroponte first tried the one laptop per child idea. Mike is volunteering at the school over the next several months.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

In an effort to increase environmental awareness, the Dutch media company Spranq has introduced Ecofont, a perforated font that saves printing ink.

The past year has brought several invasive changes to the Intel Linux graphics stack with the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager for GPU memory management within the kernel, support for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2, and kernel mode-setting finally getting ready to enter the limelight. How though has the work this year affected the overall performance of Intel integrated graphics on Linux? In this article we have run a few benchmarks that show where the driver was at a few months ago and where it is today.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced plans to overhaul desktop notifications. The project is part of a broader initiative that the company launched earlier this year to boost the usability of the Linux software ecosystem. Transient visual notifications are employed extensively in desktop applications to provide users with passive updates about application status or system events. Some typical usage scenarios include notifying users when they receive new e-mail, when an instant messaging buddy signs online, or when a CD finishes burning.