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"Want to create an animation on GNU/Linux and then convert it to a video file? Well here is one way to do it that does not involve GIMP Animation Package (GAP)."

The Open Web Foundation introduced itself to the world last week at OSCON, the Open Source Convention, held in Portland, Ore. The consortium of individuals and Internet companies is an effort to build a home for community-driven specifications on the Web. The organization follows open source models already seen in the Apache Software Foundation.

CentOS 5.2/RHEL 5.2 comes with a very highly modified Xen 3.03 which if I'm correct is in fact Xen 3.1 backported. If you wan to use the latest Xen 3.2.1 you need to update the hypervisor. This tutorial is for x86_64 because that's what I'm running on grantmcwilliams.com. If you want the 32 bit version modify the appropriate paths and file names.

Since I'm an IRC addict and I always liked to spend time learning new stuff on IRC, here is a review of several IRC clients for Linux. Some of them are well-known and popular, like XChat, Konversation or Irssi, and others are not so widely used or known, but nevertheless, they deserve mentioning.

In Linux 2.6.24.5, the problem is explained in init/do_mounts.c. Following the execution path, you can see that the first root filesystem mount happens in mount_root(). First, the device name is converted to a (major,minor) device number pair, then /dev/root is created with that (major,minor) pair. Finally, /dev/root is mounted as the root filesystem.

The catch to this is that the only partition accessible is the one created for /dev/root. The way around it is to make some other mount the first mount, then switch to the XFS later in the boot process. This is exactly what an init ramdisk gives us.

The Amarok team is proud to present the second Alpha of Amarok 2.0. Development is moving at full speed and a lot of bugs have been fixed sinceAlpha 1, as well as features polished. Thank you to everyone who has already helped by filing bug reports and sending patches. Please keep them coming! Read the release announcement for a list of bug fixes and changes. Get Alpha 2 today and help make Amarok 2.0 rock.

File under really big stuff. Google search engineers are reporting that the Google search index has grown from 26 million pages when it first launched back in 1998, to a whopping one trillion unique URLs today...

An equal dose of Linux/Unix and MS bashing today. Plus a little forward regarding these types of jokes.

Microsoft has announced that it will buy DATAllegro, maker of data warehouse appliances. It plans to use the acquired technology as the basis for a SQL Server 2008 appliance. This purchase is interesting on a lot of levels for the enterprise market. First and foremost, it signals that the hot area of high-end, shared nothing massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances have won out and users can expect them to take a major leap toward affordability, now that Microsoft has entered the market.

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below.

In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth. Think"The Terminator" or"Colossus: The Forbin Project."

Ever since a gaunt Steve Jobs addressed the adoring crowds at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the press, Apple fans - and most especially, Apple investors - have been concerned over the state of his health. Today comes the good news that Steve is just fine, thank you. The bad news is how the news was reported.

On July 15, Red Hat and Firestar released the terms of the settlement [PDF] of their patent suit. When we last looked at this settlement, those terms were not available. Now we can examine exactly what was agreed to and assess the degree of protection that Red Hat actually negotiated for the wider community. It may be tempting to say that recent events have reduced the relevance of this settlement, but that would be a mistake; what Red Hat has done here still matters.

Fortunately we rabble measure by a different yardstick, and can see the real value of this post. Which is some random computer user somewhere on the planet had the expertise to dissect and analyze a BIOS flaw, and then had the best bully pulpit of all time, the Internet, to share his findings. Despite the rise of this brave new police state era, we don't need to know anything about theAlmightyCthulhu. We don't need his home address, or work history, or DNA and fingerprints. We don't need to know who his family is and a record of everything they'v ever done. All we need to know is in that forum post- if the information is true and correct, it stands on its own. He even gives instructions for reproducing his work.

"Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these days, I thought I should join the party, began Daniel Phillips, announcing the Tux3 versioning filesystem. He continued, "Tux3 is a write anywhere, atomic commit, btree based versioning filesystem. As part of this work, the venerable HTree design used in Ext3 and Lustre is getting a rev to better support NFS and possibly become more efficient."

Mostly Linux and Unix humor with some unavoidable MS-bashing :)

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL), which closes the gap between the operating systems. With GGL, you can run as many gadgets as you wish on your screen -- or at least that's the idea. Some flaws still need to be fixed, and not everything works 100% correctly.

So you've been the IBM AIX guru on your team for years now and your bosses have determined that they want to try Linux on System p. The purpose of this article is to introduce Linux to AIX administrators. It will show you what you need to know to make the transition to Linux simpler.

Intel has switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux for release 2.0 of its MID-targeted Moblin open source stack, according to a variety of sources, including The Register. Intel also indicated Moblin 2.0 would be unveiled on August 19th, say multiple sources.

Here's how it works: Novell owns Unix's IP (intellectual property). SCO sold Unix's IP to Sun. Sun then included some Unix IP into Solaris. Finally, Sun open sourced Solaris as OpenSolaris. Sounds like trouble, doesn't it? While Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps described the line of logic above as "sheer speculation," others see a major potential legal problem for Sun. However, analysts, lawyers and open source leaders also agreed that it's unlikely Novell would ever choose to make trouble for Sun. Novell, however, has not commented on its intentions despite several attempts to get the Linux company's take on the issue.