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LXer Feature: 05-Aug-2008

Here are a few thoughts and a quick roundup of what I have seen at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco so far.

The global Internet community is bracing for the potential of malicious attacks on the domain name system with the discoverer of the DNS exploit that send shockwaves through the industry last month expected to reveal full details of it on August 6 at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

[The flaw in this logic is of course that the details of the exploit have already been revealed. If you only start to brace for impact now, you're far too late. -- Sander]

How to use RedHat grub to retrieve a lost root password.

Everyone knows that UMPCs, particularly Linux-based ones, are popping up every other day, but did you know just how many of them there are?

Oracle's post BEA Systems acquisition roadmap hits the ground running in the next two weeks with the delivery of version 10.3 of BEA's popular application server. WebLogic Server 10.3 has been released to manufacturing with customers expected to get final CDs in the next 14 days, senior vice president of Oracle server technologies Thomas Kurian told BEA users at an Oracle event on Monday.

The good news is that Mozilla's popular Firefox browser is getting video support. The bad news is that you probably won't notice. Why? Because the video codec that is coming to Firefox is not commonly used: Ogg Theora. Firefox will also be adding a new HTML tag to make embedding video easier - no more need to launch Javascript - but, again, the video codec is not the ubiquitous QuickTime, Windows Media, or Flash that people use.

I often find it ironic and a little sad that one of the most important security applications on the Internet is so poorly funded. For anyone that manages machines remotely and is concerned about security, it is perhaps the most important application to rely on for security and stability. I'm sure you know which application I am referring to, but do you know that it is the de facto world standard in its class on the Internet? I wonder if there is any other application on the Internet, proprietary or Open Source, that comes close to the market penetration that OpenSSH has earned compared to competing alternatives.

[While not about Linux, this look at OpenSSH (and OpenBSD development in general) is well worth reading - sr]

Startup Vyatta has bundled its Linux and open source software-based router and firewall software into an x86 appliance for the enterprise market. Vyatta will market its appliance to compete on cost-performance with Cisco, Nortel and Juniper Networks. Vyatta has bundled its dual-licensed Linux and open source software-based router and firewall software into a branded hardware "appliance" version for the enterprise market.

I've been thinking about how to best improve the Linux* userland over the last few days. I was venting pretty loudly about my Linux gripe of the day -- I don't even remember what I was complaining about at the time, but it was a mess of shell scripting, pipes, and about half a dozen command line programs that were conspiring to drive me up the wall. Before I could get into a really quality rant, the kind that would peel paint off the walls, the friend who I was giving an earful to asked me a question, probably to shut me up.

"So what would you do to fix it?"

That's not exactly a new question, but I hadn't been asked it before. So I put a little thought into it.

FbTerm provides you with a fast terminal emulator that runs directly on your system's framebuffer. Using the framebuffer brings improved performance while allowing you to render UTF-8 text in the terminal. FbTerm aims to be at least as fast as the normal Linux kernel terminal while providing internationalization support and modern font handling with fontconfig. It allows you to create as many as 10 different terminal windows on the same framebuffer, each window having scrollback history.

If you wanted a symbol of Linux's impact on the world of embedded systems, you could do worse than consider the edifying case of Wind River's Damascene conversion. Once one of free software's fiercest critics, today Wind River is a cheerleader for the benefits of open source, of sharing, and of giving back to the community. John Bruggeman is Wind River's Chief Marketing Officer. Here he talks to Glyn Moody about why you can't use any old Linux for embedded systems, the respective strengths and weaknesses of the Linux-based mobile platforms from the LiMo Foundation and Google's Android, and what effect Nokia's announcement that it would be open-sourcing the Symbian operating system will have on the sector.

Ajax techniques have changed the face of large, commercial Web applications, but many smaller Web sites don't have the resources to rebuild their entire user interface overnight. New features should justify their costs by solving real-world interface problems and improving user experience. With this series, you've been learning to modernize your UI incrementally using open source, client-side libraries. In this installment, learn to transform a multistep checkout process from a series of sequential forms into a single-screen interface using Ajax techniques. You do so using the principle of progressive enhancement, ensuring that your site remains accessible to all sorts of user-agents.

Novell Channel Chief Pat Bernard has left the company, and Tim Wolfe (pictured) is now serving as acting VP of global channel sales. Has Bernard landed a new job elsewhere? The VAR Guy is digging for answers.

It's hard enough for managers to motivate and track employees whose livelihood depends on doing a good job. Imagine the project management task for Linux, the free software operating system. Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the people and software on-track, with the software quality the operating system demands.

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack. Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

Hospitals aren't normally known for lightning-fast moves, but when you're a community-based institution tasked to care for underserved communities, sometimes you have no choice but to be flexible, hungry, and savvy, especially when it comes to the critical software choices that power your operations.

The University of Leicester in England is launching a major programme to help develop a new paradigm for future global computing environments. In order to improve code and data mobility over wide area networks the boffins will, err, study Ancient Mediterranean crafts-people from the late bronze age through to classical times...

If advanced calendar applications like Evolution and Sunbird are overkill for your needs, try Day Planner, a simple yet efficient calendaring utility. If you want to view your calendar as a timeline, check out Calizo instead.

The Linux OS, in the form of Moblin, LiMo, and Maemo, looks ready to take the lion’s share of the Mobile Internet Devices (MID) market and is set to capture unit volumes of 50 millions units per annum in 2013, reports market analyst ABI Research. The MID market is likely to be the first real example of a greenfield situation in which all mobile operating systems start on the same equal footing, without the baggage of previous histories such as existed in the smartphone market, ABI explains.

A new database management system (DBMS) designed for web applications and cloud computing could be the start of a new direction in DBMS development and, indeed, in software as a whole. Drizzle - unveiled recently at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) by MySQL director of architecture Brian Aker - is described as a "slimmed down version of MySQL" and defined as much by what it doesn't do as by what it does.