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Upgrade Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

China, which has long wished to develop its own computer industry, has chosen to go with Linux on the software side. Loongson is its hope for the hardware side. The Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has been developing the Loongson processor since 2002. Rather than use the x86 instruction set used in chips from Intel and AMD, Loongson uses MIPS, an instruction set patented by MIPS Technologies. This means that Loongson chips are unable to run the full version of Microsoft Windows, so they run Linux instead.

Users starting with Ruby and Rails are faced with the task of downloading source code, obtaining compilers, compiling code, and finding a relational database to use. Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails is a set of tools that enables rapid building of Web applications with Ruby on Rails and DB2.

Pundits say it is simply impossible to count all of the Linux servers in the market today. The Linux community is questioning research that suggests the open-source operating system is losing market share to Windows on preinstalled x86 servers, saying that Linux is undercounted in those kinds of studies. An analysis of IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures for the past six quarters showed that Linux growth started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to both Windows Server and the market as a whole over that period.

The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. At the same time, a Release Candidate for the KDE 4.0 Development Platform is released. This Development Platform contains the bits and pieces needed to run and build applications using KDE 4 technology. The purpose of this Development Platform is to make it easier for third parties to port their applications to KDE 4, without having to wait until the full desktop is polished enough for the final 4.0 release.

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is a network protocol that allows you to use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. It is good alternative to Fibre Channel-based SANs. You can easily manage, mount and format iSCSI Volume under Linux. It allows access to SAN storage over Ethernet. Open-iSCSI project is a high-performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of iSCSI. Open-iSCSI is partitioned into user and kernel parts.

Network administrators frequently use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to implement a centralized directory server. You can use LDAP to authenticate users in Apache. Two popular open source LDAP solutions are OpenLDAP and Red Hat Directory Server. According to the Apache documentation, Novell LDAP and iPlanet Directory Server are also supported. This article focuses on OpenLDAP, but the concepts and examples should be applicable to the others.

One of the oft-mentioned weaknesses of Linux, fragmentation, just happens to be one of its greatest strengths. A broad range of choices in an immature market is a good thing. Of course, choice does come at a cost. For example, there may be no standard way to do a particular task. Further, development resources will sometimes be split among two or more projects. However, these are weaknesses in the short term only.One could similarly argue that evolution of species suffers from the same ‘weakness’ of fragmentation. However, in the long term, the survival and consolidation of the best traits results in an improved breed. Eventually, one of the many approaches to some desktop task will rise to dominance and show the market the right way to do it, and, at the same time, reduce the fragmentation problem.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia announced yesterday that an agreement was reached to dismiss the GNU General Public License (GPL) enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox. As this settlement prevents the case from going to court, the SFLC's defence of the GPL remains untested in a US courtroom.

One potential way for a user to escalate her privileges on a system is to exploit a vulnerability in an SUID or SGID program. SUID and SGID are legitimately used when programs need special permissions above and beyond those that are available to the user who is running them. Unfortunately, a poorly written SUID or SGID binary can be used to quickly and easily escalate a user’s privileges. This leads us to the need for scanning systems for SUID and SGID binaries. This is a simple process.

mokoNinja posted a video a few hours ago on YouTube showing the newly created media player application for the OpenMoko. This is a pretty standard feature for all smart phones, and since I am looking to replace the need for a portable media player when I get a Neo1973, it is nice to see that it is coming along nicely with all the standard features one would expect raised when raised in an iPod generation. While it seems to lack the polish of the iPhone interface right now, OpenMoko seems to be shaping up into a decent contender, and once all the basic functionality is covered, we will start seeing some real innovation that makes open source applications so exciting to use.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management settings! I’m afraid that quite some people are getting a high Load_Cycle_Count because their laptop (BIOS or harddrive firmware) uses too aggressive powermanagement. These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn’t override these settings.

Day 2 of the Developer Summit was sunny and beautiful, as many took advantage of the rooftop garden near the conference rooms. Starting the sessions today were roundtables about many topics including the community, desktop, server, and others. After these followed the usual sessions, as per today’s schedule: The Community Roundtable, Defining a roadmap for supporting LoCo teams, Rethinking the logout dialog, Automatix and Ubuntu collaboration and Third Party Apt.

You know, I've never found any real use for a shell script. Recently, I found an actual reason to write one for moving and converting audio files using a few less keystrokes.

The problem with distributed computing is that everyone with the technology to reverse-engineer your crypto chip can listen to your broadcast and know exactly what you're trying to break. Build a robust distributed computing application that is opaque to observers—even those who have access to the source code— by attaching a simple neuron implementation to HTTP transport code.

Of all the tasks in FreeBSD, setting up a broadband connection isprobably one of the easiest. All the various BSDs are built aroundnetworking, and most broadband connections operate pretty much like anextended LAN, using the same hardware, often called an“ethernet”connection:...

PulseAudio is a next generation sound server for Linux, making all sorts of "ear-candy" possible: from dynamically changing the volume of individual applications to hot-plugging support for many different devices. Fedora 8 is going to be the first distribution to ship and enable PulseAudio by default and with this in mind we talked to Lennart Poettering who is the upstream and Fedora developer of PulseAudio and Avahi about the work he has put in to this.

Medsphere Releases Code for Development Testing Automation Framework 'Strongwind' Enhances Software Quality, Supports Open Source Community ALISO VIEJO, California, October 30, 2007 - Medsphere Systems Corporation today announced the release of code for a user interface test automation framework that enables developers to create automated quality assurance scripts to test features of user interface applications. Dubbed Strongwind, this new tool developed by Medsphere engineers has improved the process of testing updates and enhancements of Medsphere's OpenVista electronic health record (EHR), a commercial version of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' VistA solution.

Crossbeam Systems has started shipping a massive chassis-style, "unified threat management" (UTM) system based on an open Linux OS. The X-Series UTM server runs the company's Linux-based "XOS" OS, and targets highly scalable firewalls and other security applications for large data centers and service providers.

A settlement has been reached in the case filed last month against Monsoon Multimedia by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of two BusyBox developers. BusyBox is a collection of lightweight, standard utilities that is often used in embedded devices -- and has also been the victim of at least 18 possible license violations in the past. As reported earlier on Linux.com, the case concerned Monsoon's shipment of code borrowed from BusyBox, in a product called Hava -- without any accompanying offer of source code, as required by the GNU General Public License (GPL), under which BusyBox is released.