Showing all newswire headlines

Military tacticians often bewail the havoc that the "fog of war" (i.e., the inability to communicate effectively amid the chaos of the battlefield) wreaks on their carefully laid plans. About 10 days ago I tried to do a bit of fog cutting when I posed a few questions at Microsoft's Jason Matusow's blog .

We decide to take a fast ride on Mandriva 2008 RC2. We looked at the KDE version of this Linux distribution that was released on September 21 2007. Screenshots of KDE plus flash videos of both the KDE desktop as well as the GNOME.

Every Unix system offers several useful commands for finding files and searching them for strings. Together with programming techniques such as streams, pipes, redirections, and regular expressions they comprise very powerful tools ideal for administrative tasks.

JeOS is the latest buzz word in virtualization, however the concept itself is nothing new. Turns out that system administrators have been "hip" for awhile now, as juicing is something very similar to building a chroot environment!

Build an Eclipse plug-in that allows users to manipulate and navigate the content of an Eclipse Modeling Framework-based model.

Holonyx Inc. announced its Partner Program to provide Linux support and open source software support to Value Added Resellers and System Integrators. This program will allow Holonyx Partners to expand the technology solutions they offer to their customers by implementing fully supported open source solutions in their customer accounts.

The thinking seems to go something like this. Linux has to succeed broadly on the desktop as an alternative to Windows because:

* It’s a good way to support development of the OS and its attendant applications. People are more likely to invest in an existing success story than one that’s struggling.
* Linux is a technologically better system and it deserves to win.
* Someone has to stand up to bully-boy Microsoft

Remember Ubuntu Lite? The lighter-than-Xubuntu, more-graphical-than-Fluxbuntu variant of Ubuntu seemed about to get off the ground last year. Then it disappeared. In that time, Fluxbuntu has floundered, too. And while Xubuntu has never looked better and generally runs pretty well, I'd like to see Ubuntu play in the space occupied by Puppy, Damn Small Linux, DeLi and AntiX.

Matt LaPlante reported that there's currently 151,809 bytes of trailing white space in the Linux kernel, requiring a 15 megabyte patch to remove it all. Andi Kleen argued that the white space didn't much matter, "you don't actually save anything on disk on most file systems (essentially everything except reiserfs on current Linux) because all files are rounded to block size (normally 4K). Same in page cache. And in tar files bzip2/gzip is very good at compacting them."

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q2 2007, covering April, May and June 2007. Topics covered include the three scheduled developer meetings of the quarter (for Akonadi, ODF, and Oxygen) and reports from the Marketing Working Group, Human Computer Interaction Working Group, and System Administration Team. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

Gartner declared open-source software the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

XMLTABLE is one of the most powerful functions in the SQL/XML standard and is available in DB2 9 for Linux, Unix, Windows, and z/OS. In part 1 of this two-part series you learned how to use XMLTABLE to retrieve XML data in relational format, how to deal with repeating or missing XML elements, and how to handle namespaces. Part 2 describes common XMLTABLE usage scenarios, such as shredding XML into relational tables, and producing hybrid XML-relational storage of your XML documents.

Justas Ingelevičius wrote in about an Autodesk international user group poll about non-Windows ports. Specifically, users want Autodesk Revit (engineering design software) to run on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.

This has nothing to do with Linux or Open Source, but it does show the hazards of upsetting your network admins. Is it reality or is it humor, sadly I can see it happening, and its downright funny.

Catching my eye from this week's Distrowatch Weekly: MACH BOOT - a live CD that boots in 10 seconds. TEN seconds? I'm lucky to get anything to boot in less than three minutes. And I've never heard of Mach Boot. But I am intrigued. When an obscure distro gets mentioned in Distrowatch, it's a recipe for an overloaded server, but I will try to download, burn and boot Mach Boot to see how quickly it, in fact does boot. And whether it works at all.

Many other countries are turning to Linux and open-source for their school-house computer needs, and now there's a conference for those who want to bring it to schools in the U.S.

Offered only €30 from Acer for a refund on Microsoft products bundled with his notebook, a man took the company to court. According to this web site, not only did Antoine Gutzwiller get a full refund on a list of the software bundled his machine, but got €500 extra for what the court dubbed Abusive Resistance. Initially, Acer had offered only €30 if the man returned elements of the install at his own expense.

Are you planning on juicing anytime soon? How about JeOSing? Confused yet? Here’s a hint: Both those sentences sound exactly the same when you say them aloud. What’s different about them is a case of apples and oranges however, and I’m not talking about Tropicana. I’m not even talking about pro sports figures and questionable performance enhancing tactics that may or or may not lead to asterisks being placed next to stats and failed Hall of Fame bids.

There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically.

Linux is hot again. In fact, there's never been a better time for Microsoft Windows users to give Linux a whirl.

The OS is more usable than ever, easier to install, and more compatible with PC hardware. It still helps to be somewhat tech-savvy to get the most out of Linux, but that's no longer a major requirement.

[Pretty nice unbiased review. - Abe]