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LXer Feature: 16-Dec-2007

In this weeks roundup Andy Updegrove continues his series on ODF vs. OOXML, Open Source Fonts, a new version of Picasa for Linux, our own Hans Kwint asks "Do Linux filesystems need defragmentation?", KDE takes a stand on OOXML and Carla Schroder gives her advice to those brave enough to run Debian Volatile. Also, Microsoft decides to stay quiet on what Unix code it may own, someone figures out how to get a OLPC laptop to run XP, why the NYSE using Linux is important and Richard Stallman finally goes off the deep end.

Setting up a network can be fairly quick and easy if you're setting it up with straight Class A, Class B, or Class C network addresses. But, there may be occasions when you would only have a few hosts assigned to a given network segment. In that case, you wouldn't want to use a straight "classful " network addressing scheme, because you would waste too many IP addresses for that network. (You may need to use these IP addresses later if you decide to add other segments to your network.) This is where subnetting comes in handy.

Last month AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series as "enthusiast gaming performance for the masses" through the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, which are both sub-$250 graphics cards. While rudimentary, the Catalyst 7.11 Linux driver (also released last month), supports these two RV670 GPUs with better support coming through the Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver this month. To see how well these two PCI Express 2.0 graphics cards are able to perform under Linux, ASUS had sent out their EAH3850 TOP and EAH3870 TOP. We have tested both of these graphics cards using Ubuntu 7.10 and have compared the results to other products using the fglrx driver, including the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. These are the world's first Linux benchmarks of these new mainstream ATI graphics processors.

To embrace Linux, or not embrace Linux, that is the question.

At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Some readers took exception to the language of the release - though it really is just the standard tortured English which is seemingly required for press releases. But others question the need for realtime response in "enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. Clearly somebody sees a need for deterministic response in big corporate deployments.

The XO is the laptop produced by the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC) headed by Mr. Nicholas Negroponte with a goal to provide every child a laptop. Colin Dean was one of the first to participate in G1G1, and this is his review of it.

Although Linux has remained bloat-free for so long, no operating system can be immune to bloat. As Linux is adopted more and more, it will become critical that Linux be kept free of any and all bloat.

This document describes how to set up a CentOS 5.1 desktop. It provides all you need for daily work and entertainment, incl. multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, TrueType fonts, VMware Server, ntfs-3g, Sun Java, and many more.

I found out through Distrowatch that the next release of Damn Small Linux, version 4.2, will replace Xpaint with the unusually light, highly usable MtPaint -- pretty much my favorite Linux image editor. (If it dealt with IPTC info in JPGs, it would be my favorite photo-editing program on all platforms.)

A jolt of light stroke in a dark corner of a silent arena. A ghost of the space, spectator of the event, wonders as a warrior spawns. Behold, as the corners of the arena light up in a flash and the battle cries its immediacy through a hundred beeps of the warrior souls connecting and communicating.. "Good game and good luck."

Ruby on Rails 2.0 changes the way Rails uses scaffolding. This has made many existing Rails tutorials obsolete. This Rails 2.0 tutorial covers installing Rails and getting the scaffolded shell of an application up and running. Part 1 covers installation and generation of a scaffolded Rails application. Later parts will cover more coding in depth.

The OS has made little headway into phones so far, but that is set to change due to Google's push for open-source platform for mobile devices.

Or so, at least, Google would like you to conclude. Significant differences include single-author control (but the freedom for other authors to set up competing pages as well), bylines for page authors, reader ranking, and - oh yes - Google ads (authors interested in allowing ad placements would get a "substantial" share of the resulting revenues).

Demilitarized zone, used to secure an internal network from external access. You can use Linux firewall to create DMZ easily. There are many different ways to design a network with a DMZ. The basic method is to use a single Linux firewall with 3 Ethernet cards. The following simple example discusses Linux DMZ setup and forwarding public traffic to internal servers.

The New York Times ran a story on the New York Stock Exchange's use of Linux. The most important thing, however, is not that they are using Linux, but that now everyone knows the CIO of the NYSE thinks Linux is the best choice for their servers.

The IT skills shortage is like global warming - you either believe it exists or you don't. Either way, one thing's for certain - the debate refuses to lay down and die. For those who believe there is a shortage, there is plenty of evidence to support their argument. And for those who believe the shortage is a myth that's perpetrated by businesses to justify sending skilled jobs to less-expensive regions or hire in inexpensive immigrant labour, then there appears to be plenty of supporting evidence, too.

Arena Solutions produces and sells a hosted, subscription-based product lifecycle management (PLM) tool for manufacturing companies. Arena founder and CTO Eric Larkin uses open source tools to develop, secure, and maintain the software-as-a-service product. He believes that open source is the path to success for subscription software. "It's a more cost-effective way to build and scale a SAAS business," he says.

Learn about an efficient virtualization approach for the Cell/B.E. processor regarding hardware resources called container virtualization, and the open source software OpenVZ Linux project. This first article discusses basic concepts, architectures, and tools of OpenVZ and Cell/B.E., and how they work together.

How can a Root Certificate make its way into the default set of certificates that ship with web browsers and operating systems? Wouldn't a unified list of Root Certificates serve as a more realistic trust model?

The Net-SNMP library now has Python bindings, and it is an excellent choice to write custom code to manage a data center or supplement full-blown Network Management Systems. In this article, learn how to use Net-SNMP, Python, and the IPython shell to interactively explore and manage a network.