Showing all newswire headlines

If you are a systems or network administrator and you do not own a copy of this book, stop reading this right now and go get one. If you are a manager responsible for the care and feeding of a technical team, purchase copies for yourself and each of your team members. Heck, even if you’re unfortunate enough to be married to a systems administrator (*gasp*), buy a copy for your significant other and steal it when they aren’t looking. It’s that good. You’ll get a better understanding of what he or she does on a daily basis, as well as be able to finally explain it to your mother-in-law. (True story!) Here’s why.

Author of OpenBSD's hardware driver layer for wireless Atheros devices,Reyk Floeter, sent a query to the Linux Kernel mailing list regarding the recent licensing debate surrounding the Linux"ath5k" driver,"I'm still trying to get an idea about the facts and the latest state of the incidence that violated the copyright of my code, because I just returned from vacation."

AMD announced on Sept. 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. The company announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

The most referenced and most often used command on any Linux distribution is man, which lets users read the manual pages of other commands. Here are a couple of less well-known but useful commands that let you bookmark a position within a man page, and test a command you read from the man page without closing the page.

After lots of rumors, which went on for some half year already, now it is official: today AMD put out a press release about their efforts to open the source to their graphics cards.

While many of us have been preoccupied with the OOXML vote, the rest of the world has naturally been continuing to go about its business. One piece of business that took an interesting turn in the last few days is a ruling by a Federal Appellate Court in the United States that breaks new ground in protecting the integrity of the standard setting system. The ruling may also have relevance to the regrettable conduct witnessed in the recent OOXML vote.

Apple faces calls to open iPhone. Office 2.0 Conference Apple is facing fresh calls to open the iPhone as new evidence emerged of the technical and legal challenges developers face putting their software on the device.

"The current VM can get itself into trouble fairly easily on systems with a small ZONE_HIGHMEM, which is common on i686 computers with 1GB of memory," Rik van Riel said explaining a small patch to cmscan.c. He continued, "on one side, page_alloc() will allocate down to zone->pages_low, while on the other side, kswapd() and balance_pgdat() will try to free memory from every zone, until every zone has more free pages than zone->pages_high." He noted that highmem could be filled up with "page tables, ramfs, vmalloc allocations and other unswappable things quite easily and without many bad side effects, since we still have a huge ZONE_NORMAL to do future allocations from. However, as long as the number of free pages in the highmem zone is below zone->pages_high, kswapd will continue swapping things out from ZONE_NORMAL, too! Sami Farin managed to get his system into a stage where kswapd had freed about 700MB of low memory and was still 'going strong'."

If you have video footage that you want to capture, edit, and share with friends or family (or even use professionally), you'll be happy to know that you can do it all with open source tools. I'll show you how to author a DVD that can play on most home players.

Last weekend, we completed the move from .NET ASP to LINUX/PHP. We did this to take advantage and contribute to the open source community and to prepare for scalability down the road.

[Performance improvement table is included - Abe]

The KDE Release Team has revised the release schedule for KDE 4.0. The first visible bits of KDE 4.0 will be the KDE Development Platform release on October, 30. This Development Platform release consists of bits and pieces needed to develop KDE applications. It includes kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase/runtime. The purpose of the KDE Development Platform release is to make it easier for third party developers to port their applications to KDE4 technology and to start developing new applications. The final and long awaited release of the KDE Desktop 4.0 is planned for December, 11th 2007, well in time to be a Christmas present for everyone who has been longing for KDE 4.0.

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first beta version of the revised Eudora e-mail application, since Qualcomm stopped developing it commercially and turned it over to the open source community in 2006.

Cisco's consumer products division is shipping a successor to the Linux-based NSLU2 (aka "SLUG") consumer NAS (network-attached storage) appliance, one of the most-hacked devices ever. The NAS200 has room for two internal SATA drives, supports FAT32-formatted external USB 2.0 drives, and comes with UPnP media-sharing software.

Hey guys! The Libregamewiki (which I run), the Free gaming encyclopedia are looking for contributors for the wiki project. The wiki launched a few weeks ago and it need your help! So far, we have over 100 articles, 1,400 edits and we're not even close to reaching Wikipedia standard. It is an attempt to comprehensively document the world of Free gaming. In the process, we're collecting information that nobody collect before like the biographies of game hackers who make the games we know and love like David White of Battle for Wesnoth. There are also contests(such as Pyweek) and games that never got their own article in Wikipedia or shortly delete afterward.

[Is it me, or is there a lot more FOSS gaming news/activity lately? – Sander]

Red Hat is continuing to land big, fat contracts for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. This week saw major deals with the French Ministry for Education and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry. In the first deal, the French Ministry for Education migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to RHEL. Red Hat followed up this announcement with news of another major European deal. FASS.se, the main medicines portal run by the LIF (Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry), has migrated its servers from Sun Solaris to RHEL.

For years, if you wanted an inexpensive, but Windows-compatible file and print server, you turned to Samba running on Linux. Now, with the first alpha release of Samba 4, this open-source project is moving closer to becoming a complete Windows 2003/Longhorn replacement. However, the Samba Group warns would-be users that, "Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments. Note the WARNINGS in WHATSNEW.txt in the source and the STATUS file which aims to document what should and should not work."

Five years after being pegged a monopolist, Microsoft is coming under scrutiny for efforts to license its proprietary technology in accordance with antitrust legal demands from U.S. and European regulators. The Microsoft Communications Protocol Program (MCPP) was envisioned as a way to encourage competition and promote interoperability between Microsoft's products and Unix, Linux and open source applications. Whether the licensing program has worked as planned is a topic of hot debate, and the U.S. District Court in Washington plans to take up the subject for review on Sept 11.

A survey by the investment banking and securities firm UBS found that fewer CIOs will deploy Linux than in the past, but the results are being met with shrugs in the Linux community. A slowdown is often viewed as a natural event in market dynamics, a maturing of a technology. "This is not a bad thing," said Clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group. Linux uptake had been on a tear, Ryder said. The momentum continued as business buyers increasingly saw its value.

Bruce Perens is here for the second keynote of the evening. I spoke to Bruce on IT Conversations last March when he was last in Utah to protest the Novell/Microsoft deal. Bruce is not only interesting to listen to, but entertaining as well. Bruce gives an intro about why he got excited about open source. As I mentioned, Bruce has criticized Novell in the past (and will today). The conference is being held at Novell, but the security folks haven’t thrown him out yet.

Workload Partition (WPAR) is a new feature introduced with the IBM AIX Version 6.1 operating system. It allows running applications to move between System p machines or System p logical partitions (LPAR).