Showing all newswire headlines

"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins."

ESTO is a tool that tunes the set of parameters for optimizing a specific target program. Expert System for Tuning Optimizations (ESTO) is typically used for tuning, for maximum performance, the optimization options used by a compiler when creating an application. ESTO is currently geared toward tuning GCC and Post-Link Optimization for Linux on POWER.

Databases are happy to handle many parallel requests. However, active processes (threaded or forked) almost inevitably eat up a valuable resource: database connections. Learn how to use the antipool.py module in Martin Blais' antiorm library to make the pooling and reuse of connections transparent to programmers, and in a RDBMS-agnostic fashion.

You are probably familiar with common keyboard sequences like Ctrl-C to end a program, but there are dozens of useful shortcuts you can use in BASH to edit the command line, move around your command history, and control jobs. I've collected 18 useful Ctrl and Meta (Option) sequences to make you more productive in BASH. So grab your 'board and leave the wet suit at home, the water is warm this time of year.

A dispute over some open source software used for model railroads resulted in an important decision last week, involving the scope of open source licenses and the remedies available when they are violated. The decision has triggered alarm in the open source community, with a prominent open source licensing advocate charging that the court fell asleep at the switch in its legal analysis of the case.

In 2004 Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, walked away from the project after creating the nonprofit Gentoo Foundation to handle its intellectual property (IP). In a blog post last month, Robbins wondered if he should take back the software, since it didn't appear the foundation was taking care of things. While Robbins didn't follow through on his thought, he raised an interesting question: Can someone convey intellectual property rights and then reclaim them?

Have you ever wanted to play with a new distro without having to burn and then reboot into a liveCD or do an install into a spare partition that you may or may not have?

Okay, I'm not seriously suggesting Microsoft is paying off Netcraft to produce positive survey results (although this is certainly a standard operating procedure for Microsoft). But something is odd, if not rotten, in the state of Netcraft. I have often cited Netcraft web server surveys as evidence that open source beats closed source. The Netcraft surveys almost always showed Apache leading Microsoft IIS by a wide margin, and showed Apache growing as Microsoft IIS market share was shrinking. Lately, however, Netcraft began to claim that Apache market share has been shrinking rapidly while Microsoft IIS has been gaining the market share lost by Apache.

If you use Google or any other search engine, you already are a user of full text searching: the capability to search for a word or group of words within many texts for the best matches for your query. Sphinx is a full text search engine for database content, which you can integrate with other applications. (You can test it or use it with a command-line tool, but Sphinx is most useful as part of a Web site, not as a standalone utility.)

Sure, it’s probably too early to dance on the grave of DRM, but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that’s not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal. It’s still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.

I have pointed this out time and again. Like it or not, the patent war is already here. Luckily, if it hits full throttle, Google will be a part of it on the side of Linux vendors. Google uses Linux and is ready to battle alongside the rest of Open Invention Network, utilizing a collection of Linux patents against Microsoft if it comes down to it. In short, we have ourselves a virtual cold war of intellectual property (IP) propaganda.

There are a lot of free file managers. There is Nautilus, Konqueror, Dolphin, Thunar and more. All of them offer great functionality. However, they enjoy as a rule very intertwined interdependences, they demand a lot of libraries connected with their graphical environment, and they need X Window System server running. Of course, console zealots and users looking for “light” solutions are not left alone. They have MC!

User-Programmed Service model allows each SourceKibitzer user to participate in programming and development of the service.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to use ntfs-3g on a Fedora 7 desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions.

This is an open letter to the creators of MainActor. MainConcept, I fully understand your need to better focus your efforts on your encoder business. But correct me if I 'm wrong, is MainActor not the perfect vehicle for moving the MPEG encoder?

LightScribe technology, which allows users to etch labels directly onto CDs and DVDs, finally arrived on GNU/Linux in late 2006. LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (4L) was released in October 2006, with Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe business unit releasing its own Simple Labeler a month later. Both are free downloads with proprietary licenses, but they are currently the only tools available for using LightScribe on GNU/Linux. Both offer basic labeling, but each is limited in its own way.

European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded "unreasonable" royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

[May not seem like a Linux article, but think of things like OOXML and the Mono Project. The European Union is acting against Rambus for submitting standards for certification without disclosing that the standards could not be met without patented technology. - dinotrac]

Blue GNU has launched a simple poll aimed at understanding whether and how FOSS projects market themselves. The 4-week project is an effort to help the community understand marketing and its impact on the progress of various projects.

YaKuake is a Kuake terminal emulator that acts like a videogame drop-down console. Perfect for accessing a console quickly, read on for a review.

Installing Fedora 5 on Toshiba Satellite A135-S2246 laptop. Includes Atheros WiFi. Interesting stuff is around getting Mobile Broadband Wireless Card via PCMCIA Slot to work including a solution for "NO CARRIER" error for Sprint Pantech PX-500 mobile broadband card.