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Special To LXer - 1 June 06

Locking is a necessary evil in operating systems; without a solid locking regime, different parts of the system will collide when trying to access the same resources, leading to data corruption and general chaos. But locking has hazards of its own; carelessly implemented locking can cause system deadlocks.

[LXer presents this access to LWN's normally subscriber-only content in full cooperation with Jonathan Corbet, Executive editor, LWN.net. LXer hopes you enjoy this free peek at LWN's excellent community magazine and thanks Mr. Corbet for his cooperation.]

Yesterday, Jon 'maddog' Hall contacted LXer to announce the auction of a copy of John Lions' book, Lions' Commentary on UNIX, autographed by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Salus, and Linus Torvalds. This is part of a drive to establish the John Lions Chair in Operating Systems at the University of New South Wales, but for the lucky bid-winner, it's a chance to own a bit of computing history.

Franprix and Leader Price have chosen MySQL to manage the data in their enterprise-wide supply chain and product distribution platforms

If you are an Emacs user who read Joe Brockmeier's Vim tips column on Vim viewports and thought, "Viewports sound useful; can I use them in a real text editor?" The answer is yes.

The mouse, despite all of its admirable qualities, was created by a left-brained thinker and built for left-brained work. Mostly that's fine, but when it comes time to draw an icon or retouch a photograph, you'll be cursing your mouse as the worst input device imaginable -- awkward to hold, awkward to move with, and awkward to click. To get the right side of your brain happy, you need a pressure-sensitive tablet. Here is how to get started in Linux.

If you haven't been paying attention to GNU grep recently, you should be happily surprised by some of the new features and options that have come about with the 2.5 series. They bring it functionality you can't get anywhere else -- including the ability to output only matched patterns (not lines), color output, and new file and directory options.

A portable, small-footprint database targeting embedded and mobile applications has achieved its first stable release. ITTIA's Fuel DB offers full transactional support, along with multi-threaded shared access, and implements a fast, efficient database that can be embedded within applications, the company says.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its Red Hat Summit for customers and partners in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, and Matthew Szulik, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, used his keynote address to talk a little bit about the way that the open source community is fostering the ideals of democracy and transparency and to announce some new open source projects aimed at both commercial enterprises and individual consumers.

Eyeing systems management as the next big market to "go open source," Zenoss, Inc. is now trying to give mid-sized customers another alternative beyond the two main choices available so far: massive suites from the "Big Four" giants or a mishmash of specialized point solutions. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

Microsoft is taking a page out of the open-source community's book where it comes to security. In Windows Vista Beta 2, released last week, the company included a feature called address space layout randomisation (ASLR), a method of foiling some classes of attack that has usually been associated with open-source projects.

[Hmmm... Does Bill know about this? - dcparris]

NASHVILLE, TN -- The second annual Red Hat Summit got underway today at the Opryland Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's CEO, formally opened the event with his keynote address being the first of three days worth of keynotes, parties, and presentations.

I manage about 200 computers running various flavors of Linux and Microsoft Windows in my company. We built a home-grown PHP-based inventory application to store our hardware and software inventory information. The software relied on our updating information manually, whenever there was any change, so as you might expect, the data was always outdated. We replaced our old system with Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation, released under the GNU GPL. OCSNG suited our needs immensely. We could see the benefits almost immediately, as it automated the collection and updating of the data, which is the most crucial part of inventory management.

Year-Over-Year Results Show Continued Growth in Linux and Identity Revenues and Improvement in Overall Profitability

The boss of the VA analyst who was allowed, though not authorized, to take home critical personal information belonging to over 26 million veterans, has finally fallen (or been pushed) onto his sword. No word on the fate of other personnel who covered up the theft. To hammer home official incompetence, the VA is offering a reward for the return of the equipment that held the data, apparently employing a theory that burglars don't know how to copy data.

Foreword -- The embedded market is a service industry, because off-the-shelf products are fundamentally ill-suited to the unique requirements of specialized embedded devices, argues Curt Schacker in this brief guest column. Schacker is CEO of embedded services company Embedded Solution Partners, and a veteran of Wind River and Ready Systems.

BEDFORD, Mass., May 31, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Collax, Inc., a leading European vendor of affordable, turn-key, Linux-based server solutions for small and medium businesses, today announced that Paula Hunter, formerly of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), has joined the management team as vice president of U.S. marketing.

An interesting interview with the developer of the minimalistic yet mighty Puppy Linux. The focus is on the features that make Puppy great.

How many MIT scientists does it take to build a Linux cluster? Just one, at least in the school's Department of Chemical Engineering.

SEATTLE -- Every year, Microsoft holds a Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). This year, WinHEC was immediately followed by a small, informal two-day "unconference" dubbed FreedomHEC. Though not as large as WinHEC, FreedomHEC was a great chance for developers to get up close and personal with Linux kernel developers.

Games under GNU/Linux have usually been a lacklustre affair. For every Tux Racer, there are a hundred sub-standard Pac-man clones you’d be embarrassed to advocate. For every commercial version of Quake, there’s a hundred other worthy games the publisher elected not to port to GNU/Linux. Without good games, there’s no market, and without the market, no effort is spared. And so the cycle continues. This article looks at two of the areas in which GNU/Linux games have succeeded, and a new device that combines them both, which could help expose GNU/Linux to the populous.