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"Hi, my name is Oracle and I'll be your Linux company today." In this Cyber Cynic podcast, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks, will Oracle really try to become a Linux power?

Mozilla announced yestreday that it has received over 280 community-created videos promoting Firefox as entries to the Firefox Flicks marketing campaign. Firefox is the award-winning, free Web browser from Mozilla that has been downloaded over 160 million times.

Open source software and development can push governments of developing nations ahead in the world, but only if they participate as producers of the technology themselves, United Nations University (UNU) researchers say. While they say developing regions such as China, East Asia, India, and South America are among the biggest markets for open source software, UNU officials worry that there may be too few open source developers in those regions.

[Sure. Let's keep the proprietary software vendors in there so we can keep them in a state of dependence. Let's teach them now to depend on vendors who break promises and fail to solve problems. Throw some money at them to placate them in the meanwhile. Free Software is a reaction against proprietary software. To miss that is to miss the whole point. - dcparris]

What would you do if you found someone who was violating the GNU GPL? Would you report them? I should probably tell the story first.

[This guy wants to bring about a peacful resolution to a violation of the GPL. Click the Read More Link to see what LXer says. - DC Parris]

This week, three East Asian companies announced a joint venture to create a new enterprise-level Linux distro called — are you ready? — Asianux.

  LXer Feature: 20-Apr-06

I am a member of the Phoenix Linux Users Group or PLUG, and at our last meeting Google gave a presentation on how Linux is used at Google. Vince and Pat explained what Linux is used for and many of the challenges they have faced in pushing the Linux envelope.

  LXer Feature: 21-Jan-06

Last week, LXer Editor-in-Chief, Don Parris had strong words for Microsoft's Port 25 project. He suggested that Microsoft's appalling behavior has left a credibility gap that would hurt their Port 25 effort. The question remains whether Microsoft can or will change their behavior. Can Microsoft earn the trust of the FOSS Community? Will they even try?

A Chinese company is touting an inexpensive Linux-based computer as a way to close the "digital divide." YellowSheepRiver's $150 "Municator" appears to be available now, with a three-month leadtime, suggesting it could reach market well ahead of MIT's $100 "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) device.

It's been quite the Blu-ray party today, what with the LF-MB121JD from Panasonic, the BRD-UM2 and BRD-AM2B from IODATA, and that decisive word from Panasonic's CEO that dashed any hopes left for talks between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps. Now Sony is joining the club with the pre-order availability of their BDP-S1 Blu-ray player. That's the good news. The bad news is that the unit will be going for the expected $1000, and has a targeted availability of August 15th. Sure, all that 1080p, multi channel digital audio, and HDMI action is still here, but Sony sure isn't driving that hard of a bargain.

[Before you rush right out and buy one, you may want to see the negative impact of these devices on your freedom. The FSF links to the Boycott Blue Ray page as well. - dcparris]

KOCHI: The Software Division of Computer Society of India in association with CICC, Singapore, National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software of CDAC, Chennai, and RMK Engineering College, will hold a five-day southern regional training programme on Open Source Software from May 22 to 26 in Chennai.

When Josh at DebCentral.com came to me with his new plans for renovating our Debian Homepage RSS links page, I must say, I was less than enthusiastic. I've never been much use for or been a fan of RSS. When he showed me the new Ajax / DHTML which he was intending to implement, my ears picked up, but my question was still 'is it really a practical and usable feature. Well, it's now finished and up at http://debianhomepage.org/. All I can say is 'Wow!', It really lives up to the promises. I think this is something that many of us will find entirely useful, and if nothing else, fun to play with. Just give it a try.

You might know how to write code or build applications, but do you know what is required of a good Linux sysadmin?

The coming of Fusion, both as products and architecture, is inevitably set to change the ground on which applications development has stood for many years, as is its part in the move towards delivery Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). But the company is aware it is now stepping out into uncharted ground, where some of its claims are inevitably based on assumption.

In a move to make the freely distributed Linux operating system a stronger alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, a group of major Linux distributors announced Friday they have united on a standard set of components for desktop versions of Linux.

This week, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released updates to address security problems with Firefox, Cacti, the Mozilla Suite, the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) and several others.

On the machine's front is a computer screen running on a Linux operating system. It displays menus of possible flavors and allows the user to create any combination, such as low-fat coffee ice cream with Oreo cookies. If the machine runs out of a flavor, it stops putting it on the menu and sends a message to MooBella asking for a refill.

[Whatever you do, don't try this with Windows, boys and girls. Who knows what you'd wind up with after recovering from a crash! - dcparris]

Scheduling Backup Jobs using at and crontab

Xandros, provider of easy-to-use Linux alternatives to Windows, and TOLIS Group, developer of the ultra-reliable BRU announced an agreement to integrate a complete BRU backup and recovery system into the forthcoming Xandros Server – the first truly viable alternative to the dominance of Microsoft Windows servers in the SMB (small-to-medium business) and departmental markets.

While explaining the new splice() and tee() buffer management system calls [story], Linus Torvalds made reference to some possible future extensions. This included vmsplice(), a system call "to basically do a 'write to the buffer', but using the reference counting and VM traversal to actually fill the buffer." Reviewing the implications of using such a system call lead to a comparison with FreeBSD's ZERO_COPY_SOCKET which uses COW (copy on write).

Linus explained that while this may look good on specific benchmarks, it actually introduces extra overhead, "the thing is, the cost of marking things COW is not just the cost of the initial page table invalidate: it's also the cost of the fault eventually when you _do_ write to the page, even if at that point you decide that the page is no longer shared, and the fault can just mark the page writable again." He went on to explain, "The COW approach does generate some really nice benchmark numbers, because the way you benchmark this thing is that you never actually write to the user page in the first place, so you end up having a nice benchmark loop that has to do the TLB invalidate just the _first_ time, and never has to do any work ever again later on." Linus didn't pull any punches when he summarized:

"I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home."