Showing all newswire headlines

I recently asked Linus Torvalds for his thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and BSD, and about how much synergy there might be between the Linux kernel and the BSDs.

I tried a whole slew of different Linux systems because I bought a book with a cover-mounted DVD containing five different Linux distributions. All in all, the HP Compaq Presario M2312 comes off quite well as a desktop PC rather than a laptop.

Companies are increasingly considering Linux, but persuading them to buy is a challenge. Resellers have to fight the perception that it's a risk Linux adoption in Canada is growing, in both volume and acceptance. According to a recent survey by IDC Canada, the server market for Linux grew more than 36 per cent here in 2003-2004, beating the Windows server market's growth of about 27 per cent for the same year.

What I started in 1984 was the development of the GNU operating system. All the operating systems for modern computers of the day were proprietary; users were forbidden to share them, and could not get the source code to change them. The only way to use computers in freedom was to replace those systems with a free operating system. That's what GNU was meant to do. The Free Software Foundation was started in late 1985 to raise funds for GNU development, and more generally to promote free software.

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. [Note from Dave: it's a slow news day so here's something to read. Better than nothing, I say!]

One day I was searching the web and found either a SuSE or Red Hat site that was saying that you could set up your swap in a RAID fashion. They were talking about a large server with a lot of disk drives, and you could put a swap partition on many of them, and set all these swap partitions to the same priority. This way they would work more like they were in a RAID setup, and the speed of swap writing and reading from the disks would be improved.

The GNU General Public Licence version 2 was released in 1991. Since then the software sector and the free software landscape has changed significantly and the Free Software Foundation is working on an updated licence to account for a reflect these changes. Yesterday Richard Stallman and FSF legal adviser Eben Moglen released an article explaining a few of the issues at stake in drafting GPL version 3.

Hey -- did you know that Brazil had become the world's biggest advocate of free/open source software for developing countries? If you've read WorldChanging over the last couple of years, there's no way you could have missed it. But if you need to get up to speed on Brazil's adoption of Linux and the free software philosophy, the BBC has a useful article. It hits all the key points, and does so relatively clearly.

Digital Techniques has used embedded Linux, off-the-shelf mini-ITX parts, and high-end PCI sound cards to build a line of digital home music servers. The Blackbird servers have 80-300GB hard drives, lots of networking options, and a web interface supporting control from a wireless PDA.

It's sometimes easier for a successful volunteer Free Software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it. While paying developers is easy, it can carry unintended negative consequences. This article explores problems and benefits of paying developers in volunteer free and open source projects and surveys strategies that projects have used to successfully finance development while maintaining their volunteer nature.

ImpiLinux 2005, the homegrown South African Linux distribution making inroads into the SA market is an attractive and usable platform for users. Walter Kruse takes it for a spin to see see what has changed since the last big release seven months ago.

Microsoft has agreed to make it easier for competitors around the world to gain access to detailed technical information about the Windows server operating system as part of its plan to comply with the European Union's March 2004 ruling against the company and its abuse of monopoly power. Microsoft's proposal, which the EU Commission is now checking for compliance, would make Windows compatible with more open source software, but disagreements over licensing and distribution rights remain.

The Korean language Mozilla Web site was hacked and defaced this week, prompting calls from some corners of the open source community to gain control of the independent site.

OSDir.com Weekly Screenshot Tours for June 11, 2005. We had another great week in the screenshot department at OSDir, grabbing nice shots of SLAX 5.0.5 Popcorn Edition, B2D 20050603 PureKDE, Progeny Debian 3.0 Preview 2, Kaella 2.0.1, Kate OS 2.01, Berry Linux 0.58, FoX Linux 0.8, KOffice 1.4 Release Candidate and Klax KDE 3.4.1 Live-CD.

Foreword -- Paul McKenney recently summarized seven approaches to real-time Linux, in an epic 6,000-word post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml). McKenney's original post is reproduced below; curious readers are invited to consult the lkml

While the headlines have been dominated by what Apple is bringing to the Intel platform and what Microsoft is taking out of Longhorn, Linux vendors Linspire and Xandros have continued to improve their business desktops.

As a software version-numbering aficionado, I have recently concluded that the FOSS world has gone mad and is hurling itself -- users and developers alike -- into a black hole of confusion and long-winded explanations.

Taiwanese network equipment manufacturer Planet used embedded Linux to build a small VoIP proxy server that supports 50 concurrent users. The SIP-50 is a standalone SIP-compliant proxy server with NAT traversal capabilities that can connect public and private VoIP networks, Planet says.

It seems that in its history former proprietary workstation maker Silicon Graphics has been in and out of the channel more times that a hovercraft. But now it is back, with a soon to be announced Suse Linux based Itanium II powered server and a storage product which will be reseller exclusive. Details in July.

While the federal government encourages agencies to consider open source, local and state governments will more aggressively push adoption in the long run.