Showing all newswire headlines

Every conference, at least the good ones, has a theme to tease out and lessons to learn. LinuxCon North America 2011 was one of the best, and having the good fortune to be in Vancouver, BC last week for LinuxCon, I learned quite a bit. Now, I'm not just talking about technical stuff. There were plenty of great technical sessions and case studies. For instance, I learned quite a bit about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) during Lance Albertson's talk Friday. But what I'm talking about are the larger lessons and themes that come out of a conference. When you get a bunch of people in an industry together, you often find some larger trends worth thinking about. LinuxCon was definitely no exception.

In a flurry of filing activity in the Oracle v. Google case this past week, a couple of rulings by the court stand out. First, Google has won the right 325 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the Oracle affirmative defense of "assignor estoppel." Second, Google has won the right 328 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the issue of infringement outside the U.S. under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f). This last one is really important for reasons we will explain.

In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

Back in January, in a post "Does Android Have a Forked Future?" we explored the fact that Google seemed poised to explore several different paths with its Android mobile OS. Specifically, we noted that with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), Google seemed to be aiming targeted features at tablet developers, while other versions of Android would be more appropriate for smartphones and other devices. Since then, many stories have appeared charging that Google is being less than open with Android, and it's generally accepted that Google won't necessarily release the newest version of Android to all hardware developers at once. With Google's Motorola Mobility acquisition, how likely is it that Google will pursue an even more closed Android strategy?

A new development version of GIMP has been released version 2.7.3. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

This tutorial shows how to set up network RAID1 with the help of DRBD on two Debian Squeeze systems. DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device and allows you to mirror block devices over a network. This is useful for high-availability setups (like a HA NFS server) because if one node fails, all data is still available from the other node.

Discovering new distros is the fun part of open source software. Here is a very brief list of three new releases and an even more brief discussion, allowing you linux-logothe pleasure of exploring these first hand.

Wind River announced a new version of its Linux-ready, embedded device test automation software. Wind River Test Management 4.0 can now identify high-risk segments in production code, as well as focus testing solely on changes made between builds, among other new features, says the company.

One of the main reasons not to run Debian Stable is that you have newer hardware that doesn't respond well to the older packages in the release. For those with Intel Sandy Bridge and other newer chips, the X server as it is packaged in Squeeze can be a problem, which can be solved by running Testing or Sid, or now with X in Squeeze Backports.

TeamViewer is excellent software for allowing the control of your computer from remote places, sharing the desktop and transferring the files between the computers or compatible devices all through the internet. TeamViewer is available not only for computer operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux, but also for mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.

Sales of the "discontinued" HP TouchPad have been brisk after its price was cut to as little as $99, and hackers are working overtime to port Ubuntu and Android to the WebOS-based tablet. Meanwhile, analysts speculate on who might acquire HP's WebOS operations, which include a 2,000-plus patent portfolio that one analyst says could recoup the cost of HP's Palm acquisition.

Ubuntu Software Center is seeing its second round of upgrades, this time changes are even more dramatic. Good to see Canonical putting so much thrust on Software Center which has the potential to become Ubuntu's major money spinner in the near future.

There has been a lot of talking, over the past few months, about a Firefox extension called Firesheep which, in the words of author Eric Butler,

“demonstrates HTTP session hijacking attacks“.

Discussions around the Internet on the matter have been quite heated, with lots of people thanking him for his efforts in raising awareness on the security issues of modern Internet applications, and many others blaming him for making it way too easy for anyone -even people who know close to nothing regarding security- to hack into other people’s accounts on social networks, webmails and other web applications, provided some conditions are met.

LXer Feature: 22-Aug-2011

Is the tech press too focused on negativity, to the detriment of the FOSS community? I don't know how he does it, but Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flamefests. In his latest piece he discusses some of KDE4 developer Aaron Seigo's thoughts that the tech press presents an unbalanced, negative perspective, and sparks yet another round of heated discussions. So what's going on here?

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.

KDE Italia, the Italian community backing the KDE Italia website and the KDE Italia forum, is pleased to invite you to CoNAsSL 2011, an end-summer event aimed at gathering all the Italian associations involved in Free Software. The event will take place on 9, 10 and 11 of September, in a beautiful location: the Tuscan seaside!

For the second time this year, Canonical, through David Planella, announced a few days ago that the Ubuntu App Developer Week event will take place between 5th to 9th September, 2011, on the Ubuntu IRC channel.

If Google were to make Android proprietary, with devices built exclusively by Motorola, it could earn $10.5 billion in profits by 2015, yet that still may not be worth it, says Piper Jaffray. Meanwhile, Google's Motorola acquisition should bolster Google TV, other analysts say.

If you were hoping that the Linux 3.1 kernel would fix the big power regression problem that's caused by PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) being disabled on more systems since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, you're not in luck. There has not been any active work in this area. Making things worse though for mobile Linux users interested in a long lasting battery is another new regression in the Linux 3.1 kernel. Affected systems can easily see a 30% increase in power consumption simply when comparing the Linux 3.0 kernel to the current code being assembled for Linux 3.1. For an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the power consumption is up by 76% just over the course of this year from Linux kernel regressions.

Almost all of the 25,000 workers at thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region will over the next year begin to use Libre Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons', which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner (about 5.3 million euro) worth of proprietary licences.