Showing all newswire headlines

Draft of an open letter to the LKML about faster Linux world domination. Hope people find it interesting and would appreciate feedback.

If we were already talking to our computers, etc. as we should be, I wouldn’t feel a need to write this to you. Given current rates of progress, Linux still seems a generation away from being the priceless piece of free software useful to every child and PhD. This army your kernel enables now has millions of people, but they are not working efficiently. My mail one year ago listed the biggest workitems, but I realize now I should have focused on one. In a sentence, I have discovered and “proved” that we need GC lingua franca(s).

In less than three weeks the Southern California Linux Expo will be hosting their annual Linux conference in Los Angeles for a ninth year. There will also be SCALE University, an open-source cloud day, and various activities for the openSUSE, Fedora, and PostgreSQL projects. It's also where OpenBenchmarking.org is making its debut alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" during my conference speech.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has announced that it is moving to an all Linux based trading platform when it relocates to Johannesburg. The JSE currently operates out of London and runs on the TradElect platform which is based on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000. It plans to move to MilleniumIT's Millennium Exchange platform by the first half of 2012.

If you caught the Super Bowl over the weekend, and paid attention to the advertisements--which always go for a pretty penny--you no doubt saw Motorola's ad for its Android tablet, and other ads featuring the open source Android mobile OS. Aside from the notable fact that a Linux-based operating system was right there in between ads for cars and colas, it was also clear that big companies mean business in competing with Apple's iPad tablet with Android-based offerings. That doesn't mean the first-generation Android tablets are necessarily competitive, though. In fact, there are criticisms of them rolling in.

On 20 October 2004, the first version of a new and unknown project called Ubuntu was released. It was called the Warty Warthog. The only thing that most Linux users knew about Ubuntu was that it was based on Debian and bankrolled by some millionaire they had never heard of. Little did anyone know that said millionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, would invest so significantly in a much needed aspect of open source – the user experience. I'm not going to talk about how Ubuntu was formed, the impact it's had on Linux or the growth of the project and community; much of that has already been said.

The Linux/FOSS world offers a wealth of excellent Linux-based groupware server choices, suitable for small shops to giant enterprises. Eric Geier rounds up six to get you started.

The Debian Project announced a stable version 6.0, code-named & Squeeze,& available for the first time in a preview FreeBSD version as well as the usual GNU/Linux implementation. Debian 6.0 also offers a faster, dependency-based boot system, streamlines installation procedures, and splits off non-open source firmware from the kernel for separate download, permitting completely & free& installations.

Believe it or not, there is already a discovery dispute in Oracle v. Google. And I'm really glad, because that's the only way we can find out what has been going in discovery. What we find out now is that both parties have served the other with interrogatories, and neither is happy with the other's answers, so both are writing letters to the judge, calling them motions to compel. We get to see Google's answers to Oracle's interrogatories, and that really fleshes out Google's position for me.

[Sorry I don't see what this text has to do with the LO review TA]

If you want to try out a new Linux distro, be it the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily ISO or any other (I've only tested it with Ubuntu though!) and don't want to burn a CD each time you want to try a new daily build (and you don't have an USB memory stick around), you can use a cool GRUB 2 feature that lets you boot a live CD ISO directly from your hard disk.

Debian 6.0, alias Squeeze, has been nearly two years in development. The new version is the first completely free Stable Release – and also the first Debian distribution that not only has the Linux kernel, but also the FreeBSD kernel.

Forget Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. We look at five operating systems that are now mostly history

[I hope that's the correct link, TA]

ike most office workers, my day is generally split up into two phases. The second phase, where I spend 90% of my time, is spent switching between the 3 or 4 primary applications I need to use to get my work done. For this kind of activity Linux (and indeed any GUI based OS created in the last decade) works well, because the focus of desktop operating systems is on allowing you simultaneously to run a small number of monolithic applications that perform a specific job. On the other hand the first phase of my day is where I get warmed up for the mental triathlon to come. I read my emails, check my news feeds, browse my calendar and review my task list. In this phase I am a consumer of information, with the possible exception of composing a few short emails.

The strangely named Linux Console seems to be designed to work equally well as a Live distribution and as a permanent installation. It offers an LXDE based desktop alongside a collection of standard applications. It could be used as a typical desktop Linux distro, but I have a feeling that it could see some use as a front-end in appliance type set-ups that need to be a bit more of a typical desktop layout than some of the kiosk or media player distributions. However, I'm not absolutely sure what the aim of this distro actually is.

DockBarX, an amazing Gnome panel / Avant Window Navigator taskmanager applet was updated to version 0.43 today, this new release bringing media buttons for all music players that show up in the Ubuntu Sound menu and DockManager support which means that you can use the Docky helpers in DockBarX.

TEONW is a relatively small BASIC program, just 13 kB source, but is such an awful mess that I was barely able to understand and code the entry of the basic parameters: yield, height and population density. If I ever wanted to convert this thirty year old spaghetti to Forth I needed some help. Badly..

Linux vendors look to improve user experience with a common Linux app store. Apps are the big thing in technology right now. Any company that has an operating system but doesn't have a dedicated app store is doing it wrong. Traditionally app stores were limited to mobile devices such as the iPod and Android platform but now it looks likely that Linux vendors will also jump on the app store train to spur greater adoption of desktop Linux.

This is a nice collection of 19 open source games for Linux that contains most addictive, fun and refined games. For some of these games, also installation steps are included.

I'm willing to bet I might be a bit older than many people who read this blog. Some by not so much, and I know I am junior in age to a few. It's probably to those few that this will make the most sense.

This tutorial explains how to create a virtual machine with CentOS 5.x on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and how to set up a LAMP system (LAMP stands for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP") in this virtual machine. We use an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to set this virtual machine up.

Finally, after 24 Months of constant developement Debian Squeeze 6.0 has been released today, this release comes with many updates and new features, it includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments as well as all kinds of server applications, numerous updated software packages, over 10,000 new packages like the browser Chromium, the monitoring solution Icinga and more.