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LXer Feature: 12-Apr-2010

This week we have Jim Zemlin and SJVN weighing in on IBM's supposed breaking of their own pledge to open source many of their patents. Are HP and Dell giving up on netbooks? What will come after Linux? Jack Wallen sees the future, a review of Tiny Me and much more in this week's LXWR.

Avant Window Navigator is a dock for the Free Desktop which shows your launchers and open applications. It also contains support for extensions, via plugins for third-party applications, which communicate with the dock with DBus, and via applets, which allows for workspace switchers, system trays, clocks, etc., to be embedded in the dock. These applets can be written in Vala, Python or C.

We are several days into Script Frenzy, a thirty day challenge to write a script, either a movie, play, television or graphic magazine. The challenge is similar to the fall exercise known as National Novel Writing Month where you have to write a novel. But where NaNo is about word count, Script Frenzy is about page count. But this is not the only difference.

Last week AMD launched the FirePro V8800, which is their first workstation graphics card derived from an ATI Evergreen graphics processor and designed to be a step-up from the previously reviewed FirePro V8700 and FirePro V8750. The AMD FirePro V8800 features 2GB of GDDR5 video memory with 147.2 GB/s of bandwidth, 1600 Stream processors, four DisplayPort outputs, ATI Eyefinity support, DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.0 support, OpenCL 1.0 capable, a full 30-bit display pipeline, Multi-View display support, and much. We have now carried out our Linux testing of this new ultra high-end workstation graphics card and have the results to share this morning.

Father of Java, son of Canada Oracle's chief technology officer James Gosling, inherited from the take over of Sun, is leaving the company.…

This tutorial is being written to help you install Drop Bear to a chroot environment. Drop Bear is a relatively small SSH 2 server and client. It is an alternative lightweight program for openssh and it is designed for environments with low memory and processor resources, such as embedded systems.

In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec. Google's support for the project could be a signal that the search giant is significantly warming up to open video. Although HTML5 delivers open standards for Web video playback, browser vendors have not been able to reach a consensus on the codec. Some parties favor Ogg Theora, a royalty-free codec that can be freely redistributed because it is thought to be unencumbered by patents. Others favor H.264, a codec that offers technically superior compression but is burdened with costly licensing fees.

The screen is a high bright LCD 2 to 3 times brighter than a typical LCD screen and so it can be viewed in many lighting conditions without appearing dim. This system is also sealed and water proof.

Packt (pronounced Packed) Publishing is an online publisher of open source related books, but they are also dedicated to the "cause" of open source. So much so, that "...When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project." The folks at PacktPub.com periodically submit announcements of new book releases to the news pages of The Linux Tutorial site, so I'm quite aware of them. Recently, they emailed me and asked if I'd review MySQL Admin Cookbook. So here we are.

I knew in advance that venting my frustrations with Ubuntu in the form of an article yesterday would stir up a hornet's nest. [...] So far, with only a very few exceptions, the comments and discussion around my criticism of Ubuntu has been respectful and on topic, even when people strongly disagreed with me. This says something very positive about the Ubuntu community. Having read all the comments I'd like to clarify my thoughts on the subject. First and foremost, with all my criticism of Ubuntu, I am not questioning the competence or the expertise of the developers at Canonical. Far from it. As I pointed out in the article the folks behind Ubuntu have proven they are capable of delivering a quality product. That isn't at issue.

A month ago the Canonical crew working on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS received an unreleased Catalyst 10.4 driver from AMD for inclusion with the Lucid Lynx since the publicly available ATI Catalyst drivers had not -- and to this day still do not -- support the X.Org Server 1.7 used by this next Ubuntu release. Similar pre-releases for Ubuntu have happened in the past when AMD hasn't been quick to the game in supporting new Linux kernels and X Servers.

Setting up Last.fm streaming and scrobbling in Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, is fast and easy. The Rhythmbox music player provides scrobbling support and the Last.fm client will let you stream your favorite stations in a nice stand-alone application. Here’s a screencast and written instructions on exactly how to set things up.

Due to absence in meantime pygrub support for ZFS 24 in Xen 4.0 unix kernel and boot_archive have to be copied off the disk to Dom0. In my case OSOL 134 PV DomU was able to obtain IP address just once after first boot up configuring SMF . Afterwards it required restarting ( or reenabling) service svc:/network/physical:nwam, what finally brought me to accomplish this procedure as OSOL service , because no analog of /etc/rc.local exists on OSOL.

"With the introduction of HTML5 and its implementation in all major web browsers, it's becoming clear that Adobe is now in a place where a lack of innovation from the company could cause not only a loss of profit for Adobe, but also the eventual abandonment and deprecation of the product "Adobe Flash" by every product and service that currently supports it."

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2010.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems, and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Why spend your hard earned money on proprietary software when open source software provides a similar (or better) amount of functionality? That's a very good question.

This happens lot of times. I login as a normal user and start to edit httpd.conf or lighttpd.conf or named.conf in vim / vi text editor. However, I'm not able to save changes due to permission issue (all config files are owned by root). How do I save file without creating a temporary file (/tmp/httpd.conf) and then move the same (mv /tmp/httpd.conf /etc/httpd) as root using vim / vi itself?

Patents could lead to the mutually assured destruction of the software industry and the parading of pledged patents in the opening of a dispute between IBM and TurboHercules threatens to upset the only progress towards a safer world for open source.

Apple might have just tipped its iPhone OS 4.0, but Android has jumped to nine percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to ComScore. Meanwhile, Nielsen says U.S. smartphone sales will eclipse feature-phone sales by 2011, and ABI Research predicts that over 800 million Android apps will be downloaded this year, making it the fastest-growing OS in app downloads.

Open source developer at Microsoft, Garrett Serack announced today plans to bring a native running open source platform to Windows. In a blog posted today, Serack announced the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp). The post outlines the challenges of developing open source applications in a Windows environment and the differences between developing on UNIX and Linux and Windows.