11.26.08

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Links 26/11/2008: Fedora 10 Unveiled, One Million Androids by Xmas

Posted in News Roundup at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

IBM’s Transitive buy presents interesting server options
Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 – Raising the bar
Migrating to Linux in a business or large user environment
Can adoption of GNU/Linux help recession?
R1Soft® Releases Free Tool- Linux Hot Copy, Provides Unprecedented Flexibility for System Admins
Closed Linux driver problems described

Why doesn’t Linux aim to offer a stable kernel-level API? There has been debate about it in the past, but Welte explains that the current system has been kept so that “if there’s a technical reason to change the ABI, we can do so.”
Photo Management on Linux – Part 1
Why there are over 2 dozen music players
The evolution of a Linux user
KDE4
- The Vi input mode for Kate is “done”
  
  I just marked the Vi input mode (”V.I.M.”? ) for the Kate kpart as done in the feature plan for KDE 4.2. It feels a bit weird to mark it as done, though, as there are tonnes of things I want to implement after KDE 4.2.
- Better Firefox in KDE4
Ubuntu
Fedora
- Release
- Reviews/Upgrades
Sub-notebooks
- OLPC giveaway program hits Oz
  
  “At linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, about 150 XO laptops were handed out to open source developers, so there’s been a lot of cool development work being done by Australians given that we’ve had some availability in the community”, he said.
- Acer Aspire One netbook – Almost Perfect
Devices
- Robotic arm runs Linux
  
  Zurich, Switzerland-based Neuronics has released an open-source embedded Linux version of its “Katana” robot.” The Katana Robotic Arm runs Linux with Xenomai hard real time extensions on a Freescale MPC5200-based control board, and is aimed at industry, production, and research applications, says the company.
- Linux powers free-to-air (FTA) satellite box
  
  CaptiveWorks has announced a Linux IP set-top box (STB) and digital video broadcast receiver that offers FTA satellite HD video reception, and media center features. The CW-4000HD Linux Media Center is based on Gentoo Linux and other open source projects, says the company.
- Linux hops on STD bus
- Mobile
  - Open Mobility?
  - One million Googlephones expected in ’08
    
    Google’s Android platform appears to be a much hotter seller than first anticipated by HTC, maker of the T-Mobile G1 phone.

F/OSS

Leftovers

BT Bans Talking About Phorm, Erases Earlier Discussions

Is it really so hard to allow open discussion on such a topic? If BT believes that it’s reasonable to use the technology, then why not explain why clearly, responding to the critics? The only reason to erase these discussions is if BT knows that what’s it’s doing is highly questionable, and BT would rather not have to explain itself.
The Bizarre Cathedral – 32
Germany Realizes That Music Samples Can Be Fair Use
Apple Levels DMCA on IPodhash Project

The worst thing about DRM? The things it makes people do. Take the iPodhash project, a group of coders dedicated to reverse-engineering Apple’s database files on the iPod classic and iPod touch. Doing so allows for third-party utilities to access information on the iPod, which is particularly useful for those who want to use their iPods on Linux, since there’s no version of iTunes available for that platform.

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3 Comments

aeshna23 said,

November 26, 2008 at 8:28 am

Roy, you brought us a fun reading list as usual. I just want to comment on the Linux gets out of a recession article, because it’s a little crazy true religion-y. We are currently in the recession we are in because the government regulated the financial sector badly. In the name of helping of minority racial groups, the government forced the banks to lend money to people who couldn’t afford the loans. In response to the banks pleas, the government created too economically stupid entities, FannieMae and FreddieMac to purchase the loans from the banks which the banks shouldn’t have made in the first place. Economists have been ranting about the stupidity of this system for ages. Bush tried to fix the problem in 2003, and McCain in 2005, but to no avail.
Anyway, the tech sector simply isn’t large enough to save the economy when the financial sector is in chaos. And, the reasons given in the article for Linux adoption apply equally well when the economy is humming along just fine. Maybe a bad economy may force some bolder IT moves by some companies, but it’s not going to be enough to change recession to economic growth.
David Gerard said,

November 26, 2008 at 9:32 am

Lucene is just about the best text search available. It’s written in Java, so it’s good the platform it runs on is now free too!

Lucene is the search the Wikimedia Foundation uses (with a tremendous amount of site-specific tweaks. Goal: make the site search as useful as a site-specific Google search). Way better than the default MySQL full-text search, which is good enough for intranet wikis but not much more.
David Gerard said,

November 26, 2008 at 9:33 am

Oh – the only minus point for Lucene: it uses buckets of memory. So if you’re Wikimedia and search is important enough to devote a server to search, that’s the way to go. If you’re not quite that big, think hard.