02.03.09

GNU/Linux

• Adding more power to emergence of Linux in Gujarat India

  We have been finding the footmarks of people loving Linux here in Gujarat. There were many whom we came accross but all had Linux for part time. People recongnise Linux as Money Saving and Secured OS but there are not many who are confident to give Linux a try for maintaining or increasing their productivity. The big question for them is compatibility for windows apps they are familiar with.

• Keeping those old PCs (or netbooks) moving along

  Plenty of us have old PCs stuck in the corners of classrooms, machines we just can’t afford to replace and whose owners just can’t do without. At the same time, more and more of us are rolling out netbooks and inexpensive hardware instead of investing in the latest and greatest “Vista-capable” computers. My usual answer to this would be “Linux! Yay!”

  But do we really need to install Xubuntu on a 7-year old computer when it’s running just fine on Windows 98 or Windows 2000? Obviously, there are security risks to running these dated operating systems, but oftentimes, it’s more important for us just to keep people functional. Perhaps the machines are only used for word processing or accessing specific applications with minimal Internet access (if a computer only hits your student information system and sits behind an adequate firewall, chances of a breach are pretty low).

• How to build a powerful distributed computer

  PC hardware is now so cheap that buying a couple of extra machines and wiring them into the same computing pool could make a very cost-effective expansion. This is what we are going to build, and we’re going to use Ubuntu Linux to do it. Linux can take cluster computing tasks like these in its stride, and you don’t need to fork out for a licence for every machine.

• 10 reasons to Switch Over to Linux from Windows

  1. Free: Linux is an open source project. As they say, it is free as in free beer. All you need to install Linux is an Internet connection to download the iso files and a CD where you can burn the iso. Compare this with Windows which costs a lot!

  2. Linux distributions are COMPLETE: All the decent Linux distributions are complete: they include almost all the applications like office applications, pdf reader, web servers, compilers, etc. You don’t have to pay anything to download and install these applications. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice, which is a perfect substitute for MS Office.

  3. Virus, Spyware, Adware ? None of these can affect a Linux based system. In fact, you don’t even have to install an anti-virus software which bogs down system performance in Windows.

• Linux Community Begins Crafting Radio Ad

  So when does it run? Who gets to run it? Who knows…? We are working several funding angles now. These spots are going to be, for some, the first information they’ve heard about linux. If you decide you want to submit your own original work, keep this in mind. But it’s open source so make it what you want. Just remember, this raw source belongs to the community and is released under Creative Commons licensing.

• Linux Gazette: February 2009 (#159)

  * Mailbag
  * Talkback
  * 2-Cent Tips
  * News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
  * rI18N or The Real Internationalization Project, by Anonymous
  * Installing VMWare Server 2 on Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), by Deividson Luiz Okopnik
  * Away Mission: 2008 in Review – part 1, by Howard Dyckoff
  * Hyperestraier Redux – A User-friendly Approach, by Ben Okopnik
  Automating Hyperestraier’s indexing and web interface configuration
  * Using The Red Hat Rescue Environment, by Joey Prestia

• Kernel Space

  • Interview with Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux

    DW: What are the most exciting things coming up in the Linux kernel?

    LT: The things I personally care about tend to not even be on the radar of most people. The changes to the very lowest levels of the suspend and resume model are an example of something I look at closely and think are interesting. Most other people don’t think that kind of thing matters – at least as long as we don’t break their laptops suspending Of the actual stuff that has any visible impact to users, I guess the interesting area is that we’re getting all these next-generation file systems and they’re going to battle it out. “ext4 vs Btrfs in the thunderdome.”

• Distributions

  • Debian

    • Debian Lenny Out in 2 Weeks

      Release update: deep freeze, planned dates, and remaining bugs

      As you’ve probably read by now, the Installer Team has announced [1] the availability of the second, and hopefully final, release candidate for the Lenny installer. Testing of these images is highly encouraged.

      Following the plan outlined in the previous release update [2], we are now in deep freeze, which means that we’ll only be migrating to testing packages that fix RC bugs.

    • A Few Questions For Gustavo Noronha

      How did you end up using Debian and becoming a DD?

      Somewhat of a long story: I started using GNU/Linux because I wanted to learn how to program and I got to know that C compilers were easily available in GNU/Linux distributions. I started with Conectiva Marumbi, in late 1998, and when I bought a Debian CD in early 1999 I was instantly in love.

  • Red Hat

    • Red Hat Calls For Papers For Upcoming Events

      Red Hat issued a call for papers this week for its upcoming conferences, Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. The co-located events are scheduled to take place September 1-4, 2009 in Chicago, IL.

  • Ubuntu

    • Two weeks of Ubuntu

      I think the same Ubuntu installed on a faster PC switches on some eye candy, so during the installation it’s able to tell slow from fast PCs, this is good.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sputnik Announces Sputnik-Powered Version of the NETGEAR Open Source Wireless-G Router WGR614L

  Sputnik(R), a leading provider of software for venue-branded, access-controlled Wi-Fi networks, announced SputnikNet support for the NETGEAR Open Source Wireless-G Router WRG614L.

• Cisco Opens Up To Open Source

  Networking and telecom hardware giant Cisco Systems is now squarely aiming its product line at the Asterisk PBX market segment and other open-source products, apparently ending a long-standing unspoken strategy of exclusive support for proprietary telecommunications systems.

  Cisco officials now openly say support for standards used in open source communications software — such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) — is a good business strategy for the company.

  Asterisk, the popular open source package developed by Hunstville, AL-based Digium, Inc., for example, now owns more than 15 percent of the North American PBX market, concentrated in the SMB end, but making inroads with enterprise too. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence, but in the wake of Nortel’s collapse, Yahoo has decided to embrace open source and is working with Digium to deploy Asterisk throughout Yahoo’s global communications net, using Cisco SIP end points on the desktop.

• Building Automation Sustainability

  Reinvention of our Building Automation “BA” Industry is necessary not because we want to, but because we have to. The present financial times are rapidly redefining what is sustainable and what is not and Building Automation in its present form is not. BA is not achieving anywhere close to its potential. Typical heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems are 50% efficient compared to fully integrated systems. Source: U.S. Green Building Council, Cisco Systems, The Hartman Co.

• Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary)

  There are plenty of new databases coming out, aiming to tackle the massively scalable domain that Google’s BigTable pioneered. On the Radar mailing list, Jesse pointed out Cassandra (Facebook’s offering) and Mike Loukides countered with Hypertable, asking “We’re sort of being overrun with BigTable-style databases; I wonder what’s going to win?”. (Artur observed, “Cassandra is less like BigTable and more like a distributed column store with autocreating and searching in column namespace, but lacks a lot of indexing needed for BigTable.”)

• Spreading the FOSS message the Gandhian way

  There are some among the FOSS community who pay lip service to Mahatma Gandhi when talking about this genre of software. There are others who actually put Gandhi’s methods into practice to spread the message.

• Programs

  • Midnight Commander wakes from deep sleep

    The Midnight Commander file manager developers have restarted work on the, once quite popular, file manager for the Linux/Unix console. Midnight Commander was inspired by the famous Norton Commander for DOS.

  • 14 of the Best Free Linux Wiki Engines

    A Wiki engine is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system. This facilitates web pages being created and edited using a web browser. This type of software is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers.

  • FSFE launches Free PDF Readers campaign

    The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.

  • Talend eyes master data management, parallelism

    Open source data integration vendor Talend is planning to release a master data management product by the end of the year, as well as to offer a massively parallel processing architecture in current products, according to company executives.

• Funding

  • FOSS advocacy in Africa receives a big boost from the Open Society Institute for West Africa

    The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has received a grant from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) towards the FOSS Advocacy for West Africa (FOSSWAY) project. FOSSWAY is a one-million dollar project which is intended to entrench advocacy for free and open source software in the Western part of the African continent beginning January 2009.

• Sun

  • The Grill: Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on the hot seat

    We are preconfigured for the downturn. If you think about the discretionary expenses that go into operating a data center, first and foremost there’s the physical plant itself — the physical space, the power consumption, the HVAC. So all the work that we do around energy efficiency and on getting optimal performance — it’s because the environment ends up being a huge operating expense for our customers. And to the extent that we can help them lower their environmental impact, we’re also lowering the economic impact on their businesses. That’s clearly Job 1.

• Programming

  • Rails 2.3 preview eyed for Monday

    A release candidate for version 2.3 of the popular Ruby on Rails Web application development framework is being targeted for release today, the founder of the project, David Heinemeier Hansson, said on Friday.

Leftovers

• UK Auhtorities Descibe Sharing as “Piracy” to Crack Down on Web, ISPs

  Digital Britain: Lord Carter vows to force ISPs to crack down on web piracy

  The communications minister, Lord Carter, has pledged to deliver broadband to every home in the UK by 2012 and intends to introduce legislation to force internet service providers to crack down on web piracy.

• The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act

  A proposal to reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and prohibit public access to publicly funded research in the United States. Introduced in 2006.

• Support for Whistleblowers

  The bill would “create specific protections for those who expose abuses of authority by those trying to manipulate or censor scientific research in federal agencies for political purposes…”

• Debating the Ban on Domestic Propaganda

  “I want to make sure that we strengthen prohibitions against domestic covert propaganda campaigns aimed essentially at breaking down the Constitutional barriers between who controls policy and who makes war,” stressed Representative Paul Hodes. “It’s an important point, given the recent history.”