07.30.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Howto migrate to Linux

  Advantages of Linux

  * The company will spend less money in IT resources. Less license fees (free in most cases) and less hardware is needed to run the same services in Linux.
  * Technical Department will spend less time fixing problems and they will have more time to improve the company’s IT services. Due to the open-source nature of Linux, the IT department will have unlimited control on the software it uses.
  * The employees of the company will have faster computers with less problems, so they will work more efficiently.

• 10 Cool Unix/Linux Personalized License Plates

  Some people have taken their love for Unix and Linux on the streets literally by displaying their Unix/Linux-related personalized license plates. Though I haven’t actually seen one in real life yet, I have collected several photos that will show some of these cool custom license plates in action, which I’m going to share with all of you.

• Will I Go Back?

  I’m using the Linux distribution Ubuntu for over a year now – I hopped on the train with version 8.04 LTS. Although I still ‘need’ Windows for a number of things, like vector editing for example, – no vector drawing software in Linux satisfies my needs – I am more than pleased with this operating system.

• Ubuntu Experiment – Part 1

• On The FAA’s Slow And Steady SWIM To Open Source

  “Before we awarded the contract to Progress last year, there were other FAA programs like TFM [Traffic Flow Management], our weather-monitoring programs, and a new terminal program, TDDS [Terminal Data Distribution System]. Those program are and have been using Linux. We had a total of five such programs in SWIM Segment 1, and now that we have FUSE in place, that’s a total of seven.”

• Run your LiveCD on Windows with one click

  MobaLiveCD also lets you add a menu entry to the right-click menu of ISO images so that you can directly run the ISO image from the right-click menu. To set up the menu entry, click on the Right-click menu button in MobaLiveCD:

  Now when you right-click on an ISO image, you see the entry Test this with MobaLiveCD in the right-click menu. Select this if you want to start the ISO image in MobaLiveCD…

• Desktop

  • Dell: New Ubuntu Desktop PC Launching Soon

    In recent weeks, Dell.com’s U.S. website has not offered Ubuntu Linux desktop PCs. But that situation could change the week of August 2. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

    Our resident blogger stirred up some market confusion on July 22, when he noticed Dell’s Ubuntu site (www.dell.com/ubuntu) only offered laptops and netbooks with Ubuntu installed. Alas, Dell apparently wasn’t offering Ubuntu on desktop PCs anymore.

  • Dell: New Ubuntu Desktop PC Within Days

• Kernel Space

  • Nearly Two Dozen X.Org Drivers Get Updated

    In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren’t updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

  • Please Linus Torvalds. Don’t go microsoft on us.

    If Linux starts going down that backwards compatibility path then I think it will be on a slippery slope down to bug kingdom and security black holes. Alan Cox quite clearly stated his reasons in terms of security for his patch. For Linus to dismiss that reasoning with such an arbitrary and thoughtless manner seems to me that his mind is less on the kernel and more on other matters.

    In the past when this sort of user land breakage happened, the user land programs were quickly fixed and life went on as before. It was no big deal and an expected part and parcel of dealing with rapidly changing open source software. It was what made Linux and open source great. To lock down the kernel in such a manner means that it will not advance and that means stagnation.

  • Dispute between Linux gurus Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds

• Applications

  • Virt-manager 0.8.0 Released

    Virt-manager 0.8.0 release was officially annouced late last night. This latest release includes bug fixes and a couple of new features, my personal favourite being the Clone VM wizard that I briefly mentioned in here. The official announcement lists the following new features…

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME 2.27.5 released!

    Wow, it’s quite hot here. Sure, the temperature outside is high, but I guess it’s also because of this computer who worked hard to understand some lines of code and to translate them into something that it can then use to make me happy. Yes. Because running GNOME makes me happy! And the 2.27.5 release is no exception there: it has this magic power on me. It’s a good release to get a first feeling of what will be in GNOME 2.28, with the new modules now being integrated and new features popping here and there, in many differents modules. Ah, if only it could do something for the temperature

• Distributions

  • Arch Linux 2009.02

    Arch Linux is a distro developed without assitance from any of the major distributions, and is targeted at experienced users of Linux. It is unique in the Linux world that it uses a ‘rc.conf’ file which is executed everytime upon start up, an idea borrowed from the BSD style systems.

    While this review is technically one of the 2009.02 release, Arch Linux uses a ‘rolling-release’ system, in which the actual system is constantly updated and then ’snapshots’ of the current packages are made into an ISO file and released every 6 months.

  • Omega: Fedora For The Rest of Us

    The Fedora Project is one of the most popular Linux distributions and has been ever since Red Hat announced its creation in 2003. It is a free and open source operating system which came about as a merger between some of their commercial products. It was to be a community driven project, built entirely on free software and would be a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings. Even though it remains a community distribution, numerous Red Hat employees are involved and help set the direction of the project.

  • Free Books For Approved LoCo Teams

    Prentice Hall are happy to send each and every approved LoCo team one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Book and one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Server book. To be entirely clear: this is one copy of each book per team. This will be a great addition to each team’s library of Ubuntu books!

• Devices/Embedded

  • Waddling Past The Windows

    One of the great sources of frustration — and more than a few jokes — for geeks is the legendary instability of the Windows operating system. If you’ve ever had to rescue a box that’s crashing more often than a demolition derby car, the latest offering out of Active Media Products may help you keep your cool.

    We all know that like a faithful Labrador, Linux is a geek’s best friend. When it comes to recovering data from a crashed system, it’s particularly friendly, providing the option to boot from a Live CD or other media and recover files. The good geeks at Active Media Products, however, have taken that one step further with the release of their new BLU — Bootable Linux USB.

  • Review of the System76 Starling Netbook

    I wanted a netbook for traveling. I plan to use it primarily for checking e-mail, browsing the Internet, writing documents, listening to music and watching movies. I may also at some point use it as an e-book reader and podcast player.

    I’m a moderately competent user of computers. I have a little — but not much — experience with Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source adoption ‘anomaly’ in Philippines

  Like several economies in the region, open source adoption in the Philippines is gradually expanding as organizations to seek alternatives to expensive proprietary software. But, unlike some markets, early adopters in the country come from the private sector.

  [...]

  Miguel Paraz, an active advocate of OSS who now works for a local IT firm, noted that public consciousness of open source is only at “a superficial level”, with the occasional mention of Linux in the mainstream business news.

• How SpringSource is taking on Java Goliaths

  Some argue that open-source software can’t innovate. In fact, one of the industry’s former executives, Peter Yared, recently argued that “the only successful open-source companies sell commodities.”

  Yared clearly hasn’t heard of SpringSource, an open-source application platform provider that is redefining the J2EE application server and, quite possibly, the future of open source.

• Success with FOSS

  Sometimes people open-source code because they want other people to help with the coding. For them, absolutely, they need a community that gets involved. But others just write the code for their own pleasure, because it scratches an itch, or because they want something that does exactly what they want and there’s no such thing already. For them, a community is an irrelevance. It might even be a nuisance. They write the code for themselves, and they’re nice enough to share it. FOSS is different things to different people, you can’t apply one single standard to define what makes a project a success.

• Mozilla starts preparing developers for Firefox 3.6

  Brace yourself for the vanishing menu bar because Mozilla has published an official feature list for Firefox 3.6 in the form of a guide for programmers who need to know about the changes.

• MySQL startup targets SSDs

  Start-up Hexagram 49 has unveiled an engine dubbed RethinkDB. The company says it’s optimized for SSDs, claiming it can deliver performance ten times faster than existing databases.

• The not-so-intuitive Intuition of Intuit

  Glyn Moody says is an attempt to plug into the power of openness without really engaging with it, Matt Asay explains how openness will help the company to enrich its partner experience. Savio Rodrigues also thinks that is a win-win, adding that the goal could have been achieved even by releasing the code under a closed source license. Last but not least he argues that the EPL would have been a better choice, now that the OSI has moved the CPL to inactive (for the records, Intuit is hearing hints and reacting).

• Open-source Project Aims to Makes Secure DNS Easier

  The software, called OpenDNSSEC, automates many tasks associated with implementing DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions), which is a set a set of protocols that allows DNS (Domain Name System) records to carry a digital signature, said John A. Dickinson, a DNS consultant working on the project.

• Internet Systems Consortium using Drupal

  Internet Systems Consortium, also known as ISC, is using Drupal on their website at http://isc.org. ISC was founded by three internet pioneers Rick Adams, Carl Malamud and Paul Vixie to support BIND and other software that helps power the internet.

• Business

  • Open Source Pricing Incentives and Business Strategies: the GroundWork case

    I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to keep me updated about the initiative, below some answers on the topic of GroundWork Monitor Starter Edition.

  • Post-OSCON roundup

    A lot’s happened in the few days since my keynote at OSCON and I think it’s time I did a round-up of women-in-open-source-related stuff from the conference itself and the not-quite-a-week since.

    Some wins for the conference:

    * Gina Blaber from O’Reilly tells me that female attendance is up, and it looked that way to me. I’d guess around 5%, which of course is still kind of appalling, but I think a bit higher than last year.
    * Proportion of female speakers is up to 8.9% (from 8.36% last year). That’s just based on actual numbers of people, not the talks they gave; it might be a smidge higher based on number of talks. A small improvement, but any improvement is good at this point.

• Openness

  • Communal Webcasting platform to beef up campus’s popular educational content

    As a growing number of worldwide learners log on, free of charge, to video and podcast lectures and events at the University of California, Berkeley, the campus is leading an international effort to build a communal Webcasting platform to more easily record and distribute its popular educational content.

  • AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project

    Meanwhile, a small suggestion to the AP: Get your legal department’s footprints off your home page (where the top item is “Protecting AP’s Intellectual Property”). In fact, push them to the nether regions of the website. It’s not friendly stuff.