If you find that running Windows makes a GRUB 2-based system unbootable (Debian bug, Ubuntu bug), then I'd like to hear from you. This is a bug in which some proprietary Windows-based software overwrites particular sectors in the gap between the master boot record and the first partition, sometimes called the "embedding area". GRUB Legacy and GRUB 2 both normally use this part of the disk to store one of their key components: GRUB Legacy calls this component Stage 1.5, while GRUB 2 calls it the core image (comparison). However, Stage 1.5 is less useful than the core image (for example, the latter provides a rescue shell which can be used to recover from some problems), and is therefore rather smaller: somewhere around 10KB vs. 24KB for the common case of ext[234] on plain block devices. It seems that the Windows-based software writes to a sector which is after the end of Stage 1.5, but before the end of the core image. This is why the problem appears to be new with GRUB 2.
Og reached into his bag marked with a big "35" and tossed a plump, jucy kernel at this final group, who instantly grabbed it up, thanked him for providing it (unlike those self-absorbed 32 and 27 people) and ran off to help spread the good news of a new kernel.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced last evening, August 25th, yet another improved version of its ATI Catalyst Linux display driver, available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. ATI Catalyst 10.8 introduces final and stable support for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1 operating systems, and official OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
Apart from cleaning a long list of popular apps, it can perform some more advanced tasks too, like clearing the memory and swap partition, delete broken shortcuts, delete languages you don't use, and some other application-specific functions. Windows users may be underwhelmed, but Linux users will find this a welcome tool for freeing up a bit of space.
More details about the release can be found in the release announcement. Version 1.4.0 of digiKam is available to download from the project's web site and is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
Red Hat Inc. rose past the upper end of a month and a half long trading range Thursday and closed at a new high for the year.
SAP executives have pointed to Red Hat’s use of Linux operating systems, among other things, as proof that the move may not make much sense.
The program for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe has been announced. The conference will be held October 26-28 in Cambridge, UK, and will be co-located with the GStreamer conference on October 26.
It is running on a custom Linux operating system, designed by Kobo.
The Media Flow technology comes by way of Juniper's acquisition of software vendor Ankeena earlier this year. Media Flow provides customers with content caching and acceleration capabilities. With the new VXA Series Media Flow Engines, Juniper is now expanding the Ankeena technology with a set of dedicated Linux-powered hardware appliances, complementing Media Flow's availability as a Juniper software product from earlier this year.
Operating system support is listed for Linux 2.4 and 2.6, as well as FreeBSD.
TrygTech, a leading provider of software and hardware solutions for enabling embedded systems, has announced the release of their Linux board support package (BSP) for Device Solutions Topaz i.MX25 CPU Module.
The Dell Streak isn’t in a great position right now. It’s got that old Android 1.6 on it, and then there’s that SIM lock. But what’s really irking people is the lack of a micro USB port, or even a mini USB. It’s hard to imagine not being able to connect a mobile device to your PC to transfer songs and whatnot onto it. But that’s where John out at Linux Slate comes in–he made his own adapter.
Google has registered a trademark application for the name ‘Google Speedbook’, prompting suspicions that this will be the brand name of some new Chrome OS hardware. Could Google be looking at expanding out of smartphone hardware to release a Google Tablet or Google netbook? Read on to find out more about the Google Speedbook…
French publication Les Echos has reported that French carrier Orange will be selling three own-branded Android tablets by Christmas. Allegedly, the tablet will be sold for under 250 Euros, and be subsidized even more when 3G contracts are taken out.
Heard of Redstar before? Perhaps not, as we haven't till today, but the Japanese-based company has begun to receive pre-orders of their own Shogo Linux-powered tablet.
Thanks to the efforts of summer campaigns intern, Steve DuBois, we have all the video and audio from the conference ready for your viewing pleasure.
Mozilla Labs, Mozilla's research and development section, has announced that, based on the popularity of the Git distributed version control system, it is now offering an experimental fork for all Mozilla Labs projects and experiments on project hosting service GitHub. Since 2006, many Labs projects have been hosted on public Mercurial instances.
The Mozilla Labs developers have announced Jetpack SDK 0.7, the latest revision of the HTML/CSS/JavaScript based extension system for Firefox. The new release includes a panel API, which allows developers to float popup windows over web content, a clipboard API to give extensions access to the system clipboard and a notifications API which allows extensions to get the users attention with toaster or Growl-style messages.
An early, pre-alpha version of Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser has been around for months, but the Firefox developer has today released an official full alpha for download. And it's not just Android that's benefitting—the mobile browser has also been released for Nokia's N900 smartphone.
Last week, Mickos stopped by our offices for a conversation that covered a variety of topics:
* The rise of cloud computing and its impact on open source movement. * Will there be a LAMP stack for the cloud? * Will Oracle destroy MySQL and how does NoSQL movement impact MySQL? * Philosophical aspects of open source. * The open-source business models. * Most common mistakes he has seen startups make, especially open-source startups.
Two months after the commercial Eucalyptus Enterprise version, Eucalyptus has released the open source variant of its Amazon EC2-compatible cloud software. Eucalyptus 2.0, which forms the basis of the Enterprise version, is said to offer improved scalability and a more convenient user interface than its predecessor. Insufficient scalability was reportedly one of the reasons why NASA chose not to use Eucalyptus and, together with Rackspace, launched the OpenStack initiative instead.
OpenGeo, the leader in open source geospatial web services, announces the release of OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition in collaboration with cloud technology innovator Skygone Inc. OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition is optimized for cloud infrastructure, with special features preconfigured for scalability, and performance enhancements already installed.
There is much anticipation of Ellison's keynote, since Oracle's stewardship of Java has been regarded as unsatisfactory by many Java developers and user groups. A lack of a concrete roadmap, the lack of detail on the relationship between open source and commercial products, and the future of OpenJDK7 and JDK7 are all issues many would like to see clarified. These issues have become more critical in the aftermath of Oracle's announcement that it was taking legal action against Google for patent and copyright infringement over Google's implementation of the Dalvik virtual machine in Android, which is based on the open source Apache Harmony implementation of Java.
The Diaspora team has put out an update on their progress in creating a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network".
In a recent blog post, the Diaspora team say they have the nascent social networking software up and running, and are happy with the near-final result. Despite these proclamations, however, it's unclear what Diaspora will look like or how it will function when Diaspora finally launches.
Audacious its origins as a fork of Beep Music player and as it matured has been the media player of choice for me for a long while. The latest release is 2.4.0, doesn’t fail to impress with updates to its GUI and a plethora of features that you’ve come to expect from the creators of what to many is the defacto music player on their distro.
Version 2.0.0 has a new persister for storing messages in transit, which is now only bound by disk capacity and a server which optimises memory usage by paging these messages between disk and RAM. This change gives the server higher and more consistent performance and faster start-up; previously these both degraded with higher volumes of persisted messages.
Clearly copyright assignment is integral to the dual licensing and open core licensing strategies in enabling those vendors to sell closed-source licenses to the core project and extensions, and it does restrict developer communities in those situations.
However, as Simon briefly explains, copyright assignment is equally used by other organisations, such as the Free Software Foundation, to protect the core project. Glyn Moody described the potential benefits of such an arrangement earlier this week, while Tarus Balog provides another example of copyright assignment protecting an open source project.
The choice of an open source license for a project code release is not clear-cut, and depends on several factors; in general, when reusing code that comes from external projects, license compatibility is the first, major driver in license selection. Licenses do have an impact on development activity, depending on the kind of project and who controls the project evolution.
More details about this years Google Summer of Code can be found on its open source programs web page. Lists of student projects and organisations that were accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010 are also available. In the coming weeks Google will publish more extensive program statistics and reports to the Google Open Source Blog.
Acre is available under an Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded from its Google Code project page along with instructions on how to get started with the server.
Early adopters running Linux will be able to download and start testing Build 7.0.503.1.
It’s no secret that social link sharing community Reddit isn’t singing the praises of its corporate parent Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2006. Earlier today the two sparred over running ads in support of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in the state. And Reddit has previously written about the shortage of resources that Condé Nast is willing to provide. Now Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger network, is offering to take Reddit off Condé’s hands.
A Court in Hawaii has just rejected a new lawsuit brought against the Large Hadron Collider. The plaintiffs failed to produce any evidence that the machine is dangerous, the ruling says.
Media campaigning gone weird. MSNBC reports on a BP sponsored study that the oil cleanup is like pacman and the bacteria solve the oil spill problem. Reality distortion can be so easy.
A company that worked with sites that linked to copies of Hollywood blockbusters has become the target of a new lawsuit. The legal action filed by Disney and Warner Bros. says that Triton Media was guilty of both contributory and inducement of copyright infringement when it assisted several sites with advertising and referrals.
Lawrence Lessig talks with the Booksmith - Part III