And yet, as O'Reilly points out, the open-source world continues to fixate on the wrong battles:The whole context of free and open-source software is not about Linux taking over the world and replacing Windows. That might even happen, just as the PC replaced the mainframe. And it probably will happen. But it doesn't change the dynamic....
In 2000, the Linux operating system was a hot technology, but it had not spread much beyond scientists, researchers and computer programmers. Then I.B.M. declared that it would back Linux with investment, research and marketing, and the technology moved swiftly into the corporate mainstream.
The question of Linux vs. Windows suckiness riled the blogosphere this week, with fans questioning the drivers behind the perception that Linux isn't ready for the desktop and is only suitable for the technologically superior few. Is it a question of user skill levels or marketing talents?
The Macedonian government chose Ubuntu Linux for its "one-computer-per-child" program. By combining NComputing virtual desktops with Haier's scale and price advantage on monitor and host PCs, the joint solution can be offered for 60-75 percent less than traditional desktop PCs or thin clients.
Earlier this year, I bought an old-issue netbook, a refurbished Asus EEE PC 900A with a 9-inch screen, built-in wireless, no CD-ROM drive and 4-gigabyte drive that barely has enough room to hold the Linux operating system and generic bare-essentials software. It cost $175, or $50 less than my iPod Touch. This is carefree computing: If it's lost, stolen or damaged this summer, I'll survive.
Desktop systems are following the trend set by netbooks by getting smaller and smaller. And it makes perfect sense. Not only do you save space, but in most cases you save on energy costs. System 76, a company producing Linux-based hardware, is offering up an outstanding smaller form-factor PC - the Meerkat NetTop PC.
While this is the first NVIDIA ION nettop that we have tested under Linux (along with being the first ZaReason system we have reviewed), we were left being quite pleased with the Ion Breeze 3770. When using the proprietary Linux driver from NVIDIA, the GeForce 9400M GPU works great with an Intel Atom processor and delivers excellent video playback capabilities and is able to even run some games. Aside from faster graphics, when factoring out the other hardware differences with today's tests, the NVIDIA MCP79 performs about the same as the Intel 945 with ICH7 Southbridge.
Almost 100 articles and blogs on the topic of “ubuntu sucks” were published in the past month alone, and about as many were published that unequivocally state Windows is better than Ubuntu.
But upon closer examination, I found that a substantial portion of these negative reactions to Ubuntu stem from unrealistic comparisons.
Almost all of the hurdles people seem to have when switching from Windows to Ubuntu appear to be errors in judgment and assessment, rather than actual problems with the OS.
Both institutions deal with free materials, yet Linux and libraries haven’t always turned out to be an ideal match, according to Tom Curl, a consultant and entrepreneur with a couple of library implementations to his own credit.
Linux-enabled back-end systems are in very widespread use for cataloging books and other library content, acknowledged Curl, who heads up Medfield, MA-based Enertex Systems. But when it comes to end user terminals, the PCs accessed by patrons in actual physical library settings, Curl considers only a handful of deployments in the US to be real success stories.
Data hosting will be done on a data storage cloud hosted next to the supercomputer to allow for easy access for data processing. This cloud is based on a hybrid of software and hardware including: SAN QFS software from Sun to help manage the storage domain; virtualization software from VMware; Linux as a core operating system; Solaris ; and databases from MySQL and PostgreSQL.
This is an attempt to visualize the relationships among the Linux File Systems through the lens of the external symbols their kernel modules use. We took an initial look a few months back but this time the scope is much broader. This analysis was done on 1377 kernel modules from 2.6.0 to 2.6.29, but there is also a small dip into the BSD world.
1. Fast boot. Older versions of Linux spend a lot of time scanning for hard drives and other storage devices and then partitions on each of them. This eats up a lot of milliseconds because it looks for them one at a time. With the 2.6.30 boot-up, however, instead of waiting for this to get done the rest of the kernel continues to boot-up. At the same time, the storage devices are being checked in parallel, two or more at a time, to further improve the system's boot speed.
There are other efforts afoot to speed up Linux's boot times. The upshot of all this work will be to keep Linux the fastest booting operating system well into the future.
David Airlie has asked Linus Torvalds to pull in the TTM memory manager and Radeon kernel mode-setting code into the Linux 2.6.31 kernel.
Linux is at the forefront of web development, and Ubuntu is a great distribution to use to build and design a website for the first time. Recently, I've been developing web applications using frameworks, and Linux in general makes these things quite a bit easier. Therefore, I figured I should present some of the basic tools you can use to create, develop, and host a website. This may abstract a bit away from the idea of "applications" in and of themselves, but I thought you may all be interested anyway.
My request for using Ubuntu-One Beta was approved by Canonical, so I immediately made a small (& un-scientific) test. I put 13 files, totaling 23,4MB, first in Ubuntu-One and then in Dropbox.
Once again I hope you've enjoyed this report. I know that I promised a build HOWTO, and it is under construction so stay tuned.
By the way, I'm happy to see that OSC is becoming more popular (developer Nick Copeland may add OSC support to his Bristol synth, mentioned in my previous article) and I hope that more audio software developers utilize it in their work.
This article is dedicated to the memory of my friend Fred Kwis who passed away recently after a lengthy battle with the effects of Parkinson's disease. Fredy was only a year older than me, and we had been friends since childhood. He was a life-long musician and like an older brother to me. RIP, my friend, I know your spirit is still rockin' the heavenly house.
Version control systems play an essential role for developers. First up, they allow developers to safely store successive versions of source code. Besides providing a secure backup of the source code, this type of software lets developers revert back to a stable release if subsequent code changes have unforeseen consequences.
Plasma, the desktop shell of KDE 4, improves the desktop experience with its simple Plasma applets, plasmoids
I was told once by a third party that the reason Nautilus did not include these simple features was because they did not want to be perceived as copying the KDE guys. I honestly hope that isn't true. If it is, that means the development of the première environment for file management is being fueled by ego.
So given the fact that Gnome via Ubuntu is going to be the face of Linux, what changes do you see as an evolution of the system? Post them here and we'll cull the best and send them forward. No they probably won't listen, but you can't give up until you try at least once. You people are pretty smart...we'd like to know what your ideas are.
The Xfce Screenshooter for the Xfce desktop with the current Version 1.6.0 has no cause to fear the competition.
With Version 1.6.0 of Xfce4 Screenshooter, Xfce has gained considerable ground against Gnome and KDE when dealing with screenshot capabilities. The option to choose using the mouse pointer to hide or to display aspects over the graphic user interface is a new one.
Fedora 11 provides a sneak peak at what's coming in the more staid and stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux. During tests, eWEEK Labs found that the biggest improvements in Fedora 11 come in the area of virtualization, although Fedora still lags systems from VMware in functionality and polish. Fedora will also serve well in desktop roles, but will need more care and feeding than other desktop Linux distros.
Fedora 11, the latest release of Red Hat's community-oriented Linux OS, can serve in a full gamut of Linux roles on the server and desktop. And, as usual, Fedora 11 gives users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux an early look at what's to come in their operating system of choice. In my review of Fedora 11, I took note of the distribution's improvements around virtualization, where Fedora boasts improved facilities for creating, accessing and managing virtual machines across multiple hosts.
Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of minor usability glitches. The project, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will entail a collaborative effort by Canonical's new design team and the Ubuntu community to fix one hundred usability bugs before the release of Ubuntu 9.10.
The main point of the review is that I personally consider Linux Mint as the easiest distribution for new Linux users. Everything has been thought out to make the transition easy for those users without sacrificing what makes Linux unique. Nice touches like the screenshots in the software manager show a level of polish and user friendliness rarely seen in a Linux distribution. Linux Mint is also interesting for more advanced users that want a distribution that install quickly and include all the multimedia components without the need of adding codecs and flash from the repositories. If Linux Mint continues to provide such high quality releases I may well switch back from Ubuntu by the time of the next Long Term Support release.
Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), a premier provider of embedded Linux software solutions, today announced it has been selected by Silicon Turnkey Express (STx) as their Linux partner in enabling and supporting open source Linux for their ADS512102 board.
Freescale Semiconductor announced the availability of Linux-ready embedded software that provides security and networking functionality tailored for its multi-core, PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC system-on-chips (SoCs). The "production-ready, application-level" Vortiqa software provides a base platform for developing firewall, IPSec-VPN, IPS, anti-virus, and anti-spam software, says the company.
PIC: This means use of the Pre as a full-fledged Linux computer is/will be quite doable - and it won't interfere with the built-in Palm stuff?
RW: Correct. Exactly that.
It seems that some more details on the capabilities of the newly launched Palm Pre and on its webOS platform have made it into the wild, and among them the fact that the handset can easily run unsigned firmware, a piece of information coming from the iPhone developer Steven Troughton-Smith. A wide range of other things that the handset is capable of have made it into the wild as well, though it seems that some hacking skills are required to be able to access some of them.
As it has been reported at many places online, the Palm Pre has started to ship as a CDMA model in the United States. However, as it seems, at this time it is not GPL compliant and thus a copyright infringement!
The Pre undoubtedly contains Linux and other GPL licensed software. So it ships with the GPL license text as well as a written offer indicating to obtain the source code. So far so good.
Michael Dell has a few bucks burning a hole in his pocket. But is a company hanging on by one product the best place for his money?
The Pre's system software, based on the open-source Linux operating system, stayed responsive most of the time, although music playback stuttered once as I launched its camera program. Once the Pre's working memory fills up, it won't let you run any more programs but will advise, "Dismiss unused cards to free memory."
Google Android handset owners can expect eReader availability in “mid- to late summer,” according to TeleRead. They spoke to Scott Pendergrast of Fictionwise, which is owned by Barnes & Noble.
There are approximately 30 new Android handsets coming from top manufacturers this year, several companies are putting Android on netbooks (a hot hardware category), and there are even new strains of Android appearing. Here are just a few of the notable Android developments from the past few days.
It’s about to get a whole lot noisier in the real “land of the lost.” Google just outed a Maps update for Android handset owners, and one of the new features is voice search. Unlike prior updates, this one won’t be pushed out over-the-air. Instead, you’ll need to hit up the Android Marketplace and download it. Once you do, you’ll have not only the voice search, but some other digital cartography goodies as well.
Of course, there’s a big leap from snappy performance to an appealing platform, and that’s something that Linux still needs to address for mainstream users. Sales figures of Windows and non-Android Linux netbooks suggest that buyers are willing to put up with slower performance in return for the familiarity and app-flexibility of Microsoft-based devices. Internet browsing, while perhaps the netbook’s primary purpose, is not all the budget ultraportables are used for; similarly, the absence of Flash support for ARM processors could prove a major stumbling block for an audience used to streaming video content.
And Linux will make IBM money when used in cloud-based products which are metered to customers, often by the hour. One big reason that open source will help fuel the rise of cloud computing, while often becoming second fiddle to platforms in the cloud, is that software is only a component of a computing environment, albeit an expensive one and cloud economics almost always favor the incorporation of open source products. However, something that open source has only been partially successful at incorporating as a value creator (essentially, only the cost of development) is what IBM’s Sutor clearly stated: economies of scale.
Calgary, Alberta - Theo De Raadt, founder of the security-minded OpenBSD operating system, has announced plans to launch a series of television commercials to battle software giants Microsoft and Apple.
From the beginning of the first "I'm a Mac..." ad, OpenBSD has seen a sharp decline in users from the hip 18-35 demographic. As Microsoft and Apple have slugged it out on the television set, OpenBSD has seen fewer and fewer installations from sorority girls, coffee shop denizens, and young entrepreneurs.
The Swiss Open Systems User Group and the canton of Berne treasurer's office have reached a rapprochement. The open source advocacy group had criticised the fact that a contract for revamping the canton's 14,000 workstations was awarded to Microsoft without a tendering process. Although the canton is insisting that the contract should stand, the Swiss Open Systems User Group has decided not to pursue the case in the courts.
One of the features planned for the next version of Firefox (tentatively named Firefox 3.6, but most accurately referred as Firefox.next) is about:me, a specially crafted web page that will let you see your browsing habits profile including most visited sites, time of the day and days you navigate most, how you access sites.
Something very special happened after eLiberatica 2009 ended; I’m talking here about the initiative to organize a nonprofit organization that would support and help Free Software and Open Source spread in Romania.
It’s undeniable: Google Wave has captured the imagination of techies, social media enthusiasts, and web users everywhere. Its combination of email, real-time chat, wiki tools, and social networking have generated an incredible amount of buzz.
Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.
In hindsight, Wellesley's comprehensive approach and methodical process enabled them to make a truly educated choice. Their diligent requirements gathering efforts gave them the confidence to choose a solution that would address not only their immediate needs but also serve the institution well into the future. Their willingness to consider a variety of commercial, open source and commercial open source options enabled them to find a solution that not only met their functional requirements, but was extremely cost-effective as well.
Indian enterprises, private and public, are opening up to saving costs by using free for use technologies. Governments, institutions and companies are increasingly turning to open source technologies to turn frugal as these softwares, hardwares and applications are often free but also to avoid falling into the trap of a proprietary IT environment.
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“We invested only about Rs 8 lakh (Rs 4 lakh for a Dell server). We will incur a saving of Rs 50 lakh, because of a migration from a proprietary software to an open ERP solution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Dell X86 servers,” says Mankotia.
Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source. While the software may do most of what your business needs, you may consider having a few in-house developers add customizations. That's a perfectly reasonable idea. But there may be a better way that benefits the community, is dirt cheap, and oh yeah - is also fun.
Indiana's Michigan City Area Schools is in the midst of renovating hundreds of classrooms at fourteen school sites. Through a new technology initiative, called HiTEC ("High Technology Educational Classroom"), the district is outfitting its classrooms with a wide range of interactive A/V technologies and control systems and funding the whole thing through savings realized through an open source initiative.
A sophisticated electric walking cane for the blind is ready for mass production by this summer, the National Science Council (NSC) said yesterday, stressing the need for increased development and training for open source software (OSS) technologies.
Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.
That's because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.
Liza Kindred of Lullabot (news, site) began her talk at the Open Web Vancouver conference on open source business with a video of Dr. Vandana Shiva discussing saving seeds to preserve the right of farmers to grow their crops the way they have for thousands of years. Dr. Shiva referred to this practice of preserving traditional knowledge as open seeds, and compared it to open source.
Twenty of the biggest brains in open-source software will descend on Clemson University Saturday for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Open-source programs differ from commercial software in that the former can be tweaked by virtually anyone. And they're free.
The open-source alternative for Windows, for instance, is Linux. A popular open-source alternative for Internet Explorer is Firefox. Several cell phones run on open-source platforms.
Among the new features created at the event were a compressed backup option to save space when archiving databases, an enforced logging system for databases and the ability to suspend logging when copying a database, a command line history for the Ingres SQL utility and improved Soundex routines for better matching. Emma McGratten of Ingres, who organised the sprint said "It's a testament to the open source community when we can get together and make improvements on features and programs that are being used every day, by the people who depend on them".
Despite some encouraging upticks, the economy is still suffering, and many people are out of work. This is also the time of year when new graduates from college get set to find jobs, many of them looking for tech opportunities. The good news is that there are jobs available all over the open source community, and open source skills can be very valuable in a career.
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Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can even find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Yahoo. Yahoo makes extensive use of open source technologies such as Hadoop (which underlies its search technology), and usually has positions available for serving these efforts.
WSO2, a Sri Lankan software firm, is starting a free 'summer school' this month on open source software and service oriented architecture (SOA), the company said.
The eight week program will help at enterprise IT architects and developers to become more familiar with SOA concepts, technologies and best practices, the company said.
Open Source solutions seem to be in high demand in this down economy. So what do open source enterprise content management providers do to meet this demand? They add new features and functionality of course. At least that is what KnowledgeTree (news, site) has done.
KnowledgeTree, the open source document management system for the enterprise, has a new release featuring some small but significant updates to their software.
In the 3.6.1 version announced yesterday, KnowledgeTree has ramped up their alerts feature with specification by document type, and added configurable electronic signatures, easing the burden of regulatory compliance.
Web search pioneer Yahoo officially released its source code for Hadoop, a parallel programming framework many see as the key ingredient for cloud computing services. The software could fuel a broad class of future Web-based applications, said an IBM executive at the second-annual Hadoop Summit.
The Belgian government this week has made available to the public the source code of the applications used for the regional and European elections held on 7 June, Digivote and Jites.
The same software will be used in upcoming elections.
NHS Connecting for Health is using open source to collaborate with other countries' health services in building specialist informatics software.
Ken Lunn, CfH's director of data standards and products, said the organisation is agnostic towards open-source software, and uses it where it makes sense to do so.
Having already obtained estimates of the number of items (publications) produced each year based on library catalogue data our next step is to convert this into an estimate of the “size” of the public domain. (NB: as already discussed, “size” could mean several different things. Here, at least to start with, we’re going to take the simplest and crudest approach and equate size with number of publications/items.)
The idea to build an open source car isn't a new one, but you've got to give vehicle design company Riversimple credit for originality. The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds. If you agree to lease one for 20 years (yes, 20), Riversimple will throw in the cost of fuel for the lifetime of the lease.
In the process of writing something about the current state of Open Access (OA) mandates I became intrigued by the mandate introduced at Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN.
For hundreds of millions of people around the world higher education is no more than a dream. The United Nations hope to make this dream a reality with their global tuition-free online University.
The free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia is beginning its licence migration today. In the future, the content of Wikipedia will be dual licensed, under the current GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) and under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA). The update is beginning with the English Wikipedia projects, as a reference implementation of the licence change, and will expand to Wikipedia in other languages in the near future. From this point on, GFDL-only licensed content will no longer be accepted.
A legitimate artistic movement known as Open Source Embroidery has sprung up to explore the relationship between, no joke, software engineering and needlework. It's pretty awesome.
First, look at the team behind it. Willow Garage founded by Scott Hassan (one of the designers of the original Google search engine) has set out to develop both the hardware and software for personal robots unlike any previous venture. By promoting an open source and open platform approach they are pulling in ideas and assistance from specialists in North America and Europe.
The really problematic part is at the end: “No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media.” Well, yes, but intermittent disconnection is just as bad: if you don't know when your connection is available it becomes pretty useless. Similarly, you have to wonder how Virgin Media will know who to disconnect in this way, if they are not monitoring or intercepting traffic. The worst case would be if they just took Universal's word for it, pretty much along the lines of the increasingly-discredited “three strikes and you're out” in France.
So, although there is much to welcome in this announcement, it represents just the first baby steps towards a full and fair solution.
Just a few years ago, some broadcasters and movie studios argued that this transition couldn't happen without a DRM mandate -- a legal requirement for devices to obey the broadcast flag and apply DRM restrictions to free, over-the-air broadcasts. And they said they would hold up and obstruct this transition unless they got their way.
Case in point? BT. The British telco is starting to heavily throttle all video -- especially the BBC's online video player. This is the same BT, by the way, that just two years ago was saying there was no need to traffic shape or break net neutrality, and that it could handle all traffic issues with basic upgrades. So what happened? Well, it appears BT didn't like the competition from online video providers, so it decided to pretend it needed to do this for congestion purposes.
Apparently, it took all of a year for Bell Canada to realize that it wasn't getting any use whatsoever, and Joe McEnaney points out that Bell Canada has quietly shut down the site... though, it's still throttling traffic from resellers. Maybe, next time, instead of trying to limit competitors and offer something crappy, Bell could spend its resources investing in bandwidth. That would have made everyone a lot happier.
Following a request from the entertainment industries, a French court has ordered the P2P news site Numerama to cover the cases of 27 convicted file-sharers. For their efforts the site receives 10,000 euros which they promise to spend wisely by supporting a pro file-sharing cause.
We see all sorts of confused analysis when it comes to how "free" works in economics -- which goes back to our assertion that the human brain tends to run into a mental block when it encounters a zero and rather than recognize the rest of the economic equation, it just pops out an error message. That's the only explanation I can find for the so-called analysis by Media Metrics' Laura Martin of how Hulu is "anti-consumer, anti-media employees, and even anti-America" and supposedly putting $300 billion worth of market value "at risk" (thanks Ben for sending this in).
We've been bothered by the incredibly secretive (except if you happen to be in the entertainment industry) ACTA Treaty negotiations for quite some time now. This is the industry-led effort to get a bunch of nations to agree to draconian and damaging new copyright laws by sneaking them through as a secretive "international treaty," such that countries are then compelled to change their copyright laws to "be in compliance with international agreements." It's a really sneaky trick that Hollywood has used for years.
Comments
notzed
2009-06-17 03:19:52
Roy Schestowitz
2009-06-17 06:48:59