The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, and its affiliate, LPI-Asia Pacific announced new LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) in the region: Beijing Shenghao Boyuan Technology Company of mainland China and Concentrix of the Philippines.
Step aside, Google Docs, there's a new JavaScript tour de force in town.
I'm talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser.
The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn't have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system's core--2.6.20--runs on the foundation.
James displayed projections for the server market that show Linux adoption slowly eating into Microsoft's market share and she made even bolder statements, claiming that most datacenters run Linux, that open source software leads the high performance computing market and that most embedded devices, such as smartphones, run Linux.
Will 2011 be the year of the Linux desktop? That's a question some people on the Linux Planet have been asking for a decade, but with new developments in the past week, that dream maybe closer to reality than ever before.
BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
It's been about three weeks since last mentioning the major power consumption problem in the Linux kernel (actually, there's more than one power regression) and it's affecting distributions like Ubuntu 11.04. The lack of mentioning the power regression in recent weeks isn't though because the regressions are addressed, they are still outstanding with the about to be released Linux 2.6.39 kernel.
The power regressions just haven't been mentioned recently since I've been out of the office since late last month due to UDS Budapest, LinuxTag 2011, and beer drinking with Phoronix readers in Bavaria and around Germany. Now that I'm back to the usual workload, I've run some more kernel tests to verify the increased power consumption is still there with the latest upstream kernel. Sadly, the issue is still there.
Grab it while it's hot. Note that you'll need Zeitgeist 0.8.0 (or later) for it to work. If you're an Ubuntu user you can get packages for both from our PPA; I've also uploaded it to Debian.
If you're looking for a simple program that will let you tell your computer "If this happens, do that," then look no further. In a nutshell, Sentinella lets you monitor your computer's activity and set limits on what happens so you can automatically execute some function in the background. This approach lets you tap into the working status of your computer's processors, memory, network interfaces and more.
People who focus on minor issues are greatly exercized about the purchase of Skype by Microsoft.
How will this affect the success of Skype's spyware, they ask? Was it good strategy for one or the other? Did Microsoft pay too much? How does this affect the possible success of this or that other company? Questions whose perspective regards people as nothing more than terrain for these nonhumans to squabble over.
It's a lesser known fact, as most don't talk about it. Most of the free software goodies that you enjoy in your Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux boxes come from the Free Software Foundation -- an organization dedicated to keep users free from the clutches of the proprietary companies.
In embedded software programming there’s often the need to use assembly-level instructions to reach all the functionalities of the processing core. But when the developing is done almost exclusively in C, it is sometimes a burden, often an added complexity and possibly a nuisance to code separate assembly files containing the needed functions. Other than that, sometimes the fact that the C code must call the assembly function located in another module is a performance hit that could slow down execution to a level that is not acceptable. The solution that I prefer is using inline assembly inside small C functions, and let the compiler optimize it into my code.
The Wine team has announced the release of development version of Wine, 1.3.20. This release adds the option to clip the mouse inside fullscreen windows.
I used to run a desktop search program called Beagle, to index all my documents, text files, and emails for quick search. It ran unobtrusively in the background.
The KDE 4 developers decided to improve on this, by adding the strigi indexer, integrated with the Nepomuk "semantic desktop." Alas, "unobtrusive" was not in their mission statement. My desktop spent all day accessing the hard drive, at 100% CPU utilization, and according to the task monitor this activity was all to update Nepomuk's database. This is probably why my system was so slow.
[...]
Better still, a later comment told me that KDE 3.5 is still alive and well! Since the KDE project dropped 3.5, it was "forked" into a new project called Trinity.
Last week I’ve received an email from Bruce Byfield asking a few questions about this project. I’ve replied honestly as I would to anyone, I’ve faced several issues, and it sounded wise to me to hold a bit this. Since the Beta release of Natty that I’m following a technology forum in Portugal (over 150.000 users) and making a few notes on what peoples perceptions are about Unity and Natty.
That being said, it has to be noted that Arch Linux is not meant for users just migrating to Linux from Windows or MAC OS. That is because Arch Linux is targeted at users or developers who know what they are doing and have at least some experience with Linux.
A few days ago the Zenwalk project released its Live CD of Zenwalk Linux 7.0. Currently Zenwalk offers the main Xfce edition, a Core edition which foregoes the X windowing system and is intended to be a starting point to building a custom desktop or server system, an edition with Openbox as window manager, an older Gnome version that is still at version 6.4, and the Live CD version of the edition based on the Xfce desktop environment. In this guest post, Bernhard Hoffmann walks us through the Zenwalk Live CD version.
Mageia 1 Release Candidate was announced today right on time. Final is expected on June 1, so developers are anxious for final bug reports. They are particularly interested in the upgrade process from Mandriva 2010.x. I tested the upgrade this time, but from Mageia 1 beta 2.
From the beta to the rc, the upgrade process was quick and easy. The installer requires a lot less input than with a full install. As far as I can tell it went off without a hitch. I got a new kernel and new theme. KDE was updated to the latest stable release. NVIDIA drivers were updated and the boot glitch from beta 2 seemed to be cleared up (or rather "nokmsboot" was added to the boot options by default now). All hardware seemed to be supported properly. It could have just been my imagination, but the performance seemed very good, perhaps improved from last release. Even with desktop effects enabled, it just seemed to fly.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that its global customer portal has been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as a top support website in its fourteenth annual “Ten Best Web Support Sites” competition. Red Hat was recognized in the Open Division among five other technology leaders, including Red Hat partners Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard.
DebConf10 Final Report is out
The DebConf organization team released the final report of the 2010 Debian Conference, which was held in New York City, USA, at Columbia University. According to the DebConf blog entry, "It's a 46-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events, funny pictures and so on." There are two PDF versions of the final report available, which can be downloaded from the DebConf Media website.
Ubuntu Natty aka 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011. The release had several bugs, one being the inability of a user to mount a drive during installation. Which mean that if you are running DLNA servers or if your are using applications which needs access to different partitions during start-up you are in big trouble.
Canonical considering removing LibreOffice from default CD installer of Ubuntu 11.10
Online sources are reporting that the next edition of Ubuntu might not include LibreOffice by default in the CD installer.
As a Linux user I’ve endured a fair amount of jabs on the podcast that I co-host every week. First my microphone sucks, then my levels suck, then my bandwidth sucks. Well, no more. Time to take these freedom-hating fools to school, and what better way to do that than with a 64-bit Linux distribution and a real-time zero latency kernel?
The 451 Group’s research has previously shown that the benefits of open source software are many and varied and The Future of Open Source Survey highlights the fact that multiple factors are driving the increased adoption of open source software, including freedom from vendor lock-in, greater flexibility and lower cost.
Sendmail, Inc., the leading provider of message processing appliances and applications for enterprise messaging infrastructures, and the Sendmail Consortium (http://www.sendmail.com/sm/open_source/), today announced the availability of the latest version of the popular sendmail open source MTA (Mail Transport Agent). This new version addresses many of the requests that have been reported by the large community of sendmail open source users and developers around the world.
Summary: In the past few years, free open source software (FOSS) adoption has enjoyed tremendous growth in the IT industry. In the geospatial arena, growth is evidenced by the popularity of many tools and applications, and the emergence of a vibrant community of developers and users. Ignacio Guerrero, an IT consultant and former software director at Intergraph and Rolta, takes a look at the decision to evaluate and choose FOSS versus proprietary software from the standpoint of a typical GIS program manager.
North Bridge Venture Partners today announced the results of its annual Future of Open Source Survey. Conducted in partnership with The 451 Group, the 2011 survey involved more than 20 industry collaborators and polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond. The results of the survey, now in its fifth year, reveal that open source is now fully embraced by both the public and private sectors, and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data. Additionally, user confidence in open source continues to grow dramatically, represented by the fact that users are much less concerned with historical impediments to adoption such as licensing or conforming to an organization’s internal policies. Survey responses also show that the future is bright for open source. Emerging technology segments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), private cloud, public cloud, and mobile are driving growth in open source.
Filippo Sorbello of the university of Palermo shared his take on how Linux and the mainframe fit together, while Massimiliano Belardi - Sales Specialist at IBM - talked about IBM continued engagement with Linux and providing some case-history details.
Count me among those that have been a bit skeptical about Mozilla's new rapid release cycle.
You can also (potentially) now tell me that I'm wrong too.
Part of the Mozilla Firefox 5 rapid release cycle involves a regular and routine merge of code from the Aurora development tree to the Beta tree at set intervals.
Does this mean no-one should use cloud solutions? While there are some extreme voices that assert abstinence, I think that's an untenable position. Cloud computing offers so many benefits - many resonant with what people have historically sought from software freedom - that it's sure to be used. Listening to entrepreneurs and investors here at OSBC, there's no doubt that the future of software has a substantial dimension in the cloud.
Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance. The flexibility of Linux combined with the seamless scalability of cloud environments provide the perfect framework for processing huge datasets, while eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and custom proprietary software. Nowadays, Hadoop is one of the best choices in open source cloud computing, offering a platform for large scale data crunching.
C12G Labs announced today the availability of OpenNebulaPro 2.2 for customers and partners with an active subscription to OpenNebula.pro. This is the third major release of the commercially supported, enterprise-ready distribution of the OpenNebula open-source toolkit, which is used by thousands of organizations worldwide.
EnterpriseDB, the largest independent PostgreSQL open source database company, today announced its commitment to support the HP-UX operating environment on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. EnterpriseDB will introduce full support for HP-UX via Postgres Plus Advanced Server in June 2011. A beta version is available for download here.
Oracle has announced the development release of VirtualBox. The version 4.0.8 brings numerous bug fixes including enhanced 3D support for Gnome 3. The release fixes a potential crash when resizing the guest window. It also fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15.
These days I started to see some questions arise here and there, about why we’re not proceeding as fast as we could with the setup of the legal entity, why we sometimes fail to communicate a vision for the project, etc. These are all good questions. Ultimately, we have to react to them by acting on the issues that are raised. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing fast. I hope (I know) we will soon see several announcements pertaining to the community and the project. We’re working hard at making the foundation a reality, but we’re also working hard at securing the Document Foundation’s financial future and at improving our community processes. Questions that arise about these matters are legitimate, and if you feel we’re not answering them, then it means we’re either swamped or are currently not able to answer them (because of various constraints). But we do read them, we do hear them. And they will be answered, either in writing, or in solid fact, usually expressed by an announcement. You can help make many things a reality by contributing to the LibreOffice project. It’s fun, it’s even exhilarating and it’s a formidable human adventure alongside being technically exciting and challenging.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate has named the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to lead implementation efforts for the five-year, $10 million Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program. The HOST program will investigate open source and open cyber security methods, models and technologies, and identify viable and sustainable approaches that support national cyber security objectives.
"The strategic objective of the HOST program is to lead efforts of discovery and collaboration, seeding development in open source software and practices that produce a measurable impact for government cyber security systems," said Joshua Davis, associate division head at GTRI's Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory and principal investigator for the HOST program. "The collaborative nature of open source and open technologies provide unique technical and economic value and opportunities for government users."
[...]
Open technologies are not a panacea for all challenges, Davis added. HOST will reach out to government, industry, academic and open source community representatives to learn where and how open technologies have been successfully adopted within public and private systems and where the challenges still remain.
Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures. Kleiner partner Ellen Pao will be joining Datameer’s board. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.
In order to download the magazine you need to sign up to our newsletter. After clicking the “Download” button, you will be asked to provide your email address. You need to verify your email address using the link from the activation email you will receive.
Libidn2 is a free software implementation of IDNA2008. Libidn2 is part of the GNU Libidn project. Libidn2 is in beta testing, but is believed to provide complete IDNA2008 functionality (i.e., both lookup and register).
Several Open Source German companies cooperate in the newly launched Open Source Integration Initiative (OSII) in order to develop a modular ‘stack’ solution for open source business solutions. The Initiative is supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and backed by Lisog, the largest open source network in the German-speaking world.
Today we are happy to announce that PLoS ONE has published its 20,000th manuscript! We could not have gotten here today without the help and support of our authors, reviewers, academic editors, and the OA community. Thank you for helping us to achieve this incredible milestone!
Aldebaran Robotics is planning to release a significant proportion of its proprietary source code. This was announced at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the details are still far from clear.
Perl 5.14 is now available, marking the first major release of the open source development language since Perl 5.12 in 2010.
The new release provides improved Unicode support and expands IPv6 capabilities. While Perl 5.14 is now generally available, the release follows 12 incremental releases in the development tree.
"Like Linux, Perl follows the even/odd versioning convention that has an odd minor version number [e.g. '13' in 5.13] indicate it is a development release that will become 5.14," Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState told InternetNews.com. "There were actually 12 releases [through to 5.13.11] for 5.13 that were used to experiment with, test and harden the new features that became part of 5.14."
In the last tutorial we created a file using our text editor and saved a function to it. This file was called trivia.py and in it was the module “trivia”. We then started Python in a console and import()ed the trivia module. Once imported, it created a “namespace” and we could access the askQuestion() function from within the trivia namespace by using a dot – trivia.askQuestion(). In order for the module to work properly we had to include an import statement within the module itself so that everything that the module relied upon was imported within the module. We then manually loaded our data from a pickle file we created and, manually, ran the askQuestion() function on the first question in our data store. Finally we added docstrings to the function and the module.
The purging of less-profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has been declining for several years and why the number of Americans without coverage reached a record high of nearly 51 million last year. According to the National Small Business Association, the number of small businesses that provide health insurance to their employees fell from 61 percent in 1993 to 38 percent in 2009.
After reports this week of security forces in Bahrain torturing detainees, particularly medical personnel, Babylon & Beyond spoke with Mohammed Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights who has been working to document human rights abuses in the capital, Manama, and throughout the Gulf nation with international partners such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Last week I wrote here that Scholastic's coal curriculum distributed to 66,000 fourth grade teachers, was sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, meaning that it somehow failed to mention any of the downsides of coal production: no negative effects of mining and burning coal, no toxic wastes, no lung disease, no greenhouse houses.
With most Asian stock markets rallying overnight with the Shanghai index at a one week high (Indian Sensex in contrast at a fresh 8 week low), commodity prices are bouncing with copper in particular back above $4 and a touch above its 200 day moving average. With respect to Greece, the rhetoric is getting more heated between the ECB and other EU members over what to do next. ECB member Stark said a Greek debt restructuring "would create a catastrophe" as he believes that it "would wipe out part or all the capital of the Greek banks."
The ministers from the 17 nations that use the euro endorsed former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Inteernational, Mario Draghi, 63, to take over as head of the European Central Bankin November, Luxembourg’s Jean- Claude Juncker, who leads the group, told reporters in Brussels late yesterday. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet’s eight-year term ends on Oct. 31.
In its previous response to us, the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 - hence he was not there when the controversial Greek "debt swaps" were arranged.
We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.
The efforts of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major websites to tailor our online experiences to our supposed interests can affect our ability to get a view of the world the way it really is.
The fact that they were exempt from from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill never prevented Wisconsin’s firefighters or police from stepping up to protest Walker's union-busting agenda. Walker said the unions were exempt from the bill not for political reasons but for reasons of public safety (strikes and burning houses are not a good combination), but the police and firefighter's unions knew that their rights too could soon be on the chopping block.
Canada's new copyright reform legislation will look a lot like its earlier versions, Conservatives say.
Tory MP Dean Del Mastro said Tuesday the copyright modernization bill the Harper government pledged to pass in its election platform would essentially be a duplicate of the previously introduced ÃÂ and controversial ÃÂ Bill C-32.
The much-anticipated UK Independent Review of IP and Growth, typically referred to as the Hargreaves report, was released this morning. The report focuses on how intellectual property laws can stifle innovation and urges the UK government to enact reforms that remove legal barriers to economic growth (James Boyle, who served as expert advisor to the review, gives his take here). For example, it notes:
Because IPRs grant a form of monopoly, an overly rigid and inflexible IP framework can act as a barrier to innovation. When a firm has acquired exclusive rights over its innovative technology or content, other firms will be able to learn from that technology or see the content, but may be unable to use them for further innovation unless licensing can be agreed. IPRs can constrain third parties wishing to access or innovate on top of this protected knowledge or content, with potentially serious economic and social costs.
FFXI - Linux gameplay through Wine (Shadow Lord)