Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

There’s no denying that the widespread growth of Linux was due in part to the raw enthusiasm of advocates meeting together under the broad banner of a “LUG” – a Linux User Group. LUG members were pioneers and cowboys, early adopters and passionate hobbyists. Today, the LUG is different. With the rise of commercial backing, the ease of distro installation, and the omniscience of Google do LUGs still have any role to play in the Linux world?

What is the greatest threat to Microsoft's dominance: Google Inc. or open source? The answer is both, especially when they're working together. The search giant is always careful to squelch speculation of any looming clash of the titans. When Google added a presentation app to its online office suite, for example, CEO Eric Schmidt adamantly stated it was not a rival to Microsoft Office. Google's bevy of Ph.D.s came up with the perfect solution: a way to fight Microsoft without appearing to do so. Open source lies at the heart of that strategy.

Part of Linux’s appeal has always been its low cost (essentially free) so it makes sense that a new crop of low-priced mini-laptops are turning to the OS. The beauty of these desktop replacement replacements is that, despite their compactness, they offer a real opportunity for genuine productivity on the go. While they don’t quite have the cool factor of an iPhone, some do feature flash drives for storage and wi-fi and could have definite appeal for students, journalists, and the like. One of these units will be available through Wal-Mart, so this could spell another big boost for Linux computing in the mainstream.

[Personally I disagree. The Eee PC is way cooler than the iPhone. - Sander]

Cluster SSH opens terminal windows with connections to specified hosts and an administration console. Any text typed into the administration console is replicated to all other connected and active windows. This tool is intended for, but not limited to, cluster administration where the same configuration or commands must be run on each node within the cluster. Performing these commands all at once via this tool ensures all nodes are kept in sync.

[ If you're interested in this topic, be sure to check out the BatchLogin project as well. It was created by LXer veteran Paul Fericyde, and he announced it on LXer too - hkwint ]

O’Reilly, the organisers of Ubuntu Live, have just issued the call for papers for Ubuntu Live 2008. The theme of the event is “Taking it Further”, which I think is perfect for Ubuntu this year! Ubuntu Live 2008 promises to be informative, as we start to reap the benefits of that experience. If you have interesting deployments or projects that you would like to share, UL2008 would be the right platform to do it!

I’m on an Edubuntu users mailing list where, more often than not, veteran users can answer questions for new users. I usually give it a quick skim for any new features or fixes and then leave it to accumulate like so many other pieces of information in my Gmail account (hooray for increased storage!). Tonight, however, I found a question from a new user looking to deploy an Edubuntu lab for some fairly far-reaching purposes. The response to the question was particularly good and included valuable thoughts for anyone looking to deploy server-centric solutions, regardless of OS.

# It's a threat Microsoft can't let stand: the entire third world learning Linux as children, and growing up to use it. And Microsoft is going to get its way. # It comes after a sudden wave of SCO-like problems for the OLPC project. A specious patent lawsuit over keyboards. Board-member Intel thrown out of the project for attempting to convince national governments to drop OLPC purchases and go with its own (Windows) product. First, OLPC is shown what its problems will be if it doesn't cooperate with Microsoft. Then, Microsoft approaches with money and technical help - you just have to run Windows to get it.

Taiwanese computer parts maker Asus obviously didn't get the memo. Didn't Asus know notebook computers need hard drives? Or that they're supposed to run Windows — and the pre-loaded software must bloat the boot-up process to the length of a long weekend? Don't they know you don't just go selling laptops for less than $750 — let alone $400 — unless the hardware has been aged like whisky? Asustek Computers Inc. went ahead and broke the rules with the Eee PC. And we should all be thankful.

I consider myself to be a geek. Linux and geeks have a long history together. So, naturally there are a bunch of geeky things available for Linux. In this case, I’m talking about screensavers. I was looking for a screensaver that would show me something really cool about my system. Then I got the idea for a screensaver that shows you random parts of the source code for the Linux kernel. I couldn’t find anything out there already that would do what I needed, so I decided to put it together myself. I also wrote my own command line utility for accomplishing this called Argument Shuffle.

[Pretty cool. And you don't need the kernel sources for it. I have it output random parts of my own programming projects. - Sander]

Readers to the rescue! The first thing you learn when you write about technology is that the people who read your stuff are smarter than you'll ever be. So let me start by saying "Thank you" to all the Linux users who responded to last Friday's post on my travails trying to get Ubuntu 7.10, or "Gutsy Gibbon," to recognize my Linksys WPC300N wireless adapter.

"Openness" may be reaching hyperbolic proportions in Silicon Valley, but the idea is relatively good natured at heart. The practice is rooted in the notion that sharing various assets (i.e., underlying code, operating and communication standards) merits both consumers and businesses. However, one could argue that the current fad of openness is little more than a Trojan horse. Take for instance these four tricks companies recently employed to convince us of their openness:

We have an NFS system which involves part of the local disks of all desktops being exported via NFS. Mostly this is consistently accessed via /disk/machinename, but some desktops have more than one local directory that’s exported. I finally got around recently to rewriting the (very old and no longer functional) script to query the LDAP database and get this info for a given machine name.

At CES 2008, Chinese company Winstron showed off their GW4, one of the world’s first Google Android handsets. According to early reports, the phone is running a basic version of Linux right now, but should be running Google’s open and free mobile platform by March 2008.

Today I got to meet with some people from Everex. They showed me their two newest products: the Everex Cloudbook and the Everex Gbook. The Cloudbook - initially known as the CE260 when first announced last June - is a UMPC and it measures 9” in length and weighs only 2 pounds. The Gbook is a laptop that has a 1.5GHZ VIA C7-M processor. It’ll cost $399 and be available though Wal-Mart as well.

OpenVZ and Ubuntu Linux developers on Tuesday will release pre-built Ubuntu virtual machines, designed to allow system administrators to deploy a specialised Ubuntu system in about a minute. Advertisement OpenVZ is an open-source project sponsored by Parallels (known as SWsoft until last month), which forms the basis for the commercial virtualisation software Virtuozzo. Parallels also makes desktop virtualisation software for Mac OS X, among other products. Parallels and Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, worked together on the virtualised templates, which are based on Ubuntu 7.10.

At last. I’m free of Microsoft Money, and therefore very close to being free of all my old proprietary applications. I’ve settled on KMyMoney as a capable free-as-in-freedom bookkeeping replacement. It doesn’t do everything that I was able to do in Money, but I can live with that while hoping some of my “wants” find their way in to later versions. What follows are random observations on my experience making the switch and how the two applications compare in some areas.

Chipmaker Broadcom and software developer Trolltech this week formed a partnership to create a multimedia voice over IP development platform based on Linux. The development platform is intended for original equipment manufacturers that want to build what the companies call "next-generation" IP phones. It combines Broadcom's VoIP technology and Trolltech's Qtopia Linux platform and user interface for mobile devices.

Navica's Bernard Golden discusses how commercial open source is its own business model and unique in that it faces two "chasms" -- from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm -- one involving broad adoption of the free versions of product, and the other involving converting a significant subset of adopters to paying customers.

Over at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Korean technology firm iRiver has been exhibiting a prototype device known as the "iRiver GSM Phone". According to PC Magazine, the unit bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple's iPhone, is powered by the Linux operating system and features a 3", 480 x 272 pixel touchscreen, single button at the bottom of the device, support for multiple types of media (including Adobe's Flash), support for music subscriptions through Real's Rhapsody service, two megapixel camera and will likely incorporate four gigabytes of flash memory.

Many people claim that “Linux is about choice!”. That’s a neat phrase, but what does it mean? Does it mean that you should have the ability to twist and turn 400 different knobs on your Linux install? That’s what some think. Does it mean that you have the right to choose Linux, or choose your flavor of Linux, and then choose from the package sets within those flavors? That’s what I and many others think. There is a very distinct difference here too. Let’s look at it from a food point of view (one of my favorite points-of-view).