Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Well there you have it, Awn 0.2 has been released! With over six months since the last release, you'd think we were working on something as complicated as Gnome, but I think there are enough new features to show where the time has gone ;-). I'd like to highlight a few of the main features that have landed into trunk over the recent weeks, and others that I maybe haven't mentioned before.

Continuing their quirky habit of releasing a song for each new release, OpenBSD team has released the official 4.2 song. OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt describes it as "mid-era Rush song". Download it now and check out the free software lyrics.

I'd like to live in a tub of cream cheese icing. Sadly, that's not an option for me. It is, however, an option for Canonical/Ubuntu head Mark Shuttleworth. The open source advocate has plenty of cash - enough cash to build a breathing apparatus and waste removal system for a man-sized icing pool. I bring up the icing for no reason. I bring up Mark Shuttleworth because he's the star of Open Season Episode 4. Dave Rosenberg, Matt Asay and I reached Mark at Canonical's UK office for an hour-long chat covering all sorts of open source software topics and issues.

Following in the footsteps of the Great Cucumber and The Salad Sandwich comes Panacea, the Greek goddess of cures. That’s the codename for our latest Linux release, which went public today as Skype 1.4 for Linux. We’re very proud of our shiny new release and highly recommend you give it a shot. We tried our best to create a client that you will enjoy. Which is why it’s been written by long-time Linux users for Linux users.

This years class of nominees for the 2007 Linux Medical Freedom Award are a prestigious group indeed. The panel of judges has a difficult task ahead of it. The nominees are as follows:

• Herman Tolentino, MD Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS)
• Web Reach, Inc. Mirth Project.
• Gerry Douglas, MD Malawi RHIO.
• Paul G. Biondich, MD, MS Regenstreif Institute
• WorldVistA for WorldVistA EHR CCHIT Certification.

The award will be given November 13th, 2007 at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Fall Conference in Chicago. This is not an official AMIA award. Complete text of the nomination is within.

Another day, another Linux distro point revision. Honours this time go to OpenSUSE, available now in version 10.3 for free download at http://www.opensuse.org. You can also buy this open source operating system, which is based on Linux kernel 2.6.22, from some retailers and at shopnovell.com for $59.95 in real money. Or, rather, you can place your pre-order. Flash the cash, and you will at some undetermined but real soon time get a boxed version, a manual and 90 days installation support thrown in.

When the Linux Foundation emerged from the collision of the Open Software Development Labs (ODSL) and the Free Standards Group in January 2007, cynical observers described it, with some justification, as "yet another Linux knitting circle". Probably more than any other software phenomenon, Linux has generated a plethora of lobbying groups, alliances and standards organizations. This applies especially to what is growing into one of the most important development areas for Linux - mobile devices.

Sun Microsystems has issued patches for several vulnerabilities in its Java Runtime Environment that leave users on Windows, Linux and Solaris wide open. By our count, there are 11 separate vulnerabilities plaguing versions 6, 5, 1.4 and 1.3 of the JRE, Sun said on its security blog.

The summer has finished, and it's about time I summarised how we got on. We had 9 Summer of Code students working for us, and we had a 100% success rate this year. Woo! Last year we only managed 6 successful projects out of 10, so that's a major improvement. So, how did the various projects pan out? The proof of the pudding is in the code, of course, and these projects are all available to use today, either packaged in Debian or installed on central servers providing services. Here's a quick overview.

There are plenty of different terminal programs out there for all different desktops. YaKuake is one such KDE-based terminal emulator with a difference. It basically gives you a Quake-style drop-down terminal at the top of the screen, which you can access with a single keystroke.

The new version Puppy Linux is released. Puppy is a distribution for low end PCs, designed to run from media like usb sticks. It's size is less than 100 MB. This Puppy is a massive upgrade from the previous (v2.17.1). It has close binary compatibility with Slackware 12, with the objective of being able to install Slackware packages and have all or most of the required dependencies already in place.

As some of you may remember, 2 distros signed pacts with Microsoft in a short time. Those were Linspire and Xandros. Since 2004 I have been a Linspire Insider. I was as upset about this deal as many others were. I even had a phone call with Kevin Carmony regarding the matter. Well, at one point on the forums, Kevin Carmony told some upset members that if they did not like the way things were, they can start their own distro and see how it goes. So, former Freespire Leadership Board member Chris Medico assembled a team, of which I was honored to be asked to be a part of, which he lovingly calls Freedom Force. Within weeks, this new project, based on Kubuntu, had an Alpha. The project is called KlikIt Linux.

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices. But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”

Got a very nice letter from the EFF and am trying to put together an appointment to discuss options. The dtsc situation is under control for the moment, May light up again later next month when they look over our proposed solutions. In addition the next waste board stakeholders meeting has re-use on the agenda.

The Linux Foundation has announced a new collaborative agreement with Japan's Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA), a government research institute that promotes information technology development and broadly supports the use of open standards and open-source software. The collaborative agreement is part of a plan to mutually assist in promoting open standards and the acceleration of open-source software adoption in Asia. The Linux Foundation will be participating in the upcoming IPA Forum 2007 User Conference in Tokyo.

For years, violations of the General Public License, or GPL, have been met with quiet discussions to resolve compliance problems that can result when open-source software is used improperly. Now, however, the Software Freedom Law Center is taking a hard-line approach, filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for allegedly failing to abide by requirements of the GPL. "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance," said Dan Ravicher, SFLC's attorney on the case.

Desktop performance on Linux computers has been a hot-button issue of late, and a source of longstanding fights among the Linux developers. Today, I want to show you how I boosted (and you can boost) desktop performance dramatically.

Last month at the X Developer Summit in Cambridge, Eric Anholt, Adam Jackson, and Daniel Stone had talked about the future of X.Org releases for the next year. Over the weekend, Daniel Stone had updated the XDS 2007 Notes at X.org with the latest plans for X.Org 7.5. The current schedule for X.Org include the X server 1.4.1 release coming out on the first of November followed by X server 1.5.0 in March of 2008. Planned for X.Org 7.4 and X server 1.5 is XGE, XACE, RandR 1.3, PCI rework, XKB 2, _X_EXPORT, DRI memory manager, GLX 1.4, and Glucose.

Despite all the obstacles and doubters, O.L.P.C. has come up with a laptop that’s tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles. It’s a technological breakthrough, for sure.

"I'm a bit behind after investigating the TCP performance issues that turned out to be HW specific problems. It's a bit of a disappointment, I thought maybe there was a cool bug to fix in TCP :-)" explained David Miller, posting hisnetworking merge plans for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He noted,"I merged in Jeff Garzik's and John Linville's latest and I'm running the current tree on my workstation most of today with good results so far." David added,"I plan to commit my Neptune driver in it's current state, and that's the last new feature going in."