Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, next week plans a major update to its massive code hosting and project management platform Launchpad. Version 2.0 will introduce improved support for third-party application lifecycle tools used to find, report and fix bugs in Ubuntu - plus the applications and 6,000 projects in the ecosystem around it. Canonical has been talking up the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Mississauga, Ontario-based Koolu Inc. has agreed to distribute OpenMoko's Linux-based Neo FreeRunner in the Americas, the U.K., and the European Union. Koolu is distributing the FreeRunner under the name W.E. Phone, and is bundling it with Google Apps.

The first two days of O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) are dominated by technical tutorials, but there are sessions that buck the trend. Monday's most interesting event was Participate 08, a panel discussion sponsored by Microsoft. Panelists debated the meaning of the buzzword "openness" as it applies to source code, services, data, and business models.

Contributing to open source typically conjures images of working on a project's code. But offering bandwidth is another critical way the movement can benefit. That's the approach taken by NTT America, a Tier 1 carrier and a division of Japan-based NTT Communications, which is now helping open source by donating IPv6 transit (define) to the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC).

Microsoft is probably standing at its most important crossroads ever, just when Bill Gates is waving goodbye. Well, actually, Microsoft has been missing Gates for a long time. Something happened after the 2004 antitrust ruling, both to the company and to its longtime visionary -- call it a loss of focus. You have to wonder now whether Microsoft can get back to its old confident ways without its founder's guidance.

Life would be a lot easier if we could live in a Linux-only world and if applications never required data from other sources. However, the need to get data from Windows, MS-DOS, or old Macintosh systems is all too common. This kind of import process requires some conversions to solve file format differences; otherwise, it would be impossible to share data, or file contents would be imported incorrectly. The easiest way to transfer data between systems is by using plain text files or common formats like comma-separated value (CSV) files. However, converting such files from Windows or Mac OS results in formatting differences for the newline characters and character encoding. This article explains why we have these problems and shows ways to solve them.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering enterprises in ways we could only have imagined a few years ago. They have evolved beyond consumer-grade blogs and wikis into enterprise-class solutions driving collaboration, productivity, sales and cost savings. But despite the business value they deliver, are enterprises ready to fully embrace Web 2.0 technologies?

Debian, arguably the most important Linux distribution, is readying to celebrate its 15th birthday on August 16. While a respected and widely-used Linux distribution in its own right, Debian has, over the 15 years, also been widely used as the base for numerous other Linux distributions, including the popular Ubuntu distribution created by South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth.

New adopters often see virtualization as the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. It enables consolidation of separate servers and databases to provide more economic operations. Running consolidated computers from one virtualized machine also eliminates the electrical waste spent to keep idling servers and data-processing machines running.

ZK is an AJAX toolkit designed to make creating user interfaces that run in a Web browser as simple as creating event-driven interfaces for desktop applications. The interfaces created with ZK use an XML markup language to define the user interface and Java code to implement the Web application's functionality. ZK includes support for data-bound controls so that you do not have to worry about updating the user interface forms when you change your Java objects.

One of the development process advantages brought by git (and by BitKeeper before it) is the ability to see the up-to-the-second, bleeding-edge status of Linus's tree. So any developer who wants to know where the front edge of development lies can grab that tree and make patches fit into it. But the value of the mainline repository for development would appear to be less than it once was. The mainline is no longer where the action is.

"Hurrah! 2.0 has been released!" said Matthew Dillon, announcing the eighth major release of DragonFly BSD. This release is the first to include HAMMER, a new clustering filesystem that already boasts an impressive list of features, including: "crash recovery on-mount, no fsck; fine-grained snapshots, snapshot management, snapshot-support for filesystem-wide data integrity checks; historically accessible by default; mirroring: queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; undo and rollback; reblocking; multi-volume, maximum storage capacity of 1-Exabyte."

It's a sure thing that you can sit for a range of Microsoft certifications at almost any event where two or more 'Softies are gathered together in Bill's name. Now Intel is leveraging its own developer muscle by organising Linux certification exams for attendees of the Intel Developer Forum held late August in San Francisco.

Implicit Networks Inc., based in Seattle, claims the three companies and Adobe Systems Inc. are violating two patents for computer-server software that performs faster security functions. The patents were issued from 1998 and 2001 applications. The complaint, filed July 15 in federal court in Seattle, targets IBM's Websphere Application Server, Oracle's Application Server and BEA WebLogic Server, SAP's NetWeaver and Adobe's JRun and ColdFusion products.

Don't tell Greg Kroah-Hartman that Linux hurts for device drivers. He's heard too much of that rap, and he's already done plenty to stop it. We should thank him and help pick up the ball. I'm doing both here.

Often times when developing programs there is a need to build the program in/for multiple configurations. Many times, autoconf and its resulting configure script do what you need. Other times you can just change a #define in your code. But sometimes, autoconf isn't an option and changing a define doesn't quite work (say you need to pass your defines/undefines to m4 or some other tool that can't handle include files). The solution is probably to change your makefile. The method presented here results in a fairly compact change to your makefile

PC users seeking an environmentally friendly desktop system can add the new CherryPal C100 desktop to the list of contenders. The machine, announced Monday, was designed by green computer maker CherryPal and contains no moving parts. With 80 percent fewer components, the minimalist system uses a scant 2 watts of power.

Where most computer science departments emphasize theory and mention free and open source software (FOSS) only indirectly, Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, offers a different approach: a hands-on introduction to the community in partnership with the Mozilla and Fedora projects. Now in its third year, the program is expanding rapidly and receiving attention from other academic institutions that hope to imitate it.

Once it was the desktop, now mobile phones and embedded devices represent the future of Linux, according to open source fans. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, painted a future of Linux's manifest destiny - running everything from aerospace systems to the phone in your pocket. According to Zemlin, Linux has 18 per cent of the embedded market, beating Windows on 16 per cent. The opportunity is in mopping up the 43.7 per cent of the embedded market that's currently using proprietary operating systems. As with the Linux desktop, though, there are just one or two challenges that must be overcome, he told the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), in Portland, Oregon.

It's quite fascinating how many virtualization designs there are out there. Even in Linux itself there are so many different approaches. To reduce the scope a bit for this post we'll ignore all the designs that can't revirtualize the CPU to allow other operative systems to run.