Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I started this blog post when I was on paternity leave with my first child, thinking I'd get it finished over a few days in my spare time. Fool. As any of you with children know, there is no spare time with a newborn. So, here I am now, having lived with - and used when I can - an Ubuntu Linux laptop for the last couple of months. I've been trying it out alongside my usual laptop (Sony Vaio running Windows XP), my new MacBook Pro, and a Vista notebook that we also have in the house.

CodeWeavers, developer of software products that allow Mac and Linux users to run popular Windows software, has released CrossOver Mac 7.0 and CrossOver Linux 7.0. Both version of CrossOver 7.0 include support for Microsoft Office 2007, including Outlook 2007, newer versions of Quicken, and the Adobe CS and CS2 line of products, in particular Photoshop.

The OpenSUSE Project has achieved a new release of its free desktop and server distribution. OpenSUSE 11.0 features a redesigned installer, KDE 4.0, GNOME 2.2.2, and the flashy Compiz Fusion 3D window manager, and over 200 new features.

Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it, "represents an additional significant improvement in performance, [also including] bug fixes and most of the final media changes." A significant improvement in write performance was obtained by making the filesystem block size automatically increase from 16K to 64K when a file grows to larger than 1 MB. One remaining media change is required to optimize mtime and atime storage, at which point HAMMER will go into testing and bug fixing mode.

What started as an effort to package software not included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux has grown to be the most interesting part of Fedora for some ISVs. Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, or EPEL, is not a mass rebuild of all Fedora software for Enterprise Linux. It is a disciplined set of packages with a maintenance philosophy that aligns with Enterprise Linux.

openSUSE 11.0 was one of the most anticipated Linux distro releases of 2008. Despite a few bugs in the final code, which was released yesterday, it was worth the wait. The openSUSE version of KDE 4 alone is worth the download, and the improvements to the software manager make customizing a pleasure. I used the 4.3GB DVD version, but live CD versions are also available. In either, the first thing you might notice is the beautiful new installer. The layout is similar to that of previous versions, with a large interactive window and a progress list to the right, but with an elegant new color scheme and stylish graphics. And the beauty is not only skin deep -- there are a lot of changes under the hood in this release.

Microsoft recently survived a bruising battle with the open source community over the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard, a process that is now facing a number of appeals. The company also recently announced support for the competing Open Document Format in its forthcoming products. Here Paulo Ferreira, Microsoft South Africa's Platform Strategy Manager, talks to Tectonic about the future of XML, Microsoft's relationship with the open source community and why standards are important.

I was offered the chance to have an initial look at Novell's latest Linux offering openSUSE 11. It's a distribution I've tried in previous versions but often had trouble settling on. It seems very popular on enterprise desktops along with Red Hat. I got a copy of the KDE4 LiveCD and gave it a spin.

Red Hat has a desktop Linux plan. It’s just not the same desktop Linux plans that everyone else has. As Jim Whitehurst told me in an informal gathering of Red Hat executives and press, “There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?”

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they are often quite useful. Bash arrays have numbered indexes only, but they are sparse, ie you don't have to define all the indexes.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way. Customer One should not be able to see Customer Two's files, for example. And neither customer should be able to browse the filesystem of the server. I was also asked to define a process whereby our support staff could add new jails as needed.

Speaking on the first day of the Linux specialist's annual user conference in Boston, Whitehurst said his company need to work on its approach to "mundane" issues such as its own internal systems and managing customer records. "There is still a lot we need to do around execution. One thing I have heard from customers and partners over the last few months is that we are basically kind of tough to do business with — great technology but not necessarily the easiest company to do business with," he said.

Novell announced the official release of OpenSUSE 11 yesterday. It's the latest version of the community-driven Linux distribution and includes significant new features like the KDE 4 desktop environment and the PulseAudio sound server. We tested both the GNOME and KDE flavors of OpenSUSE 11 by installing from the Live CD images. These work reasonably well and provide an installation experience comparable to that of Ubuntu and Fedora.

One of the main community-driven projects that prompted Red Hat to open source its Satellite code today was the Linux boot server, Cobbler. Cobbler is a nifty piece of code that assembles all the usual setup bits needed for a large network installation like TFTP, DNS, PXE, installation trees etc. and automates the process. It can even generate DHCP configurations to assign specific IPs to MAC addresses.

Businesses are not philanthropists. They are not, intentionally, educators or evangelists for ideologies. However, from time to time their business models just happen to coincide with their more idealistic customers own interests. Asus is one such company. When they launched the little EeePC they could scarcely have imagined the extraordinary reaction it would cause. They say that any publicity is good publicity but the reaction to the two pound wonder was almost universally favourable. It was hot. I mean nuclear hot. And it was GNU/Linux.

NFS version 4, published in April 2003, introduced stateful client-server interaction and "file delegation," which allows a client to gain temporary exclusive access to a file on a server. NFSv4 brings security improvements such as RPCSEC_GSS, the ability to send multiple operations to the server at once, new file attributes, replication, client side caching, and improved file locking. Although there are a number of improvements in NFSv4 over previous versions, this article investigates just one of them -- performance.

One of the interesting aspects of Microsoft's long-running pursuit of Yahoo has been the potential knock-on effects for open source. Although the company doesn't make much of the fact, it uses a lot of free software, and has helped open source projects by employing some of the top hackers.

Dominic Sartorio began his career as a "traditional" software developer, but his career path has been indelibly marked by two things: a solid appreciation for the open source method, and a desire to understand the big picture of open collaboration and how that can ultimately create long-term benefits for the industry and for customers.

MontaVista announced that its Mobilinux 5.0 Linux distribution for mobile devices has been optimized for the Freescale i.MX31 system-on-chip (SoC). The optimization brings the total number of Freescale processors supported by MontaVista distributions to ten, says the company.

Finally, the so called 'stable' version of Wine, 1.0, has been released on June 17, 2008. The last Wine review I made was to 1.0RC2 (release candidate 2), in which I already tested World of WarCraft, mIRC and DC++. I had no issues with World of WarCraft (tested using a trial account) which performs very well, without any visible problems, DC++ has minor stability problems and the mIRC scripts editor crashes, but otherwise, mIRC behaves good enough.