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LXer Feature: 27-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have several Microsoft related articles including, extending the life of XP to parry the Linux threat, Office 2007 fails OXML test and MSN users find out that they get to re-buy all the music they purchased from MSN Music. Also, an interview with Kurt Denke - the man who shut up Monster Cable and a ton of Ubuntu related articles because of the Hardy Heron release. Also there are three LXer features, The Biggest Blunder, an intro to secure web data Input, and Accurate market share statistics and The $60 Billion dollar question for your reading pleasure as well.

Linux Ubuntu 8.04 virgin no longer, I popped my own cherry last night, installing Hardy Heron for the first time, with some odd installation experiences I can only hope aren’t the ‘norm’. So, what happened? So, Hardy Heron, Ubuntu 8.04, the final release version. You’re finally on my computer. It’s been a long wait – I never did bother with your predecessors Eft, Gibbon and the rest.

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

The last couple of years have seen a renewed push within the kernel community to avoid regressions. When a patch is found to have broken something that used to work, a fix must be merged or the offending patch will be removed from the kernel. It's a straightforward and logical idea, but there's one little problem: when a kernel series includes over 12,000 changesets (as 2.6.25 does), how does one find the patch which caused the problem? Sometimes it will be obvious, but, for other problems, there are literally thousands of patches which could be the source of the regression. Digging through all of those patches in search of a bug can be a needle-in-the-haystack sort of proposition.

A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service. Christopher Tarnovsky -- who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada -- testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp's NDS Group by DISH Network Corp.

I'm helping to edit what is turning out to be a shockingly good book on the legal issues around open source, from the developer's perspective, which Van Lindberg is finishing up and which O'Reilly will be publishing. When it comes out, you will want to buy it. It's incredibly well-written and expresses things much more clearly than I've yet seen in my 10 years within the open-source community.

Linux in the data center brings with it a dilemma: more boxes to manage. Traditional IT management tools such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and CA Unicenter can creep up in cost as the server count increases. With management tools in the picture, the total cost of ownership may actually increase instead of decrease when Linux is brought in.

Both Mark Shuttleworth and myself have discussed this idea before. Because Mark brought it up again in a recent interview, I feel compelled to developer this idea further. The main concept is that Linux distributions, and open source in general, have a lot to gain by synchronizing their release schedules.

LXer Feature: 26-Apr-2008

Earlier this week an article concerning Vista and market share and one about how Open Source Software has cost the IT Industry $60 Billion dollars over the last five years or so hit the newswire. Needless to say this generated some conversations about their validity. I got to wondering if there have ever been accurate market share statistics for Linux or any operating system for that matter and to ask myself the $60 Billion dollar question.

Ubuntu is becoming more and more complete and easy to configure. However, like any operating system there’s work to be done after the installation. Here’s a list of 10 tips that you can use after installing or upgrading Ubuntu.

"I've put together an automatic system for applying kernel security patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting it, and I wanted to share this system with the community in case others find it useful or interesting," said Jeff Arnold, announcing ksplice. He explained, "the system takes as input a kernel security patch (which can be a unified diff taken directly from Linus' GIT tree) and the source code corresponding to the running kernel, and it automatically creates a set of kernel modules to perform the update. The running kernel does not need to have been customized in advance in any way."

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward. Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that's capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.

A pint-sized, multi-functional Linux server small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, was released this week into the North American market by Japan-based Plat'Home.

In the coming months, Serenity Systems and Mensys will be offering the latest release of eComStation, 2.0. This is the new name and face on the venerable OS/2. It's all too easy to find websites discussing the history of OS/2, articles that walk through the installation process, and lists of drivers, software, and so forth. Despite the ardent love for OS/2 one finds in the user groups, it remains a fairly small niche operating system. This has little to do with the technical merits or demerits of OS/2.

Edubuntu is a customized version of Ubuntu aimed at children in educational environments. According to the distributions homepage, Edubuntu is "Linux for Young Human Beings." That works out well for me, since I have three of those in my house. I homeschool my children and use Edubuntu on a couple of our computers. My boys love having an operating system that was designed with them in mind, and I appreciate the way its applications encompass the total learning process.

If there appears to be more interest in the release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) than the average distribution, I think I should take some of the blame. Last month, a piece which I authored about what I perceived to be the significance of the release commanded extraordinary interest. And thereafter I noticed a spate of something in the nature of copycat pieces springing up all over the web - with no attribution at all.

The Apache-licensed GChart utility lets you quickly generate nice-looking charts on your Web site. GChart is implemented with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which we introduced recently. To install GChart, just extract the distribution zip file. You can work with GChart in your own GWT applications by using it in Eclipse. You first have to tell Eclipse where to find the extracted gchart.jar file and modify your GWT module file to include GChart. These last two setups are described in detail in GChart's installation instructions.

Brazil's Ministry of Education ("MEC") is installing Linux in labs used by 52 million schoolchildren, reports KDE developer Mauricio Piacentini. Piacentini's blog post describes MEC's "Linux Educacional 2.0" as "a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project."

"HAMMER is going to be a little unstable as I commit the crash recovery code," began DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon, adding, "I'm about half way through it." He went on to list what's left for crash recovery to work with HAMMER, his new clustering filesystem, "I have to flush the undo buffers out before the meta-data buffers; then I have to flush the volume header so mount can see the updated undo info; then I have to flush out the meta-data buffers that the UNDO info refers to; and, finally, the mount code must scan the UNDO buffers and perform any required UNDOs."

Financial and ERP applications are arguably the last bastion of proprietary software giants, but the Kuali Foundation wants to eliminate those remaining barriers to open source enterprise systems, at least in the educational realm. Kuali is a nonprofit collection of colleges, universities, commercial companies, and consultants who hope to "bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services." Kuali's first project, Kuali Financial Systems, is already working on its 3.0 release, scheduled for the end of this year.