Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

"Some people seem to be using'Acked-by' to mean,'seems good to me', without necessarily doing a full review of the patch, and instead of trying to change the meaning of'Acked-by', [the plan is] to have a new sign off which is a bit more explicitly about what it means," Theodore Tso explained in a recent thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He continued:"This was proposed by Andrew and discussed at the Kernel Summit; the basic idea is that it is a formal indication that the person has done a *full* review of the patch (a few random comments from the local whitespace police don't count), and is willing to vouch that the patch is correct, safe, extremely unlikely to cause regressions.

Cisco's consumer products division is shipping a successor to the Linux-based NSLU2 (aka "SLUG") consumer NAS (network-attached storage) appliance, one of the most-hacked devices ever. The NAS200 has room for two internal SATA drives, supports FAT32-formatted external USB 2.0 drives, and comes with UPnP media-sharing software.

Hey guys! The Libregamewiki (which I run), the Free gaming encyclopedia are looking for contributors for the wiki project. The wiki launched a few weeks ago and it need your help! So far, we have over 100 articles, 1,400 edits and we're not even close to reaching Wikipedia standard. It is an attempt to comprehensively document the world of Free gaming. In the process, we're collecting information that nobody collect before like the biographies of game hackers who make the games we know and love like David White of Battle for Wesnoth. There are also contests(such as Pyweek) and games that never got their own article in Wikipedia or shortly delete afterward.

[Is it me, or is there a lot more FOSS gaming news/activity lately? – Sander]

Red Hat is continuing to land big, fat contracts for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. This week saw major deals with the French Ministry for Education and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry. In the first deal, the French Ministry for Education migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to RHEL. Red Hat followed up this announcement with news of another major European deal. FASS.se, the main medicines portal run by the LIF (Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry), has migrated its servers from Sun Solaris to RHEL.

For years, if you wanted an inexpensive, but Windows-compatible file and print server, you turned to Samba running on Linux. Now, with the first alpha release of Samba 4, this open-source project is moving closer to becoming a complete Windows 2003/Longhorn replacement. However, the Samba Group warns would-be users that, "Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments. Note the WARNINGS in WHATSNEW.txt in the source and the STATUS file which aims to document what should and should not work."

Five years after being pegged a monopolist, Microsoft is coming under scrutiny for efforts to license its proprietary technology in accordance with antitrust legal demands from U.S. and European regulators. The Microsoft Communications Protocol Program (MCPP) was envisioned as a way to encourage competition and promote interoperability between Microsoft's products and Unix, Linux and open source applications. Whether the licensing program has worked as planned is a topic of hot debate, and the U.S. District Court in Washington plans to take up the subject for review on Sept 11.

A survey by the investment banking and securities firm UBS found that fewer CIOs will deploy Linux than in the past, but the results are being met with shrugs in the Linux community. A slowdown is often viewed as a natural event in market dynamics, a maturing of a technology. "This is not a bad thing," said Clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group. Linux uptake had been on a tear, Ryder said. The momentum continued as business buyers increasingly saw its value.

Bruce Perens is here for the second keynote of the evening. I spoke to Bruce on IT Conversations last March when he was last in Utah to protest the Novell/Microsoft deal. Bruce is not only interesting to listen to, but entertaining as well. Bruce gives an intro about why he got excited about open source. As I mentioned, Bruce has criticized Novell in the past (and will today). The conference is being held at Novell, but the security folks haven’t thrown him out yet.

IBM and Novell have announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM productivity tools to deliver advanced email and calendar capabilities, unified communication & collaboration and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capabilities with OpenDocument Format support.

In an effort to fully understand the math proposed by Roman Zippel in his Really Fair Scheduler, Ingo Molnar implemented a simplified version of the logic on top of his Completely Fair Scheduler code which he then humorously labeled the Really Simple Really Fair Scheduler, "could you please confirm whether the math algorithm you are suggesting is implemented by this patch roughly correctly?"

The numbers, clearly, point to a major industry trend. Take a look: Dice, the tech jobs site, reports that it had 9,631 Linux job listings in August. While this is a big number, what's truly eye-catching is the percentage growth since January: Linux job listing are up a robust 30 percent--three times the increase of overall tech job listings. (Since January, Dice job listings have grown by 10.2 percent, to a total of 96,548 tech jobs.)

Today marked the mildly delayed new release of X.org version 7.3, which corresponds to server version 1.4. The X.org community has been working out the last of the bugs since their code-base became semi-frozen on August 1st (which they refer to as "Code Slush") and are now confident that the release will be worth the wait. The so-called killer feature of this version of X is the new support for hotplugging of input devices (such as keyboard, mice, touchscreens) as well as output devices (monitors, projectors, and so forth).

Mandriva readies for full release later this month by announcing Mandriva 2008 RC1, codenamed "Copernic". Mandriva 2008 RC1 is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures.

"Completely fair scheduling is [a] really good thing, but if you want the best performance for certain applications you need to tune up some things," explained Michal Piotrowski in his announcement for the fifth version of hisDeskOpt daemon. The daemon is a Python script that helps to automatically tune the I/O scheduler and the process scheduler to offer better performance for certain applications such as games or audio applications. The script supports the default CFS process scheduler and CFQ I/O scheduler, as well as the anticipatory I/O scheduler and the deadline I/O scheduler.

It’s old news now, but ISO has announced that OOXML failed to meet both of the criteria for success in the Five Month Ballot Period. Andy Updegrove and Pam Jones have the details. Congratulations to all who worked to secure this result in the goal of high quality, non-vendor dictated open standards. The story is not over, of course, as the Ballot Resolution Meeting in February will attempt to get agreement on fixes to OOXML to make it acceptable. A lot will happen between now and then. Nevertheless, this was a truly historic vote and result. But that was so yesterday. What about tomorrow?

Linux is not a free version of Windows. The two systems differ not only visually, in the graphical user interface the user sees, but also functionally, as is frequently discussed, and legally to boot, which is constantly emphasized by the Free software community. The differences between them are so fundamental that drawing a comparison between them is nearly impossible. There are so many moot points that they could make up a very long list. This part of my article concerns the architectures of Windows systems.

On the last months people have been complaining a lot about the lack of contrast and the all white issues on the oxygen style, I have said also lots of times that it is mostly a pallet issue. But the message is not getting out, so... I will do what i always do... Show pretty pictures.

What do engineers do when they observe a problem? They start a project to fix it. A Swiss standard expert who got annoyed by the "Open XML bug" of ISO procedures launched OpenISO.org. "Generally speaking, the only way in which the world has ever been changed for the better is by small groups of dedicated people who (mostly) didn't have much in terms of financial resources but who went forward anyway... Right now OpenISO.org seems to me to be the only promising long-term strategy."

South African computer technology distributor Sahara is offering notebooks with pre-installed Linux operating systems. The company added this open-source option to its product range earlier this year, but it is unclear how successful the move has been. Currently Sahara is the only major supplier of computers pre-loaded with Linux in South Africa.

The real question Linux advocates need to answer is this. Can you go Microsoft-free and still get your work done? Mike Kavis is trying to find out. Back in May he dumped his Windows desktop for Ubuntu and now he has launched a pilot program to take his employer in the same direction. This type of experiment is going on in lots of places. As I noted previously, I’m engaged in the same process. Step by step, application by application, I am weaning myself away from Microsoft. I’m not Microsoft-free yet but if I can do it, you can too. If Mike can do it, so can your enterprise. I want to be like Mike. Do you?