Showing headlines posted by dcparris

A senior analyst believes Firefox maker Mozilla Corporation should be doing more to push the Web browser, despite a recent distribution deal with Real Networks.

IFBIN was an attempt at creating a commercial code library that you subscribed to. The code was great, but the price was steep, especially to a community spoiled by lots of good and free tutorials. Recently, IFBIN was changed to be a free service.

I recently attend a Philadelphia Area Linux Users Group (PLUG) meeting presented by Toby DiPasquale titled “Google Internals” Slides here: Google Internals talk for PLUG by Toby DiPasquale. Why is this of interest on a Linux blog? As many of you may already know, Google uses a version of Red Hat to power their servers, running on old kernels (it is speculated that they run on 2.0 or 2.2 kernels). This Google Internals talk takes you through the basics of how Google uses their approximately 450,000 servers to run everything from Google search to GMail worldwide. The slides are based on information gathered from reliable Google sources, including talks given by Google staff, and gives you a very basic framework for understanding what is “under the hood” over at Google.

Did you ever wonder what our editors do in their spare time? We don't -- because most of the time we figure we're better off not knowing. In any case, it seems that Robin 'Roblimo' Miller got turned on to a YouTube video called Al Gore's Penguin Army and decided to spread the word with his own YouTube video that this corporate-sponsored piece misused our favorite mascot, Tux, and didn't even bother to give appropriate credit to Tux creator Larry Ewing. Oh, the humanity!

The GIMP finally has a documented file specification. The free image editor has long been criticized over the fact that its native image format XCF was not publicly documented. Recently the issue came to a head, sparked unintentionally by discussions over the proposed OpenRaster graphics interchange format. Once the argument cooled off, however, an independent developer decided to tackle the problem head on -- to the benefit of all.

Linus Torvalds had harsh comments about the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to help it draft version 3 of the GNU Public License (GPLv3). However, so far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree with Torvalds' assessment that the FSF isn't listening to feedback.

Rip your DVDs to a nice portable .avi the easy way with Acidrip, a very competent front-end for Mencoder.

Plenty of loud argument has ensued over whether binary-only drivers belong in an operating system based on open source philosophies. David Chisnall examines the reasoning on both sides.

The first Colombian Mini-DebConf will be held at Popayan, Cauca, on August 19th-20th. It will be a space where the people of the Debian community of Colombia could meet together and work around the project. We'll have talks, hacklabs, some "free"-time for BSP, packaging or any other debian-related activity, and of course, recreation time, like a trip around the city in Chiva, a typical bus of the country.

The Linux kernel development model changed a couple of years ago at the 2004 Kernel Summit [story]. At that time it was decided that as a team Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton [interview] were doing a great job together maintaining the 2.6 kernel, using Andrew's -mm kernel [story] as a staging area with new features being allowed into the mainline kernel and ultimate stabilization left up to Linux distributions. In March of 2005, Greg KH and Chris Wright began maintaining a -stable patchset [story], accepting small, focused patches fixing real bugs or security issues. The -stable patchsets have been maintained since for the latest kernel and the previously released kernel.

In December of 2005, Adrian Bunk announced his intention to maintain the 2.6.16 kernel indefinitely, maintaining it much the same as the 2.4 kernel is maintained for as long as it is used and patches are contributed. Greg KH recently announced that Adrian is now taking over the 2.6.16-stable branch, "he will still be following the same -stable rules that are documented in the Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt file, but just doing this for the 2.6.16 kernel tree for a much longer time than the current stable team is willing to do (we have moved on to the 2.6.17 kernel now.)" He went on to caution, "and I'd like to offer my best wishes to Adrian for doing this work. Personally I don't think it can be done for all that long of an amount of time, and I will be very happy to see him prove me wrong :)"

It's not surprising that some open-source software companies consider closing their source code, said Dennis Cox, chief technical officer at BreakingPoint Systems. Closing the code and selling future versions or becoming the official supplier of support services can be profitable, Cox said.

[Interesting title, weird article. - dcparris]

Firefox doing well

UK colleges and universities routinely consider open source solutions to IT problems - even when official policy might not support it.

Aug 04 (LBO) – Popular Internet search engine Google has given the Lanka Software Foundation 25,000 dollars to drive open source software projects locally.

The Defence Academy was formed in April 2002 as a result of the 2001 Defence Training Review. The Academy is a military and academic community that provides professional and personal development to some 11,600 students per year. It has an annual operating budget of £110 million and manages contracts worth £1.2 billion. It has some 750 military, academic and support staff. The Academy is a British institution playing an international role.

Under the multiyear pacts, RealNetworks will continue to offer the Google Toolbar with its RealPlayer. It will also offer people downloading the media player the option of downloading Firefox.

[This story is essentially a duplicate of one which already appeared on LXer. However, I couldn't resist the historical opportunity to post a story with "rid=66666", the 66,666 story passing through LXer's database. -- grouch]