Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Since our previous peek at the state of wireless networking in Linux, which is moving forward in an excellent fashion, the new unified Linux wireless stack (mac80211) has been accepted into the mainline 2.6.22 kernel. This is the new common base for all Linux wireless drivers. There are no drivers yet that use mac80211, but inclusion in the kernel is a huge step forward. Linux developers are hard at work porting old drivers and writing new ones, and this should attract participation from additional developers who now have a nice unified wireless networking stack to build on, instead of the previous mish-mash.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 102 for the week of August 20th. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue102

If you use the Opera browser on multiple machines, you'll inevitably run into the problem of keeping your bookmarks in sync. While you can store your bookmarks using services like del.icio.us, you might want to opt for oSync -- a synchronization utility that has a couple of clever features besides the ability to keep bookmarks and notes in sync.

A distributed computing project named "Artificial Intelligence - Reverse engineering the brain" has been launched on Linux. The goal is to use the power of distributed computing to build a large scale artificial intelligence system.

Perhaps Creative Commons' LiveContent 1.0 CD would work better if more clearly defined. Its Web page enthuses that the project is"an umbrella idea which aims to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities," adding that it"works to identify creators and content providers working to share their creations more easily" and"works to support developers and others who build build better technology to distribute these works." In other words, LiveContent is a sampler of free content and free software, but this purpose seems lost in a cloud of rhetoric, even to project members. The CD suffers from lackluster presentation, a mediocre assortment of samplers, and a lack of explanation.

Linux's global uptake and acceptance into the mainstream marked a milestone when the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) announced that their exam totals have topped the 150 000 mark and that their rollout is gaining momentum.<br /> <br />

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Pencils down" marks the end of the Summer of Code for 2007. Python highlighting support, with work on a new, handwritten lexer in KDevelop. A data engine and associated Plasma applet for KGet. Start of the Plasma-based Wikipedia and Service Info applets for Amarok 2. Wikipedia integration, and other improvements in the Step physics simulation package. A console added to KAlgebra. New graphical themes for KGoldRunner. XMP metadata support in Digikam. More progress in the unobtrusive search dialog for Kate. Usability work across many applications. No mixer functionality in Phonon for KDE 4.0. The start of development on KChart 2.

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt highlighted a recent commit to the NetBSD source tree saying, "if anyone had any doubt that our insistence on freedom was important, just read this." The referenced commit message describes an effort to work around issues with a binary blob included with NetBSD, something strongly avoided by the OpenBSD project.

LXer Feature: 26-Aug-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

Linux-based application platform vendor Trolltech expects a higher growth rate in the second half than the first six months but said growth for the full year may fall below the approximately 40% recorded for each of the three previous years.

I plead guilty to past transgressions. So, call me a hypocrite if you will. I don't care anymore. I refuse to get stuck in the past because the present and the near future is fun.Indulge if you will in recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images experienced as intrusive and distressing. The obsession with Microsoft in Open Software communities is excessive and unreasonable and a product of the mind. My only hope is that such thoughts, impulses, and, or images can be expunged by logic or reasoning, which is contrary to the notions in the psychiatric community.

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that relying on an outside source—and a General-Public-Licensed one, at that—for a piece of technology as central as a hypervisor would be too risky or uncomfortable, leading the Redmondians to opt instead to go it alone.

In the continuining discussion about how GCC treats the volatile keyword, Linus Torvalds noted, "I just have a strong suspicion that 'volatile' performance is so low down the list of any C compiler persons interest, that it's never going to happen. And quite frankly, I cannot blame the gcc guys for it." He went on to explain, "that's especially as 'volatile' really isn't a very good feature of the C language, and is likely to get *less* interesting rather than more (as user space starts to be more and more threaded, 'volatile' gets less and less useful."

Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita, announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

The problem isn't just silos and walled gardens — our names for choiceless dependency on one company's goods and services. The problem is the defaulted belief system that gives us silos and walled gardens in the first place. In that system suppliers believe that the best customers and users are captive ones. Customers and users believe that a free market naturally restricts choices to silos. It's a value sytem in which VCs like to ask "What's your lock-in?". Even in 2007, long after the Net has become established as an everyday necessity, we still take for granted the assumption that living in a "free market" is to choose among jail cells. May the best prison win.

Ubuntu developers have taken the wraps off the fifth update to the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" version, a major release that will include significant additions to the Linux distribution. Developers have been releasing "Gutsy Gibbon" builds since May, but the "Tribe 5" alpha release this week previews many of the significant features planned for the final release when it appears in late October.

In Linux circles, Microsoft's anti-Linux site, Get the Facts, was better known as Get the FUD, and was seen as more of a joke than a convincing argument in favor of Microsoft products over Linux. Microsoft may have come to agree that the site was not serving any useful purpose, as the company closed it down on Aug. 23.

"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins."

A dispute over some open source software used for model railroads resulted in an important decision last week, involving the scope of open source licenses and the remedies available when they are violated. The decision has triggered alarm in the open source community, with a prominent open source licensing advocate charging that the court fell asleep at the switch in its legal analysis of the case.

In 2004 Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, walked away from the project after creating the nonprofit Gentoo Foundation to handle its intellectual property (IP). In a blog post last month, Robbins wondered if he should take back the software, since it didn't appear the foundation was taking care of things. While Robbins didn't follow through on his thought, he raised an interesting question: Can someone convey intellectual property rights and then reclaim them?