Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Faced by technical inferiority and an inability to compete on price, Microsoft has resorted to spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, says the Linux creator.

"Either people really are calming down, and figuring out that we're in the stabilization phase," Linus Torvalds began in announcing 2.6.23-rc3,"or it's just that it's the middle of August, and most everybody at least in Europe are off on vacation." The actual source-level changes can be browsed via the kernel.orggitweb interface. Linus went on to summarize:"Regardless of why, -rc3 is out, and doesn't have the tons of changes that -rc2 did. But there's some scheduler updates, sparc64 and powerpc changes, and random driver updates (the lpfc SCSI driver kind of stands out in the diffstat).Shortlog appended, I don't know what I can add to it.. Please do give it a good testing, unless you're on a beach sunning yourself (and who are we kidding: you're pasty white, and sand is hard to get out of the keyboard - beaches are overrated)."

DesktopLinux.com launched its 2007 Desktop Linux Survey on August 13, asking users of Linux desktops to identify what distributions they use, as well as their choice of windowing environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.), web browsers, email clients, and Windows-on-Linux solutions.

A project aimed at building a Linux distribution for media center PCs has achieved a major new release. LinuxMCE 0704 is based on Kubuntu, and offers lots of flashy features, such as whole-house high-definition video distribution, optional alpha-blended graphics, gyroscopic remote control, and much more.

Government calls for tender to conduct nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards, including Open Document Format, in the country's public sector ICT deployment.

LXer Feature: 12-Aug-2007

Some of the big stories this week are the ruling by the Judge in in the SCO case that Novell actually owns UNIX still, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony resigns, why Microsoft might want to help get rid of patents, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explains his company's deal with Microsoft in his keynote address at LinuxWorld, Vista is helping Linux uptake and the author of one of our FUD articles uses his own recipe to cook up some good non-facts.

Greg KH and Chris Wright have been maintaining a -stable 2.6.x.y patchset for the 2.6.x and 2.6.(x-1) kernels since March of 2005. Thus, with the current stable release being 2.6.22, they maintain -stable patches for 2.6.22 and 2.6.21. 2.4 stable kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau noted the currently high patch rate in each of the 2.6 -stable trees and decided to maintain -stable patches against the 2.6.20 tree until things calm down. Adrian Bunk also continues to maintain a -stable 2.6.16 branch of the Linux kernel.

In this article, discover how to track several events on AIX(R) with auditing, a major feature of AIX security, and learn how to use auditing to keep track of the read and write operations on a file. Also examine commands, such as ls or istat, to check a file's time stamp.

"BACK UP ANY IMPORTANT DATA," began the Linux 0.10 installation instructions. "Linux accesses your hardware directly, and if your hardware differs from mine, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Doublecheck that your hardware is compatible: AT style harddisk, VGA controller." The installation guide explained that there were five major steps in getting Linux installed and running on your computer, including the above first step of backing up the system. The second step was to use Minix and the mkfs command to create a new filesystem on an empty partition of your hard drive. Third you used dd to write the 'boot' and 'root' Linux disk images to floppy disks. The fourth step was actually booting from the floppies, "having a floppy as root-device isn't very fast (especially on a machine with less than 6MB total ram -> small buffer cache), but it works (I hope)."

ngo Molnar pushed a series of patches to his Completely Fair Scheduler code upstream that were merged into the mainline kernel. He explained the reason for so many small patches, "the main reason is the safe and gradual elimination of a widely used 64-bit function argument: the 64-bit 'now' timestamp."

Motorola, Inc. today announced a significant step in its commitment to mobile Linux and rich experience creation by introducing MOTOMAGX, its next generation mobile Linux platform. Building on the global success of Motorola's earlier Linux-based platforms, MOTOMAGX lays the foundation to deliver new levels of openness, flexibility and support for third-party applications on Motorola mobile devices.

If you want to set up a “multimedia” PC or a “HTPC” (Home Theater PC), you might end up using MythTV, which can be found at Christian Marillats Debian-Multimedia repository. Once you add that repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list, installing MythTV is as easy as: aptitude install –with-recommends mythtv

When Judge Kimball ruled against SCO in favor of Novel and said that Novell owned Unix's IP (intellectual property), that was the end of SCO. So now, SCO's legal cases are dead -- but what about its friends and partners? I've said since the beginning that there was next to nothing to SCO's claims that Unix IP had illegally been transferred into Unix. After all, SCO itself had incorporated Linux code into Unix. I thought the APA (Asset Purchase Agreement), which gave SCO the right to sell Unix but didn't give the company the IP rights to Unix, would prove SCO's case's Achilles' heel.

Last year's winner in this category, the Nokia 770, has a younger sibling, and, as oft happens, the kid takes the cake. Nokia's N800, the follow-up to the 770, is smaller, lighter, better-looking, faster and has a larger brain.

Joseph Conn hasThis article on why the release of CCHIT-certified WorldVistA EHR has been delayed:"The delay can be attributed in large measure to unique legal and business considerations that arose by virtue of certification as an open-source software product, according to Joseph Dal Molin, interim president and vice president of business development for WorldVistA."The main thing that has been the stumbling block for us is translating the (24-page) CCHIT agreement into an end-user agreement," Dal Molin said in a telephone interview."We need to maintain certification in an open-source world. As bizarre as it may seem, we didn't anticipate that as part of the (development) effort."

The day Linux fans have been waiting for since SCO attacked Linux on May 12, 2003 has finally arrived. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix's IP (intellectual property) rights. This, in turn, means the end of SCO's cases against IBM.

Linus Torvalds is often described as an open source champion, interested in licensing only insofar as it affects his ability to share code and improve software more quickly. However, his real position is more complicated -- and to some, perhaps surprising. Asked point-blank which is more important, sharing code or empowering users -- the declared goal of the free software champions whom Torvalds is routinely depicted as being in opposition with -- and his first response in what he calls "the usual Linus polite words" is "That's a really stupid question. Why do you put it as an 'either or' kind of concept?" He then goes on to explain that, because open source operates in the same manner as scientific query, and is a matter of enlightened self-interest, sharing code and empowering users "are not at odds at all" -- a view that, in the end, places him closer to the free software position than either free software or open source followers might care to admit.

Warren Woodford of MEPIS announced on Aug. 10 that his company has built KDE 4 Beta 1 Live DVDs to verify the compatibility of KDE 4 with SimplyMEPIS 7.x. SimplyMEPIS 7.x marks the return of this popular desktop Linux distribution to using Debian Linux as its base. Warren said, "I decided to share my KDE 4 Beta 1 ISOs, so others could take a first look at KDE 4 and also to demonstrate that I'm serious about the commitment that MEPIS 7.x will be incrementally upgradable."

The first question a company asks when presented with a Microsoft Office alternative is how well the software supports Microsoft's de facto standard file formats. Based on eWEEK Labs' testing experience with productivity applications based on the Open Document Format standard (the most prominent of which are Sun's StarOffice and its open-source sibling, OpenOffice), document fidelity consistently falls short of 100 percent, and that's not good enough for most companies and organizations.

To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that you become quite comfortable with using the command line interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on computer resources.