Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Neil Horman posted an enhancement to a /proc/sys/kernel interface for redirecting core dumps, "allowing the core_pattern to contain arguments to be passed as an argv array to the userspace helper application. It also adds a format specifier, %c, which allows the RLIM_CORE value of the crashing application to be passed on the command line, since RLIMIT_CORE is reduced to zero when execing the userspace helper". Andrew Morton was skeptical at first, "this all seems to be getting a bit nutty. Who needs this feature and what will they do with it, etc?"

We went to OSCON, hoping to uncover some fresh details on Sun Microsystems' "Project Indiana." We mostly failed in this endeavor. Sun's operating system chief and Debian author Ian Murdock was at the event, elaborating on Project Indiana. He covered, for the most part, ground we've already been over, which places Indiana as Sun's quasi copy of Red Hat's Fedora project. The core of the new project revolves around Sun's mission to release a fresh, supported version of OpenSolaris every six months.

LXer Feature: 29-Jul-2007

This week we have some details about the Linspire-MS deal, a great article by Danijel Orsolic, Open Source in Outer Space, my Interview with Dave Wreski, a short list of good command line tools and much more.

We are now nearing the end of the first (out of two) week of this vote. At the time of writing, 190 people have voted, out of a potential 1035.

Detailed stats are to be found at:
http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/

People who have voted should see their names at: http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/voters.txt

The question of what units you are working with is one that will at one time or other have plagued anyone who studied a science or a branch of physical engineering. Teachers go to great lengths to make sure students remember to specify their units. It is not enough to say that the answer is 42. Forty-two what? 42 metres? 42 electronvolts? 42 furlongs per fortnight? Without a clear understanding of what units are involved, certain results and claims can be meaningless, misleading or simply expensive.

Yasunori Goto posted some documentation for memory hotplugging which can be used to increase or decrease the amount of memory available to a live kernel. The documentation explains that this functionality is useful for virtualization and capacity on demand solutions, as well as for physically adding and removing RAM from NUMA-nodes. The document itself, "is about memory hotplug including how-to-use and current status. Because Memory Hotplug is still under development, contents of this text will be changed often."

How appropriate that we caught Chairman Tim O'Reilly ogling Portland's tram schedule just a few minutes before the Pirate Party's founder Rickard Falkvinge took the stage at O'Reilly's own conference. Chairman Tim plotted his escape from OSCON, as Falkvinge prepared to talk to the people about things that matter. O'Reilly seemed to miss the crucial issues of the day at every turn, during OSCON.

It’s been almost two weeks since Graduation Day. The kids produced great work. The parents and instructors were all terribly proud. Everybody went home and got plenty of sleep. Now that the buzz has just about worn off, it’s time to reflect on what we accomplished, and what exactly we should do next.

Thousands of open source advocates and enthusiasts from around the world are expected to take the message of free and open source software to the streets on September 15 for the fourth annual Software Freedom Day.

Those wanting to perform serious graphics tasks on their Linux desktops may benefit from a new book by Michael J. Hammel's, coming soon from No Starch Press. The Artist's Guide To GIMP Effects is a four-color tome said to "harness all of the GIMP's powerful features."

For the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, we travel to the Netherlands to meet a KDE promoter and meeting organiser, someone who helps the international community to experience KDE events, even if they were not in attendance - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jos Poortvliet.

Oracle's assault on Linux looks to take the shape of a fork in the near future, according to Canonical founder and Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth. "They must be on track to fork soon," he told us, during an interview here at OSCON. "They are hiring too many people just to deliver patches. My assumption is that they are on track to fork and build their own distribution."

Telling the story of Project Indiana is not an easy one. Headlines like "Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris" or "Sun OpenSolaris to become more 'Linux-like'" have published, accompanying similarly themed articles. The problem is, this assertion is not quite on the mark. LinuxPlanet talked with several members of Sun's OpenSolaris team to discern just what the deal is.

"People who think SD was 'perfect' were simply ignoring reality," Linus Torvalds began in a succinct explanation as to why he chose the CFS scheduler written by Ingo Molnar instead of the SD scheduler written by Con Kolivas. He continued, "sadly, that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I never [entertained] the notion of merging SD for very long at all: Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than trying to work with them."

It's no secret that Mozilla Corp., the company behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other open-source Internet programs, has made Firefox its No. 1 priority. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker is now admitting that the popular email client Thunderbird has taken second place, and she's now looking beyond Mozilla to find another way to advance the program.

Sun Microsystems' ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office won't usher in an era of universal document interoperability, but eWEEK Labs believes it is the best option currently available for adding Open Document Format support to Office's massive installed base. The plug-in, which Sun debuted on July 4 in the form of a freely downloadable 30MB installation package, enables users to read, edit and save ODF-formatted word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation documents using the 2000, XP, and 2003 versions of Microsoft Office.

Rafael Wysocki posted a lengthy status report "describing the current state of development of the suspend and hibernation infrastructure: how it works, what known problems there are in it and what the future development plans are". Regarding future plans, Rafael noted, "the part of the suspend and hibernation code that should be taken care of first is the handling of devices. Namely, I think that we should first separate the hibernation-related handling of devices from the suspend-related handling of them in order to overcome limitations mentioned in Section IX. This also will be necessary if we want to try some new approaches to hibernation, such as the kexec-based one recently discussed on the LKML." He added, "the next thing that seems reasonable to do is to eliminate the freezing of tasks, described in Section VI, from the suspend and resume code, since the limitations related to it are regarded by many people as too restrictive."

The Fedora Project offered a peek under its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of time after its release. We asked Max Spevack, the Fedora project leader, whether the numbers are telling the full story.

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit group dedicated to accelerating Linux's growth, announced on July 24 that it had tapped long-time Linux executive Marcus Rex to serve as CTO. Rex "will help drive new standardization and technical initiatives around Linux and promote Linux adoption more broadly," the LF said.

"British software group Misys is expected to announce a major strategic gamble this week - giving its products away for free.""Under new American management, the company is planning to embrace the 'open source' movement, releasing a software code that can be copied or modified by other programmers.""Two new products are planned in healthcare and financial markets that Misys hopes will become industry standards: one offering a platform for trading carbon credits and the other aimed at harmonising medical records."