Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Alan Cox posted an updated LibATA PATA (IDE) status report on the lkml. Improved from a previous status report [story] he noted, "current kernels now support HPA (Host Protected Area) but default to honouring it. Probably a wrong default for PATA but we need to decide the right way to expose it nicely." He went on to note, "no PATA hotplug support yet. Need warmplug helpers for some chipsets (eg some intel ICH) to avoid risk of hangs."

Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution. Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

A small company near Torino, Italy is shipping a tiny ARM9-based processor module designed for use with low-cost carrier boards. Elpa's RD129 comes pre-installed with the latest Linux kernel (currently 2.6.21.5), and is available with a handy development board.

There's probably more open source in your organization than you think, which makes it critical to put some governance standards in place.

After interviewing Axel Dorfler yesterday, in this second installment of Five Questions, we interview Robert Szeleney, the main driving force behind SkyOS. SkyOS has been in development since the late '90s, but for the past few years, it has seen rapid development.

Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing butopen source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.

OpenOffice.org suffers from a wildly inconsistent user interface (UI) that combines unique elements with borrowings from Microsoft Office. Now, in the upcoming version 2.3, it is finally having some of the cosmetic procedures it so badly needs -- at least in the charts subsystem. The changes include a new default color scheme and a heavily revamped wizard, but only small changes in functionality, making this revision a case study in UI design for both better and worse.

For many seasoned Linux developers, device drivers still remain a bit of a mysterious black art practiced by a select few. While no single article could possibly attempt to covered everything there is to know about writing drivers, Valerie Henson gives us a brief taste of what's involved, by implementing a device to return "Hello World" using all the major driver frameworks.

The Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has offered a prize for the best campaign against Microsoft's attempt to gain international standardisation for its Office format.

Look at how to create scripts that are able to record their output, trap and identify errors, and recover from errors and problems so that they either run correctly or fail with a suitable error message and report. Building scripts and running them automatically is a task that every good administrator has to handle, but how do you handle the error output and make intelligent decisions about how the script should handle these errors?

The KDE e.V. and KDAB are happy to announce continued collaboration on the Free Desktop, with KDAB becoming the latest new Patron of KDE. KDAB is known for its high-quality software services.

Last January, Host Europe, a company that runs the Web sites for 120,000 businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, secured an unlikely supplier for the open-source software it uses to run almost all of its computer servers.

At the second day of aKademy 2007, the contributors conference closed with the aKademy Awards Ceremony. Two of last years winners, Boudewijn Rempt and Laurent Montel awarded no less than four awards to Sebastian Trueg, Mathias Kretz, Danny Allen and Kenny Duffus.

The developers of Slackware this week announced this year's first release of their Linux distribution, Slackware 12.0, which they have described as a "must-have upgrade for any Slackware user".

aKademy 2007 continues! Sunday, the second day of the conference, brought more talks covering a wide diversity of topics.

Len Brown can only be a glutton for punishment; he is, after all, the maintainer of the Linux ACPI subsystem. That is a difficult position to be in: ACPI involves getting into the BIOS layer, an area of system software which is not always known for careful, high-quality work. Supporting ACPI is a complex task which, among other things, requires the embedding of a specialized interpreter within the kernel, a hard sell at best. Even with that background in mind, one must wonder just how much masochism is required to lead one to deliver three separate talks at the 2007 Ottawa Linux Symposium. That is just what Len did, however; the end result was a good view into several aspects of the power management problem.

This simple guide will bring up the Windows start menu inside GNOME and allow you to run, use and install any Windows app (that can run in a VM) inside your existing desktop. It takes about 10 minutes to setup, minus the time to install Windows, and involves one command in total.

Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence. But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.

There are many good reasons to be concerned about security and privacy online. For example, Internet banking can be at risk if there is any possibility of malicious software on your computer's hard drive. Banks even expressly warn that before using their systems you should ensure you have taken steps to ensure your personal security.

New head of the European Patent Office (EPO), Alison Brimelow, has signalled her intentions early, calling a public meeting to discuss the policy vacuum left by the rejection of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions.