Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The third annual Red Hat Summit is underway in San Diego. This year's show already has a different feel to it than the first two. The crowd is larger, for one thing. The event is a complete sell-out -- so much so that Red Hat had to stop taking registrations. Attendees have booked all the available rooms at the Sheraton and are spilling over into two additional hotels, and Red Hat is running shuttles between the hotels. Unofficially, the crowd is between 1,200 and 1,400, up from less than a thousand last year.

Back in early March, a company called the Olliance Group held a gathering of about 100 corporate manager types at a resort in California's wine country. This "Open Source think tank" has now produced a 16-page report. It is, indeed, an interesting look at how a certain part of the corporate world views free software - though, perhaps, not entirely in the ways its authors intended. When a self-appointed "think tank" gets together to talk about free software, one is right to be cautious. When one of that event's top-level sponsors is Microsoft, an extra degree of nervousness seems appropriate. The other top-level sponsor, naturally, is Novell; the remainder of the list is NEC, Unisys, Jasper Soft, OpenLogic, and SugarCRM. Not the most community-oriented bunch one could have come up with.

IT professionals spend a lot of time thinking about security, and ways to make sure their systems are patched as quickly as possible. However, what goes on before they hear about a vulnerability is mostly a mystery. To get a clearer picture, we talked to Mark Cox, director of Red Hat's security response team, about trends in Linux security, who discovers vulnerabilities, how they're rated, and what's being done to minimize security problems.

Jens Axboe posted a series of ten patches that add support for large IO commands. He began by defining the problem..

Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) recently conducted a successful open source introductory course. With 40 people certified so far, there are plans underway to scale this up to as many as 1000 students in June.

A chapter of a new how-to book, Hacking Ubuntu: Serious Hacks, Mods and Customizations, has been published online at ExtremeTech.com. The chapter, entitled "Making Ubuntu Usable," explains how to tune Ubuntu to your personal tastes by changing startup music, background, fonts, icons, colors, and more.

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced that an initial version of the quality.mozilla.org site has launched. Described as "pre-alpha", the quality.mozilla.org site (QMO for short) is intended to become a central portal for the Mozilla quality assurance community.

Silly name, but a good idea, VMware is joining the rush down the road of paravirtualisation already beingtrodden by the likes of Novell and Microsoft.

Andrew Morton sent out the latest lguest patches for review, noting that he intends to merge the code into the mainline kernel, "some concern was expressed over the lguest review status, so I shall send the patches out again for people to review, to test, to make observations about the author's personal appearance, etc. I'll plan on sending these patches off to Linus in a week's time, assuming all goes well." The project's FAQ notes, "lguest is designed to be simple to use and modify, with the aim of keeping the codebase small. Currently it's around 5000 lines including userspace utility, whereas kvm is over 10 times that size, and Xen is around 10 times bigger again (of course, both have far more features)."

One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a Web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities.

Ubuntu 7.04, aka "Feisty Fawn," has been out for several weeks now and it's already very popular. Heck, Michael Dell was running it even before he chose it to become Dell's Linux of choice. But, how good is it?

Fluendo's Elisa is a free software media center application that can play your DVDs, video files, music, and pictures. Since it is designed for extensibility, Elisa has the potential to do much more. It does not handle television or video recording functions, but it is a slick and promising project.

Scientific Linux, a project based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 source packages enhanced with a variety of additional applications, released its v5.0 i386 live DVD on May 7. The SL5 live DVD features a 2.6.18 kernel, includes all client/workstation RPMs, and uses GNOME as its default desktop.

We are here today to talk about the Strigi project - the indexing and search technology of KDE 4 - and to interview Flavio Castelli, a key developer of Strigi.

Snap Links is a great Firefox extension that makes it possible to open multiple links on a web page by simply dragging around them. Excellent for opening multiple search results.

The Gentoo Linux project team today announced its first release of the year: Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code-named "Secret Sauce." GL 2007.0 comes as an installable/live CD, features a 2.6.19 Linux kernel, and offers a choice among KDE, GNOME, and Xfce desktop environments.

Mandriva recently released its first distro of the year, dubbed Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Like previous releases, Spring is available in five editions, two of which can be freely downloaded. I installed and worked with the $76 Powerpack edition, which includes support and several gigabytes of packages. Not only does Powerpack score over other multiple CD/DVD free-of-cost distros, it also makes competing non-free distros eat dust.

Although OpenOffice.org doesn't allow you to create self-running Impress presentations, there is a tool that can help you with that. Using IndeView, you can convert your Impress presentations into a self-contained package that can run off a CD or DVD on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Jörn Engel announced LogFS, "a scalable flash filesystem." The project's home page notes that LogFS aims to be the successor of JFFS2, "the two main problems of JFFS2 are memory consumption and mount time. Unlike most filesystems, there is no tree structure of any sorts on the medium, so the complete medium needs to be scanned at mount time and a tree structure kept in-memory while the filesystem is mounted. With bigger devices, both mount time and memory consumption increase linearly. JFFS2 has recently gained summary support, which helps reduce mount time by a constant factor. Linear scalability remains. YAFFS also appears to be better by a constant factor, yet still scales linearly."

Document company Xerox South Africa switches its electronic resource planning systems to Red Hat Linux running on Dell's PowerEdge servers.