Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 08-Apr-2007

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

Indian engineers are helping to fuel the increasing world-wide popularity of the `free-and-open' Linux platform for a host of handy consumer devices from mobile phones to music players to portable life-saving devices — and they are doing this using internationally used chip platforms.

The winner of the election is Sam Hocevar. I would like to thank all the candidates for their service to the project, for standing for the post of project leader, and for offering the developers a strong and viable group of candidates.

Explore the innovation of open source solutions available from IBM and see the power and flexibility of an open community development environment.

If you need your data to be available in all your offices -- even if the central office goes up in smoke one day -- Radiant Data's new PeerFS 4.0, which now supports multiple 64-bit Linuxes, might be just what you need.

Mozilla on Friday took the wraps off of the first release candidate of its upcoming Thunderbird 2.0 release, aimed at making organization of e-mail easier for its users.

A "Microsoft-centric" call center solution provider called Promero worked mostly with proprietary applications, offering them as hosted software-as-a-service products. When it decided to create a custom replacement by cobbling together an existing CRM package and its own lead-generating application, CTO Roman Schepis quickly discovered that the only way to go was to use an open source CRM application.

It's a good thing Apple isn't fighting back against Apple TV hacks, because while we haven't yet seen any hard evidence that Linux on the Apple TV is even as far as is claimed, apparently some industrious hackers have already made some real progress in shoehorning Tux into the minuscule media device. According to the Mactel-Linux wiki, users have managed to capture the ATV's boot loader and run a custom Linux kernel; right now that kernel and the primitive ATV build apparently seem to support WiFi, SpeedStep, and EFI, but there are issues with USB (you're telling us!), and the graphics aren't settled either.

The Ireland-based Linux Mint team yesterday made available the first release candidate of its next version, Linux Mint 2.2 KDE Edition Beta 020. Code-named "Bianca," it uses the KDE 3.5.6 desktop for the first time, running on a 2.6.17-10 kernel, the team said.

GoblinX Premium 2007.1, a bootable live CD distribution based on Slackware Linux, was made available this week by its Brazil-based project team. It is the first release of an "new generation of the distribution, full of news, special features, and upgrades," according to the team.

Internet application testing vendor RadView plans to migrate its flagship product to an open source model using the General Public License (GPL), internetnews.com has learned. The announcement is expected to be made on Wednesday April 11. The move to open source its products could have implications for commercial vendors in the sector, such as Hewlett-Packard's Mercury Interactive and IBM's Rational Software division.

With Palm attempting to migrate its OS to Linux and Symbian working to begin a degree of interoperability with Unix, Linux-based phones are gaining ground, and a recent ABI report suggests they will make up 14 percent of the market by 2012. They face an uphill battle, however against an array of difficult obstacles.

The del.icio.us blog announced an upgrade to their Firefox extension that enables the easy bookmarking of pages.

The eighth annual Linuxfest Northwest takes place from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., April 28 and 29, 2007 at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. Exhibits, presentations, and parking are free. All ages are welcome. The Fest is an informative, low-key way for people to explore Linux and other open source products. LFNW features internationally recognized speakers from leading companies and well-known open source projects, as well as exhibits and demonstrations for a wide range of interests and technical abilities.

Nagios is a GPL-licensed framework that allows you to intelligently schedule little monitoring programs written in any language you choose. Nagios lets you monitor hosts, services, and networks. Here are a couple of examples of real-world monitoring scenarios.

No Starch Press has published a book about integrating embedded hardware, Linux-based operating systems, and custom applications to create Linux devices. "Linux Appliance Design," by four authors, is the first book to tackle both the hardware and software components of device design, the publisher claimed.

SysMaster used embedded Linux to build a set-top box with a dizzying array of audio, video, networking, communications, and data capabilities. The Tornado M10 Digital Media Center runs Linux 2.6.19, and targets phone and IP network operators wishing to offer a wide range of services.

Suppose you want to let a friend thousands of miles away listen to a song from your computer. Perhaps you just want to open up the music library on your computer to a select few while you're on another client on your local area network. Enabling file sharing might be overkill. Instead, you can use a streaming server such as GNUMP3d. Streaming servers are useful for more than Internet radio; they can let people choose individual songs from your music library and play them -- no need to configure NFS, SSH, or Samba.

Mandriva this week made available the third release candidate of its Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 distribution, nicknamed "Beijing." It features a 2.6.17.13 kernel, choice of KDE, GNOME 2.18, or Fluxbox desktops, and the distro's usual full feature set, the project team said.

It sounds unlikely, but Novell and Sun Microsystems have partnered to bring SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 to Sun's Ultra Workstations: the Sun Ultra 20, Ultra 20 M2, Ultra 40, and Ultra 40 M2.