Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Yesterday the OpenBSD Foundation debuted as a Canadian nonprofit organization intended to serve as"a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to support OpenBSD in any way." Developers Bob Beck, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback will serve as the foundation's directors. Membership, according to the bylaws, "shall be limited to persons interested in furthering the objects of the corporation and shall consist of anyone whose application for admission as a member has received the approval of the board of directors of the corporation." However, the foundation's Web site notes, it is "not actively seeking new members at this time."

Microsoft realizes it has a schizophrenic relationship with open source software but can't seem to find any meds capable of correcting the situation. During a speech today at OSCON, Microsoft's open source chief Bill Hilf revealed that Microsoft will submit its Shared Source License to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval. Microsoft's decision to make peace with the OSI – the self-proclaimed protector of open source software – ends a rather combative, multi-year debate between the parties.

Three months ago, former sponsor Bank of America dropped the affinity credit card of the Linux Fund, the"public charity" with a stated mission to support free and open source software. This week the project emerged from hibernation and began accepting applications anew for its on-again, off-again Tux Visa card. New underwriter U.S. Bank is offering consumers a platinum, student, or basic Visa card, each of which provides a small cash reward to open source projects selected by the Linux Fund advisory board. What changed?

Since May, ingimp, a modified version of the GIMP, has collected daily logs on what users do with the program in the hope of improving its usability. The richness of this data is unprecedented, yet improving the GIMP is only a sideshow for the project. What ingimp is really designed to do, according to the project's leader, is develop the software and practices to put free and open source software (FOSS) usability testing on a professional footing "without placing an undue burden on either the developers or users."

"This is a free minix-like kernel for i386(+) based AT-machines," began the Linux version 0.01 release notes in September of 1991 for the first release of the Linux kernel. "As the version number (0.01) suggests this is not a mature product. Currently only a subset of AT-hardware is supported (hard-disk, screen, keyboard and serial lines), and some of the system calls are not yet fully implemented (notably mount/umount aren't even implemented)."

[Not "news" really. But fun for the nostalgia inclined :-) – Sander]

At OSCON a few minutes ago, Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf what will change in the future specifically with regard to Microsoft dealing with F/OSS projects regarding patents. (The context is that Hilf had just said that Microsoft has made mistakes in certain areas. Hilf’s response was… priceless. “I get a lot of e-mail.” “People like to subscribe me to crazy newsletters and spam.” Uh, thanks.

A global survey conducted by Alfresco has found some interesting trends within the use of open source software among enterprise users that show promise for the future of open source. It was found that there was a strong preference for deployment on Linux over Windows. It also found that Red Hat use has grown much faster than that of Novell SUSE following Novell's Microsoft patents deal.

Red Hat is growing and executing well. Financial analysts expect Red Hat to hit $517M this year (fiscal 2008, ending Feb. 2008), and $631M in fiscal 2009. At this pace, Red Hat should cross the $1 billion revenue mark in fiscal 2011. Red Hat may well be the gorilla in the Open Source marketplace. But after everything is said and done, that marketplace is tiny in comparison to the total software market. Just imagine a Microsoft that could offer customers a choice of Windows/.NET, Linux/JEE or, and here's the magic, BOTH. The fact is most customers have heterogeneous environments, and those that don't today, will likely in the future.

[It's hard not to laugh out loud when reading stuff like this – Sander]

The new PC-BSD 1.4 beta, released last week, offers 3-D desktop support via Beryl as well as late-model components such as KDE 3.5.7, FreeBSD 6.2, Xorg 7.2, a selection of fresh GUI tools and utilities, and a variety of optional components, as detailed in the full release notes. PC-BSD is a desktop-oriented distribution based on FreeBSD, similar to DesktopBSD, but outside the official FreeBSD project. It strives for user-friendliness primarily via a graphical installation program and a KDE graphical interface.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on July 22 at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Ore., the availability of Landscape, its Web-based systems management program for Ubuntu servers and desktops. Landscape will be available to Canonical's support subscribers. Landscape provides a key tool for the growing number of businesses that want to take advantage of the ease of use of Ubuntu and have previously seen system administration or support as a hurdle. This is Canonical's first native Ubuntu system deployment and management tool.

Lars Ellenberg started an effort to getDRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Service merged into the Linux kernel. When asked for clarification as to what it was, Lars explained,"think of it as RAID1 over TCP. Typically you have one Node in Primary, the other as Secondary, replication target only. But you can also have both Active, for use with a cluster file system." Earlier in the thread he described it as"a stacked block device driver".

A number of KDE related news stories are floating about the interweb today, so here's a quick round-up. Aaron Seigo writes his KDE e.V. Presidential Address on his blog. Over at Ars Technica, I have an article talking about the future of KHTML and Webkit. Daniel Molkentin has published a new book on coding for Qt 4.x and lastly, I've stumbled across a short visual tutorial for those Mac OS X users among us that are looking to help test the KDE/Mac snapshots.

Following the progress of founder and chief maintainer Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is like watching a litter of scampering frisky pups. A fast gestating two months after the prior release, newborn Puppy Linux Version 2.17 -- aka "Dancer" -- was pushed out late last week. Version 2.17 of Puppy Linux -- so named to reflect its small, cuddly, yet very complete persona -- popped out at a mere 82.6MB, says the distro's website.

The FESCo election is over, and the members for the 2007/2008 FESCo are (in alphabetical order): Christopher Aillon, Josh Boyer, Tom Callaway, Kevin Fenzi, Dennis Gilmore, Christian Iseli, Jeremy Katz, Jesse Keating, Bill Nottingham, Brian Pepple, Jason Tibbitts, Warren Togami and David Woodhouse.

Hewlett-Packard announced on July 23 that it would be buying Neoware, a provider of Linux, Windows CE and Windows XPe OS thin client computing and virtualization solutions. HP will be paying $16.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash) of approximately $214 million on a fully diluted basis for the company. In a statement, HP declared that this acquisition as part of HP's strategy to expand in growth markets and further its leadership in personal computing.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 97 for the week of July 15th through July 21st 2007. In this issue: fedorapeople.org is now available, Smolt, Open Invitation, Ohio Linux Fest Keynote Address, GNOME Cookbook, Repoview-0.6.0, Mascots and Fedora, Volunteers needed for GITEX, New in Fedora: Jack Aboutboul, Proposed Fedora 8 Features and much, much more.

Navicore is Nokia's GPS mapping and navigation program for the Linux-powered N800 Internet Tablet. The kit comes with a Bluetooth GPS receiver, car-mounting hardware, and a memory card containing the Navicore Personal software and map collection. If you have an N800, it's a great travel aid. Sadly, there is one strike against Navicore that I see no way around for desktop Linux users. The N800 Navigation Kit ships with a memory card containing one region's maps (say, North America). The Navicore Web site contains additional maps for other regions of the world -- but you cannot access or install any of that data without running Windows.

Open-Xchange, the open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange is recognized in the first annual Enterprise Open Source Readers Choice Awards. "We're excited about the award as it is an award based on recognition by our customers and the community," said Gerald Labie, CEO, Open-Xchange. "From a market perspective, the reality is that each nominee in this category -- regardless of whether they won or not -- is part of a major force putting increased competitive pressure on the large, proprietary groupware vendors."

When a partition that was previously an ext3 partition is converted to disk dump, the next time the system will boot, it will show a "Token is too" error. This problem occurs and leaves the system in an unbootable state. This is because yaboot tries to to boot from a partition of type “Linux” (Type 83). This error does not occur if the partition is labeled as swap (Type 82).

Learning a new language cannot be complete without a few 'real world' examples. 'Hello world!'s and fibonacci sequences are always nice as an introduction to certain aspects of programming, but soon or later you crave something meatier to chew on. 'Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code' by Kevin C. Baird provides a wealth of knowledge via general to specialized examples of the dynamic object oriented programming language, Ruby. Want to build and mp3 playlist processor? How about parse out secret codes from 'Moby Dick'? Read on!