Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

SYDNEY -- The seventh Linux.conf.au (LCA) continued Tuesday at the Kensington campus of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, with miniconferences and a keynote by Christopher Blizzard.

Scalix made its Linux-based e-mail and groupware platform Scalix 11 available last week, with features such as improved Web client access, support for mobile users, support for users of Microsoft Outlook and interoperability with Microsoft Exchange servers.

From time to time vendors in the application development space have claimed 5GL (5th generation language) capabilities. If you think about this for a moment you will realise that this can't be true. The idea of GLs is that each is an abstraction of the former, so we had machine code (on which I cut my teeth as a developer); assembler; third generation languages such as COBOL, Java, C++ and so forth; and finally 4GLs (now sometimes referred to as ABLs-advanced business languages-as 4GL seems to be out of fashion).

On Monday, Slashdot reported that legendary Linux kernel developer Alan Cox filed a patent application in June 2005 related to digital rights management technology. Cox's patent describes software that would automatically suspend operations if the user was found to be out of compliance with the software's licensing terms but that would save the user's data before suspending to prevent data loss.

The Open Source Consortium (OSC) has thrown down the gauntlet to the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), urging the organisation to turn its talk of promoting open source software into action. The OSC claims that, despite overwhelming evidence that open source software saves schools money and enhances learning, Becta is taking no practical steps to help schools adopt open source.

The National E Prescribing Patient Safety Initiative, press release here is an e-prescribing juggernaut aimed at providing 'free' e-prescribing for all doctors. '...The challenge, according to the eHealth Initiative, is that fewer than 1 in 5 of the nation’s practicing physicians currently process prescriptions electronically. Studies indicate that most physicians have been reluctant to adopt electronic prescribing largely because of the cost of the systems, and a perception that the technology requires too much time to learn and install. NEPSI will help address those barriers by providing physicians simple, safe and secure electronic prescribing at no cost...' This initiative raises a number of questions currently not answered: Who gets the e-prescribing data? Is this really free? What is in it for Allscripts?

eHealth News Portal is presenting a news article named "Study finds open source key to European ICT competitiveness" which underline the economic impact of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) on the European information and communication technologies (ICT). The mentioned study report also says that increasing the use of FLOSS could provide a way for Europe to compensate for low ICT investment as a share of gross domestic product. "A growth and innovation simulation model shows that increasing the FLOSS share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself - over €10 billion annually," it states.

For independent software vendors (ISV), one of the major problems in supporting GNU/Linux is the variety of package management systems. However, if the Free Standards Group has its way, the next version of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) will solve that problem by providing an application programming interface (API) that acts as a bridge between the major package systems and software installers. Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, says the solution could be included in the most widely used distributions by early 2008.

Despite fears that Linux may have been left out of the Flash agenda, Adobe today release Flash Player 9 for Linux.

About 25% of enterprises will be running mission-critical business applications on the Linux open source operating system by 2009, according to a survey by Saugatuck Technology and BusinessWeek Research Services. By the end of 2007...the figure will be 18%. But this follows the revelation by IDC that after four years of double-digit growth, sales of Linux servers are slowing down. Although Linux servers now represent 11.8% of all server revenue, growth for the third quarter of 2006 was about 16% of that for the third quarter of 2005. Hewlett-Packard sells the most Linux servers, but it is less actively committed to Linux than IBM and, latterly, Sun.

Linux has the remarkable ability to be adapted and scaled to specific purposes. It can run corporate servers, personal computers and even small consumer electronics devices. Open source isn't a CE manufacturer's only choice for a micro OS -- among other options are WinCE and Wind River. Unlike other applications, however, a Linux system demands no royalties.

The Zenwalk project over the past two weeks has released both installation and live CD editions of its "mini" Linux distribution. Both versions feature a 2.6.18 kernel, an Xfce default desktop environment, and support for GNOME as a desktop alternative.

Mountain View, CA – The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Working Group has become the newest member of the Mountain View Alliance (MVA), a consortium of open specification organizations in the telecommunications industry.

Considering that the computer literacy trainings for the general population announced by the Government of Republic of Macedonia are in general a positive move for development of information society, the Metamorphosis Foundation and the NGO Free Software Macedonia encourage the Government to provide right to choose for the citizens, by offering trainings for use of free and open source (FOSS) also.

Foreword: This article unravels the mysteries of Trolltech's Qtopia development framework, for new users just trying to get it installed. The article includes examples based on GPL-licensed versions of Qtopia and KDevelop. It was written by three employees of Mindfire Solutions, a New Delhi, India-based software development services house.

With Intel Corp. processors supporting the company's Virtualization Technology (VT) becoming more pervasive, Linux kernel developers are writing the code to improve hardware virtualization and hence performance. Speaking at this year's linux.conf.au Linux and open-source conference in Sydney, Intel software engineer Jeff Dike spoke about three virtualization methods -- User-Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and hardware virtualization.

FSMLabs says its real-time Linux distribution is being used to fly cameras above NFL games, film sets, and other events. RTLinux powers the real-time camera control software used by Cablecam, a provider of video footage to sports broadcasting companies and movie studios.

[Finally, Linux doing some real work ;-) - Scott]

Nadia Derbey posted a set of patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List titledAKT, Automatic Kernel Tunables, explaining,"this is a series of patches that introduces a feature that makes the kernel automatically change the tunables values as it sees resources running out." The kernel portion of the AKT framework is described as providing sysfs interfaces for registering tunables, and for activating the automatic tuning of registered tunables. Nadia explains the second feature,"it can be called during resource allocation to tune up, and during resource freeing to tune down the registered tunable." The userland portion of the framework provides an interface for configuring whether or not a tunable should be set automatically.The default automatic adjustment routine provided by the patches simply allow a tunable to be configured with a minimum and maximum values, as well as a thresholds.

SYDNEY -- One of the great things about Linux.conf.au is the chance to mingle with some of the brightest lights in the open source community. For example, Jeff Dike, author and maintainer of User-Mode Linux is here this week to talk about UML and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). During one of the breaks on Monday, I sat down with Dike to talk about UML's immediate future, and picked his brain about other virtualization technologies.

Do we really need a separate distribution like GNewSense strictly for ideological purity? Ubuntu can be made truly free by removing the restricted modules package and leaving the multiverse packages disabled. That’s all you need to do. Not hard, is it? If Feisty Fawn, the next release, includes binary blobs in the kernel as Red Hat/Fedora does then there is exactly one extra step: recompile the kernel leaving out the offending bits. That’s the worst case scenario for ANY Linux distribution.