Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Theodore Ts'o offered an insightful summary of issues affecting future development on theext3 filesystem, "it is clear that many people feel they have a stake in the future development plans of the ext2/ext3 filesystem, as it [is] one of the most popular and commonly used filesystems, particular amongst the kernel development community. For this reason, the stakes are higher than it would be for other filesystems." He listed the three main concerns for future development as stability, compatibility confusion, and code complexity, "unfortunately, these various concerns were sometimes mixed together in the discussion two months ago, and so it was hard to make progress. Linus's concern seems to have been primarily the first point, with perhaps a minor consideration of the 3rd. Others dwelled very heavily on the second point."

Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss is now worth about $35 million less than it was when first announced on April 10.

You probably already know that a firewall is an essential component in your network border security. But you may not know that a Linux-based iptables firewall is especially robust and configurable. Today we'll set up system administration using Webmin, and in our next installment we'll create a good stout Internet-connection sharing firewall.

From the newsletter: Our monthly roadshow for state and local government agencies and academic institutions continues in July. Both events will be a free, half-day seminar on Enterprise Linux solutions, featuring engineers from Red Hat, IBM, and customers. IT management and staff from all area state and local government agencies and academic institutions are invited. Seating for each event is limited to 40 registrants. Lunch will be served.

The City of Munich's LiMux project center is rejecting charges by the Senate administration of Berlin that the migration to free software has gotten stuck before it ever got going. As Project director Peter Hofmann told heise online, "Open Source software at the workplace is a reality in Munich." At the end of May, his department presented the future basis client to the public at in information day. At present, the pilot phase is focusing on a software suite. The approximately 100 pilot users include Mayor Christian Ude and his deputy Christine Strobl. Hofmann added that "most users" in the city's administration use individual Open Source programs to surf the net, write e-mails, or edit graphics, for example, "on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which remains dominant."

The impending release of Windows Vista with its fancy Aero Glass special effects, along with the hasty addition of the similar XGL and Compiz technologies to the latest SUSE Linux release, makes me think that programmers have a warped idea of what desktop computing is about.

[Silly rabbit! Tricks are for kids! - dcparris]

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is looking to retain its independence, according to its CEO, despite a recent turbulent period that showed the precariousness of its single-product strategy.

I've been a happy MythTV user for a long time -- you can check out my review of version 0.19 -- but lately I've been feeling that something is missing. MythTV is great for watching and recording TV, but I watch TV less than four hours per week. On the other hand, I love music, and MythTV offers no easy way to listen to music from various sources, such as audio CDs and Web-based and FM radio stations. After fiddling with custom solutions based on MPD and MPlayer, I decided to look for an alternative -- which led me to Freevo.

Japanese mobile firm Willcom is developing a Linux-based modular smartphone for sale in Japan starting in August.

Panasas Storage Boosts Cluster Performance by 10X and Eliminates Need for Costly NFS Servers

The International Engineering Task Force is working on a proposed standard for the age-old but never standardized syslog protocol, but their efforts may be in jeopardy thanks to a patent application by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., of Shenzhen, China.

There are plenty of reference applications available for Linux, but the ultimate Linux lexicon has to be WordNet, a powerful desktop dictionary.

Many in the Linux world believe that Linux desktops can easily replace Microsoft Windows for certain uses. They also admit that the Linux desktop may not be a solution for all Windows users, but they firmly believe that they are making progress toward that goal.

Microsoft was out in force at an open source conference in London this week, but many delegates were unwilling to talk about its motives

[From the article: "Fishenden told ZDNet UK that the conference was a good opportunity to address the “misconception”, as he put it, that Microsoft was anti-open source."
That's right, folks! Microsoft is not anti-Open Source. It's just that Microsoft makes less money because of Open Source; therefore, Open Source is anti-Microsoft. - dcparris]

A commercial real-time Linux variant offering separate real-time and non-real-time execution domains has added support for a family of network processors that integrate separate application and control plane processing units. FSMLabs's RTLinuxPro development kit now supports Freescale's PowerQUICC III family of SoCs (system-on-chip processors).

In my last blog post, I started writing about OpenWRT, a free software firmware replacement for many off-the-shelf home broadband routers. I received an email last week from a reader who had some of the very same questions I had about the whole process of installing a new firmware. I’ll address some of his points here.

Last week you learned how to use FreeWorldDialup to connect to other VoIP users. Today you'll set up distributed Asterisk peering with the DUNDi (Distributed Universal Number Discovery) protocol. DUNDi is a peer-to-peer system for finding Internet gateways to telephony services.

  LXer Feature: 29-Jun-06

Why do Linux advocates argue over whether to call their operating system 'Linux' or 'GNU/Linux'? It's all open source, right? At this point there are blood pressures rising among free software advocates, while any casual software user reading this is simply thinking, "Yeah, so?"

A new study by code analysis firm Klocwork has discovered new flaws in open source programs that previous scans by a Department of Homeland Security-sponsored study did not.

Yes, we know you're sick of hearing about Ubuntu. Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that, everyone must love Ubuntu or else. Don't run away screaming just yet, because there are good reasons for all the Ubuntu buzz, as Carla Schroder reports.