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Oracle Corp. may end up merging the best features of OpenSolaris with Linux once it takes control of Sun Microsystems Inc., but it is unlikely to kill off Sun's widely used Solaris operating system, analysts said today. During a conference call today after the $7.4 billion acquisition deal was announced, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said one of the primary reasons Oracle is interested in Sun is Solaris, a version of Unix that has a large installed base and has long been the leading platform for Oracle's flagship database.

LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2009

It has been a busy week on our newswire. There was much good news for open source graphics, not quite so good news on the Linux security front, debatable news from Redmond, a flood of news about Ubuntu and much speculation dressed as news about Sun and IBM. And in between all that we had some regular news, tutorials and musings as well.

Here is an overview of the main things from last week.

We are just one week away from the release of Ubuntu 9.04 and with that it is now time for the Jaunty Jackalope release candidate. Ubuntu 9.04 features the GNOME 2.26 desktop, X Server 1.6, and the Linux 2.6.28 kernel...

Jaunty Jackalope has sprung a step closer, with the release of final pre-production code for Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop and Server, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition. The Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate was kicked out Thursday afternoon. The Ubuntu team behind it has reported that the release candidate is "complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user", but that it does provide the caveat that there are still a few known bugs.

"In a world where distinctions between open source and proprietary software are becoming increasingly irrelevant, what role can IP [Intellectual Property] play in facilitating greater collaboration with the industry for the benefit of business and customers alike?" While this quote appears near the end of Marshall Phelps and David Kline’s new book Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft, it does sum up nicely the thread that weaves through the book, a case study of how Microsoft reinvented itself and began leveraging its Intellectual Property for good (collaboration) instead of evil (punishment).

If you build your own GNOME packages from source or use GARNOME to help in the process, get ready as GNOME 2.26.1 has just been released. GNOME 2.26.1 incorporates bug fixes, translation updates, and documentation changes since the release of GNOME 2.26 just one month ago.

All major development efforts are now being focused on GNOME 2.28 and planning for GNOME 3.0, but another point release for the 2.26 series will come next month...

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.

While a test release has been around for a few months, last night PulseAudio 0.9.15 was officially released. This open-source sound server has a number of significant enhancements in this latest update...

Steve McIntire has been elected as the new Debian Project Leader. His new term will start on April 17th, 2009. Steve narrowly beat Stefano Zacchiroli who was also a candidate for the position of DPL.

In their usual bi-weekly ritual, the open-source WINE developers have released a new version of this software used to run Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems. The latest development release of WINE is version 1.1.19 and it offers support for Visual C++ project files in winemaker, improvements to the Esound driver, many Direct3D code cleanups, fixes to the OLE clipboard handling, and OpenBSD compilation fixes.

Intel contributes quite a bit to the development of X.Org and the Linux kernel, through a number of Intel employees working on Linux full-time, making hardware contributions, etc. Up until recently, Intel even had its own Linux distribution (Moblin) for their Atom hardware. One area, however, where Intel has not been a major contributor is with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) considering they have long preferred their own high-performance Intel Compiler (ICC).

We are now into the second quarter of 2009, but Intel will soon release its X.Org driver for Q1'09. While late, the xf86-video-intel 2.7.0 driver update SDVO-TV support, basic SDVO-LVDS support, tear-free X-Video support, and many bugs have been fixed.

Just before calling it a week, Carl Worth released the third release candidate for the xf86-video-intel 2.7.0 (version 2.6.99.903)...

When looking at log files or other files that are compressed and rotated automatically, it's useful to be able to deal with them in a uniform fashion. The following bash function does that.

Yahoo! has opened up its Google-battling Hadoop research cluster to three more big-name US universities. Yesterday, the company announced that The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are poised for large-scale data-crunching research on its M45 cluster, the 4,000-processor, 1.5-petabyte-disk data center opened up to Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of 2007.

Please join us for South Carolina's only Open Source Software conference. We've worked long and hard to make April 18 the most fun and productive Saturday you're ever likely to have! Red Hat's CIO Lee Congdon and Open Invention Network's Keith Bergelt will each give talks. Bergelt speaks on a topic dear to our hearts here, "Keeping Open Source Open - The Battle Continues and Why It's Important" and Congdon on "The State of Open Source Today".

Mark Shuttleworth, the benevolent dictator of Canonical and Ubuntu, has big ambitions for Linux. He wants to make the Linux experience seamless, elegant, and superior. Can Linux deliver both power and beauty?

Intel's convertible "Classmate" PC for schoolchildren has been released in China for the first time, as the Hanvon HCQ890 (left), the chipmaker says. Separately, Computer Technology Link, one of several companies marketing the Classmate in the U.S., supplemented its offering with a standard netbook, the UW1.

Learn how to copy files from the commandline with rsync in this video tutorial by Shawn Powers.

Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has posted a blog entry disputing Microsoft's claims that it owns 96 percent of the netbook market, and that Linux netbook returns are four times higher than with Windows. Canonical was responding to a blog earlier this month from Microsoft's Brandon Le Blanc. Written by Chris Kenyon from Canonical's OEM Services, the blog post, "Microsoft, FUD and the netbook market," claims that Microsoft's Le Blanc was incorrect when he wrote that Canonical confirmed a 4x return of Ubuntu-based netbooks, compared to returns of Windows XP-based netbooks.

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1 is out in the wild! Featuring one of the longest ChangeLogs in Amarok history, this beta release showcases what is possible when building on the strong technical foundations that have been laid with Amarok 2.0. Nearly all parts of Amarok have received attention, and while not a final release, it is already very usable and quite stable. Hop on over to amarok.kde.org to read the full release announcement including the epic sized ChangeLog.