Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Alan Cox [interview] offered an updated libATAPATA (IDE) status report. He summarized, "with the exception of HPA and serialize support its now pretty close to a straight replacement for drivers/ide on x86 systems (and boxes using PCI devices only). There is other stuff that wants improving still like error recovery on CRC, but its getting close."

He provides a list of recent changes then cautions, "please remember that functionality equivalence, and much cleaner code doesn't mean less bugs yet, there is a *lot* of testing and hammering on the code needed before it is production ready for switching." His current patch is for the 2.6.16-rc2 kernel.

Hamilton, Ontario, Linux and open source enthusiasts were privileged to hear former Red Hat CEO Bob Young, author and Unix historian Peter Salus, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ren Bucholz banter about SCO vs. Linux and other patent and copyright issues at a meeting of the Hamilton Linux User Group last week. Outside of the discussion that went on, there were interesting dynamics among the speakers and also between the panel and audience.

Users of Microsoft’s Office and Access packages have been told they will have to install updates as a result of a patent infringement dispute between Microsoft and a Guatemalan inventor that has cost the software firm almost $9 million in damages.

[Ed: The article points out that technical, as well as legal, challenges apply in this situation. Gartner recommends using a version of MS Office without MS Access where not needed. Linux News recommends using OpenOffice.org or some other libre office suite where patent encumbrances of this sort are not likely to affect so many users. - dcparris]

Novell will ship SUSE Linux with a pre-configured kernel for use with Virtual Iron virtualization software to let users rapidly deploy and configure enterprise-class computing workloads.

An emergency management centre in Cape Town will soon be using open source VOIP telephony to deal with and respond to disasters in the region. The implementation of the Asterisk-based call-handling system by local VOIP gurus, Connection Telecom, points towards growing open source use in critical applications.

Paris, France (AHN) - In a move that stunned those supportive of open sourcing for computers, officials announced that French police will convert their 70,000 desktops to Mozilla's Firefox browser, abandoning Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

In Linux Land, distributions are often divided into categories based on how they manage software. It's more than just keeping track of what is installed, but what version. The obvious issue is security updates. Software is usually offered in packages. Sometimes they are all self-contained; often there are packages which depend on others. These dependencies usually make sense, but not always.

MFI Furniture Group has until Tuesday to serve a writ for compensation against IBM before its claim expires.

Brits pull the rug from under patent lawyers

Late December the KOffice team announced a design competition for KOffice 2. A prize of $1000 USD will be given to the best entry as determined by a panel of judges. The deadline for submissions is now only 2 weeks away. Several quality proposals have been submitted, but there is always room for more. So if you have been considering an entry until now, please read the guidelines for objectives, submission formats and examples. For those already working on entries, please review entry requirements and make sure to meet the deadline. Questions on the competition can be directed to the KOffice mailing lists or on the #koffice IRC channel.

[Ed: All right, let's get those submissions submitted! Let's go! Move it! Move... Please excuse the Parris Island flashback. Still, time is running out on the KOffice 2 design competition. I'm sure some starving programmer could use at least one or two of those thousand dollars. - dcparris]

'We are not crusaders,' declares the Linux kernel leader in a debate over proposed open-source license changes.

[Ed: For once, I find myself really questioning the value of the DRM clause in the GPLv3 draft. Yet, how else can one prevent free software from being misused to enable DRM? - dcparris]

The more I see of IE 7 the more I think it's going to make a big splash when it hits the scenes. Even though it's a better browser on Windows Vista than on earlier versions of the operating system, it's got some impressive features on Windows XP as well. Many of them come from Microsoft's willingness to adopt a Firefox feature or abandon something that's been in IE for years. Consider the way IE 7 starts what I think is a long-term shift away from ActiveX.

Nowadays, the biggest traditional database companies are making free availability and open source development an increasingly significant part of their product lines. In the latest such move, this week IBM announced it would make its DB2 Express-C package available at no cost, though still under a proprietary license.

[Ed: If this is a move toward FOSS licenses for proprietary database systems, great. For me, freeware is not so much a threat to free software as it simply steals the thunder. My real problem with freeware is that it creates confusion, as if there isn't enough of that already. Thus, a certain IT director I know, who doesn't understand the concepts behind libre software, would point to this as an example of "everything going proprietary". People miss the point that underpins the whole Free Software movement. - dcparris]

ARMONK, NY -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/03/2006 -- IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications.

Chuck Ebbert raised an issue with the stability of Andrew Morton [interview]'s 2.6 -mm kernel development tree, "most -mm kernels have small but critical bugs that are found shortly after release. Patches for these are posted on linux-kernel but they aren't made available on kernel.org until the next -mm release." Andrew releases a complete copy of his -mm kernel with varying frequency, not making the in between tree-states available from source control due to his development methods [story].

As a solution, Check suggested the creation of a hotfix directory for each -mm release, in which critical fixes could be placed as they are discovered, "I'm talking about patches for problems that keep you from even testing
-mm, or that fix really annoying things you hit while testing.". Andrew agreed to the idea, "OK, I'll create a hot-fixes directory there and will try to remember to put stuff into it." The release of the 2.6.16-rc1-mm5 kernel quickly followed and includeda directory for critical hot-fixes.

Esther Dyson has had a ringside seat for the development of the Internet. She was Interim Chairperson of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) when it was a fledging organization whose goal was to help move the burgeoning Internet's administration out of the US Department of Commerce. Dyson is credited with trying to make ICANN an open and transparent body, but she concedes that she was not completely successful. Today, Dyson is still involved with IT development around the world. She is also editor of Release 1.0, a quarterly report that outlines the opportunities and issues produced by the converging worlds of technology, communications, and the Internet, as well as organizer of the 25-year-old PC Forum conference. We asked Dyson for her perspective on today's IT world.

Even though Microsoft's Internet Explorer still owns some 85 percent of the browser market, Mozilla's Firefox "already has the technological lead in the browser market, and the momentum has just started to build," an Lxer.com column suggests. "So, how can Internet Explorer catch up?"

Advisories were released this week for LibAST, MyDNS, Mail::Audit, PHP, and several other packages. Vendors that released advisories this week are Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Red Hat. No advisories were issued for SUSE or Ubuntu this week. The Mozilla foundation has also released an update to Firefox 1.5 this week.

Most Linux-based distributions for the masses have either GNOME, KDE, or both desktops, yet the startup times and resources required by both GNOME and KDE make them unsuitable for old or lower-end hardware. My quest for a standards-compliant, fast, lightweight, and extensible window manager led me to Openbox.

But today, I'd like to talk about an extension I added the other day that's particularly cool: Viamatic foXpose. This extension lets you view all of your open tabs as thumbnails within your browser window with the click of a mouse. After installing the extension, just click on the little window pane in your status bar to view all of your tabs at once like this: