Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Groovy is one of the most-interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There's the conundrum.

Six years after the launch of the IcedTea project, developer Andrew John Hughes feels that it's time to take stock. Questions were previously raised over the role of the project, which aims to make it possible to use OpenJDK using only free software build tools for GNU/Linux platforms, when OpenJDK 7 was released.

You just think that's a Chromebook beckoning you with an open source OS, easier upgradeability and fast connections to the cloud. All those qualities could make it a Linux netbook in disguise -- or at least what the netbooks of a few years ago promised before they all started selling preloaded with Windows. The key? More manufacturers buying into the flexibility of the Linux kernel in the Chrome OS.

The transaction will be financed through a combination of cash and equity contributed by Mr. Dell, cash funded by investment funds affiliated with Silver Lake, cash invested by MSD Capital, L.P., a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, rollover of existing debt, as well as debt financing that has been committed by BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets (in alphabetical order), and cash on hand. There is no financing condition.

Developers at Google and Mozilla have demonstrated interoperability between their implementations of WebRTC, allowing them to make video calls without plug-ins. WebRTC is being developed within the W3C and IETF communities as a future standard for HTML5-capable browsers to allow them to create HD video quality connections, between servers and browsers or between browser peers, without resorting to third-party or non-standard plugins. Two different web browsers being able to communicate using WebRTC is a significant milestone in that standard's development. Using the current Chrome 25 Beta and a recent Firefox Nightly, Todd Simpson, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and Hugh Finnan, Google's Director of Product Management were able to video chat from their respective browsers.

The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February - 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here. In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the slimmed-down version of the mini-computer is now available in Europe. Customers from outside Europe will be able to purchase the device "soon"

LXer Feature: 04-Feb-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a "hate based fork". The developers also noted that their "pet project" was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

Martin Peres and Timothée Ravier ignited the Linux graphics security discussion this morning in Brussels during FOSDEM. Their talk, which was entitled "DRI-next/DRM2: A walk through the Linux Graphics stack and its security", went over the current issues and some of what's being tried to improve the situation. The idea ultimately comes down to exposing a secure API to user-land and restricting GPU's RAM access rights.

Oracle has released a large package of security updates for Java which addresses 50 vulnerabilities in Java both in the browser and in the server. The "Critical Patch Update February 2013" (CPU) for Java had been scheduled, says Oracle, for 19 February, but due to one of the vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, the company brought the release forward. Oracle advise users to install the update as soon as possible because of "the threat posed by a successful attack". This probably explains why Apple disabled Java at the end of the week, as they most likely knew the update was arriving early.

It's déjà vu all over again for Microsoft, as Black Duck Software has named Redmond's TypeScript project among its 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year - despite Microsoft spending nearly a decade trying to figure out this crazy communist software manifesto. Back in 2001, Microsoft labeled open source a "cancer," "un-American," and a threat to rich software capitalists everywhere. By 2003, however, it was limping along the right track with the introduction of its Shared Source Initiative, and not long after started releasing open-source code of its own and creating its own open-source software lab. So why is Microsoft still considered an open-source rookie in 2013, 10 years later?

One of the first high-quality raw photo editors available for Linux desktops was LightZone, but although it was (initially) free of charge, it was a proprietary product. Unfortunately the small company behind it eventually folded, and both the free and paid versions went away, as did the updates required to support newer cameras. The company shut its doors for good in 2011, but the software has made a sudden—and unexpected—comeback as an open source project. Fans of the original will be pleased, but the nascent effort still has considerable work ahead before it grows into a self-sustaining community project.

The volunteers that run the Rubygems.org repository of components for Ruby applications are checking those components to ensure they haven't been tampered with after the platform was compromised. Attackers uploaded a gem to the site which had a metadata file that used the Rails YAML flaws to copy initialisation and configuration information to the Pastie clippings site.

What a difference a day makes -- or, in this particular case, eight months or so. Less than a year ago, retailer Barnes & Noble yanked an issue of Linux Format magazine from its U.S. shelves because of a cover story on the topic of "hacking." "A complaint was made," explained the announcement last May on Linux Format's TuxRadar blog.

It should not surprise you that year after year the most common resolution people make is a combination of lose weight, eat healthier, and get in better shape. This, along with my own resolutions, prompted me to think about what it means to get a company in open source shape.

Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I'd lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

Developers at KDE are planning to merge the code for their Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active user interfaces in the not-too-distant future, according to a blog post by Aaron Seigo. As he explains, individual programs are currently responsible for each shell; their sources, however, consist of just three to ten thousand lines of code, since they otherwise make use of a common code base.

The developers of the VLC video player have warned of a crashing bug in the latest 2.0.5 version of the application, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The issue is a problem in the ASF demuxer (libasf_plugin.*), which can be tricked into overflowing a buffer with a specially crafted ASF movie. The developers note that users would have to open that specially crafted file to be vulnerable and advise users to not open files from untrusted third parties or untrusted sites.

Are you looking for a reliable virtualization package to run multiple virtual machines that handle unmodified Linux or Windows images? Then look no further than your existing Linux configuration. It already has the underpinnings to support Kernel-based Virtual Machine. You need look no further than your distro's package repository to install KVM.