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5. Licenses of open-source software like "Linux" and "Asterisk" have no copyright restrictions which in effect puts no restrictions on their use or distribution. As a consequence, any work which is derived from the open source software as conceptualized, created, installed and managed, by the Applicant becomes the ownership of the Applicant.h

There were a couple of comments posted to my previous write-up of PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6 which said that the LXDE version was already available. In fact I had noticed the ISO files for it when I downloaded the KDE distribution, but since it had not been "announced" on the PCLinuxOS Web Page I decided not to write about it at that time. Those comments pointed me to the Release Announcement for the LXDE version, so I have now downloaded it and installed on a couple of netbooks. Here are my first impressions.

Microsoft has entered into its second Android-related patent agreement this week, with tablet maker Velocity Micro. The deal, involving unspecified royalties, follows others with General Dynamics Itronix and HTC....

Apparently Linus has made another of his grand pronouncements, on a subject relevant to this project (thanks to Pete Zaitcev for bringing it to my attention).

People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.

I beg to differ, on the basis that many people are deploying user-space filesystems in production to good effect, and that by definition means they’re not toys. Besides the obvious example of GlusterFS, PVFS2 is almost entirely in user space and it has been used to solve some very serious problems on some seriously large systems for years. Everything Linus has worked on is a toy compared to this. There are several other examples, but that one should be sufficient.

So where does Linus’s dismissive attitude come from?

Famously, the Gilligan's Island theme song, in its first season, left out mentioning the Professor and Mary Ann characters by name, simply including the "…And the Rest" in that lyric where their names later were heard. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even spoofed this issue during screening of This Island Earth, in which the actor Russell Johnson (The Professor) appeared. When Johnson first appears on screen while viewing This Island Earth, MST3K's Mike says over the film: "Hey, what's this "…And the Rest" Crap!?!". Indeed, what's that all about?

Sony CEO Howard Stringer told shareholders that his company was the target of hacker attacks in April “because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames.”

In April Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network (PSN) offline for several weeks after hackers broke in and stole information from more than 70 million user accounts, finally relaunching it in May. A similar attack also affected Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) servers, which control Sony’s online role-playing games. Combined, more than 100 million user accounts were affected.

Sun sets on UltraSparc I through IV+ Oracle is putting the finishing spit and polish on its impending Solaris 11 Unix operating system, but if you're hoping to plunk it on some vintage iron – or even some machines that are really not so old at all – you're going to be disappointed.…

T-Mobile unveiled an Android 2.3-based 4G slider phone with an advanced camera. HTC's MyTouch 4G Slide is equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch, WVGA touchscreen, and an eight-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, & zero& shutter lag, a backside illuminated sensor, and a wide aperture f/2.2 lens, says the carrier....

In a previous article extended file attributes were presented. These are additional bits of metadata that are tied to the file and can be used in a variety of ways. One of these ways is to add checksums to the file so that corrupted data can be detected. Let's take a look at how we can do this including some simple Python examples.

Microsoft has continued to push its patent claims into Android territory by signing a patent agreement with General Dynamics' rugged device subsidiary Itronix. The agreement provides broad coverage under Microsoft?s patent portfolio for Android devices, says Microsoft....

LXer Feature: 27-Jun-2011

I like netbooks a lot. Portable, long battery life, sharp bright screens-- what's not to like? I took ZaReason's Teo netbook on a torture trip and learned a few things.

For the multiple Linux kernel power regressions that I've talked about on Phoronix now for a number of weeks and have been affecting mobile Linux users en mass, I said I was looking for a better power measuring approach by using an AC power meter / UPS rather than a notebook battery to use in nailing these regressions. Using such a power meter would lead to a fully-automated process by the Phoronix Test Suite as no longer would I need to keep pulling the power plug from a laptop, could use much faster hardware, and allow for some other interesting possibilities. Well, last week I bought a power meter that plays with Linux. So now there's some news to share...

Last week at Google's offices in London there was a gathering of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) developers to discuss various topics from C++0x and GDB to the compiler's plug-in API. There are notes from this 2011 GCC Gathering on the GCC Wiki for those interested, but perhaps most interesting was their discussion surrounding the planned migration to C++. GCC itself is largely written in C at this point, but there's an effort under-way to switch more of this compiler code to being more C++ based...

Norco announced a barebone, 1U rackmount network security appliance that supports Intel's & Pineview& generation of Atom processors. The FW-7874 offers up to 2GB DDR3 memory, PCI and mini-PCIe expansion, CompactFlash and SATA storage, and four gigabit Ethernet ports with LAN bypass, among other I/O....

Wine 1.3.23 has been released this afternoon with more Direct3D/DirectX 9.0 functions being implemented by this popular free software project...

Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other. This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.

Cybernet announced a "zero footprint" computer built into a keyboard, featuring a dual-core Atom processor and a multi-touch trackpad. The Linux-ready ZPC-D45 is under one inch thick, but it provides features such as a CD/DVD drive, both VGA and HDMI outputs, stereo speakers, and dual Mini PCI Express slots, the company says....

What's better, a graphical interface or the Linux command line? Both of them. They blend seamlessly on Linux so you don't have to choose. A good graphical user interface (GUI) has a logical, orderly flow, helps guide you to making the right command choices, and is reasonably fast and efficient. Since this describes a minority of all GUIs, I still live on the command line a lot. The CLI has three advantages: it's faster for many operations, it's scriptable, and it is many times more flexible. Linux's Unix heritage means you can string together commands in endless ways so they do exactly what you want.

A small but useful feature for the CD ISOs of Fedora, openSUSE, MeeGo, and many other Linux distributions is that they are spun as hybrid ISOs. Hybrid ISOs allow the same CD ISO to be copied directly to a USB storage device (i.e. flash drive) without needing to rely upon any external utilities. Ubuntu ISOs have not supported this feature, but they do have their easy-to-use start-up disk creator to take care of this task. However, the daily ISOs for the Ubuntu Oneiric development cycle and all official Ubuntu CD releases going forward for i386 and x86_64 platforms will be now spun as hybrid ISOs...

Back in April we reported on the ambitious project by a lone, independent developer to write a GLSL IR to TGSI translator for Mesa that wouldn't involve using Mesa's crufty IR. This work would also be a stepping-stone to GLSL 1.30 support in Mesa, which is needed for OpenGL 3.0 support in this critical free software project. Today the developer is reporting that he believes this translator is ready to be merged into Mesa...