Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The venture investments flowed to open source startups today, with new money arriving at Greenplum, Alfresco, and Zenoss. The biggest chunk, US$27 million, went to Greenplum, which develops business intelligence software based on the open source Bizgres software project. Zenoss, which sells open source software for managing computers and networks, announced US$11 million in funding, its second round. Alfresco, whose open source software is used to keep a handle on the large quantities of documents companies must reckon with, announced US$9 million in third-round funding.

One side effect of Linux marketing by Red Hat and others has been the widespread belief that people transitioning from expensive old Unix servers running on proprietary chipsets to Linux on x86 do so mainly to get Linux. I don’t believe that; I want to venture a total speculation: that the same forces about Linux eating Sun’s lunch have created a situation in which MacOS really has started to eat the Linux desktop lunch.

Linux Desktop Garage from Susan Matteson is a great resource for those looking to learn the Linux operating system. From the basics of learning the Linux interface to using some of the most popular applications on it, Linux Desktop Garage will help you get up to speed regardless of your knowledge or experience with this powerful operating system.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth are backing a scheme to make publicly funded education materials freely available on the Internet. The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

Microsoft has just announced it will contribute millions of dollars to train students and teachers worldwide how to use its software. That means less exposure to Linux for our children and a continuation of the dependence on the Windows XP and Vista. Of course, before receiving any of this funding, the school must be using Windows XP or Vista. Microsoft has used this tactic in the past to crush competition, including its decision to give away Internet Explorer to starve Netscape out of the industry.

If you are like me, you have a ton of passwords you have to remember. I have different login names and passwords for bank accounts, forums, blogs, email, and other stuff. How do you deal with it all? How can a person possibly remember them all, especially the ones that only get used once every month or two, or just a couple of times in a year? Thankfully, I found a cool program called Revelation Password Manager.

Hearing the terms "free software" or "open source," you might imagine that they referred to a single school of thought. Even "free and open source software" (FOSS) suggests only two different outlooks: Free software, which values political and philosophical freedom, and open source, whose main interest is enhanced software quality. Yet all these impressions would be misleading. When you look, there are at least seven different types of FOSS supporters.

Last night I opened my laptop and Outlook got mad at me. It went all sorts of crazy, trying to configure itself, not finding insertion points, and internal errors. I closed it down and killed all outlook procs but it still haunted me. Every time I opened a new app Outlook would try to configure itself and fail miserably. So I deleted it and downloaded Thunderbird. I forgot how much I hated Outlook. But now that I had Thunderbird installed, I had to make it work with our Exchange server. I got quite farther than I expected.

[Including read access to Exchange calendar data! - Sander]

It’s been about 18 months since Slashdot linked to Tim O’Reilly for linking to Jason Kottke for linking to Cory Doctorow for linking to me for switching from Mac to Linux. (Best comment: “this is just another A-list blogger circle-jerk.” As if that was my fault!) At the time, Jason said, “Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.”

While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with long term interoperability. The “official” ECMA OOXML that was submitted to ISO is not what Microsoft implements in Office 2007. So unless your application reverse-engineered Office 2007’s support, you’ve got interoperability problems right there.

A market research study released in December finds embedded Linux has become as dependable for developers as real time operating systems. The Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) study compares the outcomes of hundreds of design projects that used embedded Linux to those that used commercial RTOSes, and further compares outcomes with non-commercial "roll your own" embedded Linux.

"The following patches have been in the -mm tree for a while, and I plan to push them to Linus when the 2.6.25 merge window opens," began Theodore Ts'o, offering the patches for review before they are merged. "With this patch series, it is expected that [the] ext4 format should be settling down. We still have delayed allocation and online defrag which aren't quite ready to merge, but those shouldn't affect the on-disk format.

The 2.6 Linux kernel comes with a very flexible and powerful auditing subsystem called auditd. auditd is composed of two parts. The main work is done in kernel-space. In user-land, auditd is listening for generated audit events. auditd is able to log file-watches as well as syscalls. All LSM-based subsystems–for example, SELinux–are logging via auditd as well.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has been in the news a lot in recent months. Reports last fall that Uruguay purchased 100,000 XO laptops and soon US consumers could do the same via a special campaign soon gave way to news items about a patent lawsuit and Intel's abrupt departure from OLPC's board. Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software/content and COO, says those developments are nothing more than a bump in the road.

It was all hookers and balloons at Sun Microsystems when the company first found out that Apple would pick up its well-regarded DTrace analysis tool for use with Mac OS X. Now, however, one of the lead DTrace developers has expressed some regrets after Apple "broke" his software in an apparent bid to protect big media and ISVs.

[No really FOSS related, but "interesting" nonetheless. - Sander]

Over the past weekend, I spent most of my time playing around with OpenSUSE and Ubuntu in an attempt to reintroduce myself into the wide world of Linux. And while I could have been a bit happier with the support and Linux does take some getting used to after immersing yourself in a Mac and Windows world every day, it's still an ideal platform for the advanced techie who doesn't want to waste his time with things that "just work."

The Ubuntu team yesterday released Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS, the second maintenance release of Dapper Drake. Ubuntu 6.06.2 is a version of Ubuntu Linux that will be supported until June 2009 on desktops and June 2011 on servers and is ideal for enterprise systems looking for a solid OS with long term support.

Red Hat has launched a testing and certification facility in Beijing, China, as well as opened another research and development (R&D) center in the Chinese state. These moves come under an initiative to encourage deployment of open source software in the country, which Red Hat has termed Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI).

The final 2.6.24 Linux kernel is expected any day now, so the various subsystem maintainers have begun summarizing what changes are expected to be merged into the mainline kernel during the 2.6.25 merge window. Ingo Molnar spoke to changes for the x86 architecture: "Continued, intense arch/x86 unification and cleanup work by lots of people; FIFO ticket spinlocks for better spinlock scalability; 'regset' generalizations - the most important step towards utrace support (==next-gen ptrace); support for more than 255 CPUs [up to 4096 - in theory up to 65535]; almost complete 64-bit paravirt guest support; KGDB support on x86, finally!"

After years of watching the software industry twist itself in knots trying to differentiate “open” vs. “free” and having to re-invent code simply because it had the wrong comments at the top, I think it’s time to put an end to the madness. This promoted me to write the following letter to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.