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8th Jan 2006
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Linux and Open Source News for 7th January 2006

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previous    Digital Audio    next


Source: Misc. Gadgets

Filed under: CES, Misc. GadgetsThe iD3 from Realm Systems isn't the first full
computer-on-a-stick solution; we checked out the BlackDog Linux box a few months
ago. Like the BlackDog unit, the iD3 squeezes a processor, RAM, storage and a fingerprint reader into a tiny box that
connects to a host PC via its USB port, and runs all applications locally, while using the host's monitor and keyboard.
The iD3 also includes built-in VPN software to enable users to access their corporate networks from anywhere. No word on
what other software is installed, how much memory is available and how much this will sell for. But we assume the OS is
some variant of Linux, and that pricing will be in line with the BlackDog box, which goes for $200 and up, depending on
available memory.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments



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  popularitypopularitypopularitypopularity

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Linux Live CDs Size: 211.59 MB Status: 1 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2006-01-07 03:53:16



previous    General    next


Source: RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

Simplify your Web-based development with Tapestry, an open-source, Java-based framework that makes developing a breeze. This article
shows you around Tapestry, from installation to file structure. See for yourself how Tapestry facilitates servlet-based Web application development using HTML and template tags.


  popularitypopularitypopularity

Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article on how to simplify your Web-based development with Tapestry, an open-source, Java-based framework that makes developing a breeze. The article shows you around Tapestry, from installation to file structure. See for yourself how Tapestry facilitates servlet-based Web application development using HTML and template tags."


Source: OSNews

"Linux follows the philosophy that every thing is a file. For example, a keyboard, monitor, mouse, printer You name it and it is classified as a file in Linux. Each of these pieces of hardware have got unique file descriptors associated with it. Now this nomenclature has got its own advantages. The main one being you can use all the common command line tools you have in Linux to send, receive or manipulate data with these devices."


Source: OSNews

The study described in the following article was done by Mirosoft, so run to the kitchen and get some grains of salt. "Microsoft's Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively "put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything." Do with the results as you please, but the topic is interesting nonetheless. What are your experiences?


Source: MAKE Magazine Weblog

O'Reilly Media has a full slate of in-booth tech talks at Mac World January 9th to the 13th and plenty of Mac and digital media titles to browse. Plus we have goodies, too! If you buy two or more titles at the booth, you get your choice of a canvas book bag or an O'Reilly T-shirt (while supplies last). And even if you're not in a buying mood, you can enter a drawing with the opportunity to win a 30GB iPod Fifth Generation (video model). MAKE (part of O'Reilly) will be speaking each day about all the things everyone wants to do with their iPods like convert video, install linux, etc. Ok, not everyone Link.



previous    OS: Linux    next


Source: Linux Today

After the last article was published, I have received more than a dozen requests for a second filesystem benchmark using the 2.6 kernel


Source: Linux Today

The SCO Group is now trying to make more charges stick in its case against Novell. The only real question about this move is what took them so long ?


Source: Linux Today

I've been receiving a fair amount of e-mail from people who are sure that I don't know Linux, but their notes are really showing me that they don't know reviewing


Source: Linux Today

I talked to one of [S3's] reps (who gave the impression of being fairly senior in the company), and he cast some interesting insight into the whole Linux graphics driver issue


Source: Linux Today

Texas Instruments (TI) and MontaVista Software announced in December they would pair TI's DaVinci technology-based products with embedded Linux, part of an attempt to more tightly integrate hardware and software in digital media


Source: Linux Today

Incremental changelog, links within.


Source: Linux Today

The DCC Alliance, made up of several Linux distributors which are attempting to add LSB (Linux Standard Base) 3.0 compatibility to Debian Linux, has not had an easy time of it



previous    Software: Linux    next


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

GLSOF is a GUI for LSOF.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
Including an entry for an lsof path and the related dialog now returns
information about lsof.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Lodel is a high-quality Web publishing system (CMS). Text-processed documents (in DOC, RTF, or SXW) are imported using a server-side application, servoo. Documents are structured using the styles in a word processor (or with forms). You can easily add and modify database fields to fit your needs: title, images, abstract, etc. It automatically produces sites with a table of contents, keyword index, author index, and much more. It is compliant with Dublin Core, UTF-8, CSS, and XHTML. It is currently in French and will be shortly translated into English.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release fixes relative link encoding in Word documents and errors
inside RSS loops.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

html2ps is a PHP equivalent of the popular Perl script by the same name
that accurately converts HTML with images, complex tables (including
rowspan/colspan), layers/divs, and CSS styles to Postscript and PDF.
Unlike most other HTML2PS/HTML2PDF converters, it offers good CSS 2.1
support and is very tolerant to non-valid HTML. It can convert even
CSS-intense sites like aol.com and msn.com.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release adds the A0-A3 and A6-A10 paper sizes, several updates to
the documentation and source code comments, and support for interactive
text and button form fields. It fixes lengths given in relative "em" and
"ex" units being incorrectly calculated for the "background-position"
property, TH attributes being ignored, a PHP 5 compatibility problem,
part of the content after a manual page break being printed on the
same page, and printing the text on the page margins inside the
fixed-positioned elements.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Initng is a full replacement of the old and in many ways deprecated sysvinit tool. It is designed with speed in mind, doing as much as possible asynchronously, and using the system resources more efficiently.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release adds bugfixes, stability, and minor improvements.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

boinc can be used as a console tool to display information
about BOINC projects and working units. It can also be used
to start or stop BOINC.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
The script now uses the options -dir and -redirectio when starting
BOINC, and the log file is no longer "boinc.log", but the
BOINC-generated "stdoutae.txt". Wrong behavior which occurred when a
project had several applications has been fixed.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Mozilla New Mail Icon is an extension which displays an icon in the system tray when new mail arrives in your Mozilla Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird . It supports the standard (FreeDesktop.org) system tray, as used by GNOME, KDE, and IceWM.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release fixes installation on Thunderbird 1.0, a "cutoff icon"
glitch on KDE, and a problem with the Russian localization. Unnecessary
library dependencies have been eliminated, allowing the XPIs to work on
older systems without libstdc++.so.6, Pango, and Cairo.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

ngacl is an effort to give Linux and its filesystems a full blown ACL system, similar to that used by NFSv4 and Windows. With this software, you have 13 different access rights, dynamic inheritance, and audit ACLs. The implementation is filesystem-independent because the kernel parts are an LSM module. In addition, there is a Samba-VFS module that enables you to alter ACLs with the Windows ACL editor.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release adds working audit ACLs, stability, and semantic
enhancements.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

CPPSERV is a Web application server providing a
Servlet-like API to C++. It consists of a
stand-alone daemon and a Web server module.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
File upload support was added. SPTK3 was employed. Many minor code and API cleanups were made.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

JamochaMUD offers Unicode, plug-in, and multi-language support (8 different languages) to allow a more enjoyable MUCKing/MUDding experience. It features command history, synchronized window controls, experimental SOCKS 5 support, and greatly improved ANSI colour support. It plays nice on Unix systems, supports a wide range of MU*s, and also includes emulation of some TinyFugue editor controls. It uses Java 1.1, and includes classes to be easily reused in other Java applications.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
The client now supports connecting to MU*s using SSL. User history length is now user-definable. A fix was implemented to avoid a hang during the first time a user tries to connect to a server. The splash screen no longer obscures the setup dialogue during a first run. Upon the initial run, the pane split between input and output windows is now set to a more usable size.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

The Z-machine Preservation Project is a Java
implementation of the Z-machine (Java version
= 5 is required). The project goal is to
provide a Z-code interpreter in Java that conforms
to the standard and is easy to comprehend,
maintain, and extend. Architecturally, it consists
of a Z-machine core system that is independent of
a particular user interface technology. The core
system's behaviour is documented and verified
through its test cases.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release adds support for timed input and enhanced Unicode display. It also provides a new paging algorithm and fixes several issues with the screen display and input. This is the first release to run several public Z-code test suites (random, strictz, etude, gntests) successfully.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

cowdancer allows copy-on-write file access. You can copy a full tree
using hard links, and cowdancer will create a new copy when you need to
write to a file. It's completely implemented in userland, and should run
on most Linux filesystems.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
Speed improvements were made. The binary ilist is saved in cow-shell and loaded mmap in cowdancer. The ilist is now also sorted. The code is now a bit more thread-safe.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Redet is a tool for developing and executing regular expressions using any of more than 30 search programs, editors, and programming languages, intended both for developing regular expressions for use elsewhere and as a search tool in its own right. For each program in each locale, a palette showing the available constructs is provided. The properties of each program are determined by runtime tests, which guarantees that they will be correct for the program version and locale. Additional features include persistent history, extensive help, a variety of character entry tools, and the ability to change locale while running. Redet is highly configurable and fully supports Unicode.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
Cgrep is now supported. Hyphens in Tcl regular expressions no longer need to be quoted in order to work properly. The Tcl -nocase and -expanded options are now supported. A command line option that causes the program to start up in substitution mode was added. The default program has was changed from egrep to Tcl. A bug in which attempts to obtain version information from nawk triggered an error was fixed.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Backup Buddy is a set of scripts which make
versioned, disk-to-disk, backups via rsync easy.
It allows the user to set up disk-to-disk backups
that happen automatically.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
If disk space is running low, the scripts now display an error instead of deleting the last remaining branch of an account. This prevents you from having to resync an entire file tree in the event of disk space shortages.


Source: Freshmeat Daily News

Lost Labyrinth is a rogue-like role-playing game.
It uses a Zelda-like graphics engine, and has high
replayability.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release featured seven new character animations, which are are a bit smaller than the older ones, monsters that jump when they attack so that you can see which one is attacking, and messages in the main screen when a weapon or armor is damaged or broken. Attributes can now never be higher than 15, speed never higher than 25, and life points and mana points never higher than 150.



previous    Software: OpenSource    next


Source: NewsForge

Like all computer users other than a few free software zealots and Mac addicts, I secretly prefer Windows to all other desktop operating systems. I run Linux only out of cheapness and a old-hippie desire to "stick it to The Man." But lately Microsoft has started to embrace open source so lovingly that in a gesture of support for their new open-mindedness I was ready to dump Linux on my two daily-use computers and install Windows instead. Then another Windows security hole popped up. Darn! Once again, it looks like I'm stuck with free, reliable, secure Linux, at least for the next year or two.



previous    Weblogs    next


Source: The Jason Calacanis Weblog

I got to spend some time with Eric, Larry, and a dozen other journalists yesterday after the amazing keynote.The story everyone wanted to talk about--and Eric and Larry didn't--was Google going into the operating system, deskop computer, and office suite business (let's call those three things "Google Desktop" for simplicity). Eric kept saying the Google vision is to index the worlds information, but we all know that is a smoke screen. Google's business is to make money from targeted advertising (i.e. AdSense). Let's look at the facts:1. 99.9% of Google revenue comes from Adsense.2. Google search is not necessarily the most efficient carrier of Google Adsense (content based websites and applications are very good at carrying Adsense as well) 3. Google is doing projects like Google Pack, GTalk, Orkut, and GMail that have NOTHING to do with indexing the worlds data--these projects are all carriers for Adsense.4. Google has built the largest grid computing networking in the world with hundreds of thousands of computers--extending this to a desktop OS would be a cake walk.5. Google has hired folks who worked on Open Office.6. GMail's WYSIWYG is 90% of Microsoft Word. Everyone and their brother is making web-based word processors today (i.e. http://www.writely.com/)7. Google is about to launch a calendar according to reports. That's a no brainer since they have contacts and email already.7a. Email, contacts, and calendar=Outlook. Outlook=Microsoft Office. Office=Microsoft's main revenue stream.8. Most folks are fine with web-based applications now. AJAX has made web-based email competitive with desktop email--case is closed on that issue.9. Google's server network is the only one in existence that could handle a hosted office suite--GMAIL has proven that.10. Google is getting involved in the light $100 laptop project--which is really close to the Google Desktop concept.11. Bill Gates himself said that there will be a huge market for advertising-based software, and Microsoft is making a web-based version of Office a major priority.12. Tech CEOs lie through their teeth all the time--they have to. Steve Jobs said that he would never make a video iPod for two years--then he did. I would task Eric's comments that they are not interested in making a desktop OS, Office Suite, etc. with a grain of salt. If they were interested--and i know they are--they would never tip their cards.Now, I don't think Google will make a PC. I think Google will:a. launch calendar and office suite in the next six months. b. by the end of the year they will come out with a Linux-based OS and offer it for free to PC makers. Those PC makers will love Google for giving them a free OS and Google will love extending the reach of their money maker: google Adsense.The big win: Google can offer PC makers something they have never had: reoccurring revenue. Not only can Google give a free OS and office suite, they could offer them 10% of the Google Adsense revenue of that computer/user--FOR LIFE!Can you imagine if Dell or Compaq could not only sell a computer for $500 with $50 in profit, but also make another $25-50 a year in Adsense revenue? The person keeps the computer for another two years and Dell makes more from the Adsense than the computer.The Google Desktop is the greatest growth opportunity for Google right now, and Google needs to find growth if they are going to live up to their valuation. For those reasons I think this is a done deal. Thoughts?Epilogue: Almost eight years ago Bill Gross pitched me on this idea and started a company called FreePC. Your PC came with a banner fixed to the bottom of the screen. Bill Gross also created Overture--the original version of Google Adsense. When Google launches their free PC or free OS/office suite they will have taken two of Bill Gross' ideas to the bank. Somewhere Bill Gross is feeling pretty darn good about himself (I always thought the guy was brilliant).Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments









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Updated: Wed Jun 28 00:09:47 2006


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