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15th Jun 2007
14th Jun 2007
13th Jun 2007

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News Alert


Linux and Open Source News for 14th June 2007

Pretoria Linux Distributor

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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 699.69 MB Status: 2 seeders and 8 leechers Added: 2007-06-14 23:54:22


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Open Source Software Size: 10.90 MB Status: no seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-06-14 22:07:54


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 3.82 GB Status: 26 seeders and 59 leechers Added: 2007-06-14 16:34:41


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 3.76 GB Status: 35 seeders and 92 leechers Added: 2007-06-14 16:31:27


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 3.37 GB Status: 4 seeders and 13 leechers Added: 2007-06-14 16:16:17


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Source: slackware

Patrick Volkerding has announced the first release candidate of Slackware Linux 12.0: "It's that time again, and here we have Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1! If we're lucky, we got it all right the first time. Big thanks to the crew." This message has been posted on the .


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Source: yellowdog

Terra Soft Solutions has announced the availability of an updated release of Yellow Dog Linux, version 5.0.2: "We are pleased to announce the release of Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2, a single Install DVD with support for the Apple G4 and G5 computers, Sony PS3, and IBM 'System p' .


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Source: suse

Andreas Jaeger has announced the fifth alpha release of openSUSE 10.3: "I'm glad to announce openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5. The following are some highlights of Alpha5 compared to Alpha4: Linux kernel 2.6.22-rc4; reduced size and cleaned-up dependencies of some packages; glibc 2.6; Emacs 22.1; OpenOffice.org 2.2.1rc3; lots of package .



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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "When you power on your computer, the first software that runs is a bootloader that invokes the computer's operating system "


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Source: Linux Today

developerWorks: "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl) form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. Many open source packages based on LAMP components are available to solve a variety of problems "


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Source: Linux Today

OSNews: "And if I hadn't flown into a high-minded anti-Microsoft, down-with-Bill-Gates fury at the start of this year, would I ever have stumbled upon ZenWalk? I doubt it "


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Source: Linux Today

InfoWorld: "Or maybe I should say a lack of guile. But naivete works, too. I just spent an engaging hour talking with Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life "


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Source: Linux Today

ITtoolbox: "This time Linspire has signed a deal with Microsoft to license VOIP and Windows proprietary media formats and true type fonts. My question is why ?"


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Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "Now there are two ways to read these Microsoft-Linux pacts. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch writes that Microsoft is creating an anybody-but-Red-Hat club to outflank the Linux bellwether "


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Source: Linux Today

eWeek: "Curbing my enthusiasm somewhat is the fact that Intuit's forthcoming Linux-friendly product is the server-based QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions "


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Source: Linux Today

SearchEnterpriseLinux: "Sounds like momentum is swinging in Microsoft's favor, right? Not really, said Gordon Haff, senior analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata "


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Source: Linux Today

APC Magazine: "It was with much anticipation that we nabbed the new Fedora Core 7 Live CD in the hope of checking it out first before installing it. Unfortunately, the live CD had other plans "


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Source: Linux Today

iTnews: "The start-up company that's been crawling open source project servers and collecting statistics for more than a year could pose competition to JBoss, GlassFish and Geronimo "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "Turbolinux's Linux-based wizpy music player is a beautiful device. It's slick, black, and slightly smaller than the smallest cell phones. Unfortunately, its value and functionality doesn't live up to its good looks "


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Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Linux Log: "'If you don't evaluate Linux desktops, you may be liable to your shareholders because you're spending an enormous amount of money to upgrade to Vista without a demonstrable ROI '"


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Source: Linux Today

TechIQ: "This is pure speculation by The VAR Guy. But things are getting a little strange over at Dell "


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxWorld: "The New York state politician backing a bill that would order the state to examine a switch to open document formats for official business said Friday that she is optimistic her bill will escape the fate of similar bills in five other states "


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Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "In the latest word in a peculiarly public interchange, Linux leader Linus Torvalds appears inclined to take up Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz on his offer for dinner "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: "If anyone out there still thinks that the main Linux kernel might change to the GNU GPLv3 (GNU General Public License Version 3) anytime soon, you can forget about it "


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Source: Linux Today

ConsortiumInfo: "I'm attending the Linux Foundations' first annual Linux Collaboration Summit from the Google campus in Mountainview California today and tomorrow, and will add periodically to this post as the day goes along "


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Source: Linux Today

LKML: "I'm damn fed up with the FSF being the 'protector of freedoms,' and also feeling that they can define what those freedoms mean "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "The top leader of Linuxchix resigned yesterday in the midst of a controversy over her leadership style "


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Source: Linux Today

Web Host Industry Review: "Over the past week, I've been looking through the various appliance projects hosted at rPath's rBuilder project site with an eye toward what could a hosting company borrow or participate in "


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Source: Linux Today

Mad Penguin: "Not too long ago, I shared my thoughts on Microsoft's introduction of Silverlight, their blatant lack of Linux support and how they were aiming at regaining their browser dominance "


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Source: Linux Today

OSWeekly: "With the news of Linspire's CNR coming soon to Ubuntu, and Automatix now offering a limited number of closed source, commercial applications, what possible consequences will this have on the Linux community and open source as a whole ?"


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Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Networking Planet: "We see the headlines all the time: 'Company X Loses 30,000,000 Customer Social Security Numbers and Other Intimately Personal and Financial Data! Haha, Boy Are Our Faces Red !'"


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Source: Linux Today

Shift+Backspace: "PCLinuxOS 2007, also referred to as PCLOS, was released on May 21st, 2007 to rave reviews "


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Source: Linux Today

Ubuntu Geek: "MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2 "



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Source: Slashdot: Linux

walterbyrd sends us to the ZDNet blog, where Dan Farber & Larry Dignan write: "Intuit said Wednesday it will allow QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to operate on Linux servers. For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone — QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

RLiegh sends us to an AP article reporting that Linspire has signed a patent deal with Microsoft. The company, which started out life as "Lindows," joins a growing list of patent agreements reached between Microsoft and vendors. Linspire will be granted a license to use True Type Fonts and "various code" that would allow for Linspire users to use voice on Windows Live Messenger as well as the usual patent protection for Linspire's customers. In return, among other things, Linspire will make Microsoft's search engine the default search on PCs shipped with their OS. Kevin Carmony, the CEO for Linspire, approached Microsoft a year and a half ago, according to the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.



previous    News, reviews and commentary on all aspects of Linux and open-source software, including application servers, communications and database servers.    next


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Source: eWEEK Linux

As with Microsoft's Xandros and Novell agreements, the deal will offer protection to Linspire Linux users against possible infringement of Microsoft patents. (DesktopLinux.com)


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Source: eWEEK Linux

The two companies will work together to advance office document compatibility, enhance instant messaging interoperability and reinforce existing collaboration on digital media.



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Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

The latest and greatest gadgets and gizmos for your pal, the Penguin.


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Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Vendors are hiring the Linux faithful and reaching out with offers of collaboration. Is all the recent interest in Linux good for the OS?


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Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

If you think the computer industry moves fast, try
keeping pace with the telecommunications business. Markets change
swiftly and dramatically. Technology alters the economics.
Competition is cutthroat. What’s a Penguin to do in such a
hazardous world? As it turns out, a lot. Learn why Linux is
enjoying remarkable success keeping the world connected.



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Source: ONLamp.com

Via John Lilly (COO of Mozilla), Steve Jobs misses the gold ol’ Browser Wars.

Now I’m not the chief of a successful hardware/software/consumer products company, but the goal of being #2 by swallowing #3, #4, #5… seems somewhat wrong to me.


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Source: ONLamp.com

In the second and final part of this series, Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp goes under the hood of his single sign-on tool, CAS+, and shows how it actually works. Along the way, there's lots of useful information about the underlying mechanisms that make all SSO solutions purr.


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Source: ONLamp.com

Writing documentation is a thankless job when you're getting paid for it, so why in the world would people voluntarily do it for free? Andy Oram wondered just that, so he conducted a survey. Now he's here to present the results and some conclusions he's drawn.


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Source: ONLamp.com

The often public battle between Microsoft and the Open Source community over document standards has been in the news a lot lately. With states and countries choosing to mandate ODF, Microsoft has been doing its best to get the rival OOXML standard adopted. Sam Hiser, Vice President and Director of Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, presents his reasons why ODF is the way to go.


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Source: ONLamp.com

The Linux Foundation–the new organization formed this year from the merger of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group–is holding a summit this week at the main Google campus.
I think we can already call the summit a success, and an indication of the Linux Foundation’s acceptance by its community, just on the basis of the many busy, well-known people who chose to show up. It was a great place to make connections among both speakers and attendees.
The first day was a pretty public affair, with an audience of 200 that included journalists, so the discussions were basically polite and stuck to acceptable debates such as how to recruit more developers. I could not, unfortunately, attend the sessions later in the week where (to use Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s metaphor) the sausage would be made. But some interesting points came up anyway.
Role of the Linux Foundation
It was impressive to see the thanks tendered by Linux kernel developers to the Linux Foundation, especially for its work to recruit developers from the Pacific Rim. Greg Kroah-Hartman and others spoke about how valuable it was to travel on the Foundation’s dime to Japan and encourage development groups there. Bringing East Asian developers more into the kernel community will be a major focus.
Other tasks Zemlin defined for the Foundation include promoting and defending Linux and free software. It may be hard to remember that free software is still subject to legal threats. But the SCO versus IBM cluster of cases drag on and patent wars escalate. Under such circumstances, one can’t expect FUD to go away either–why are U.S. governments so slow to adopt free software and open standards?
GPL debate, version ad infinitum
A stark contrast emerged between the attitude of Linux developers toward the soon-to-be-released GPL version 3 and the attitude of prominent lawyers in the free software community who worked on the GPL over the past couple years.
The Linux kernel developers kept a solid front, backing what Linus Torvalds has said about version 3 from the beginning. The most positive statements they could muster is that the Free Software Foundation listened to its critics, that the final GPLv3 is much better than its early drafts, and that (in the words of Ted Ts’o) it would be “basically OK for userspace programs” (not the kernel, in other words).
James Bottomley presented the kernel developers’ digging in as a pragmatic decision. Given that individual developers keep the copyright on their contributions, it would be too much trouble to try to get them all to relicense their code. But everyone made it clear they didn’t want to change from v2 to v3 anyway.
Later that day, attorneys Karen Copenhaver and Mark Radcliffe had the chance to discuss their work with the Free Software Foundation on v3. They both praised the new license and suggested that it would spread gradually to projects over time. Everybody at the conference suggested that the community “chill” (relax and let things take their natural course). I talked to O’Reilly colleague Allison Randal, who has worked a lot on v3 from her perspective as a Perl language contributor. She confirmed that from a legal standpoint, the GPLv3 stands on much firmer ground than v2, but pointed out that even the lawyers who supported the license didn’t predict quick, widespread adoption.
Mark Shuttleworth
Shuttleworth gave a quietly very inspiring talk that straddled the important themes of community building and formal tool support. He pointed out that traditional, centralized version control tools such as CVS and Subversion divide the user community into two parts: those with the rights to commit changes and those who can merely download. For free software, he promoted the use of the newer distributed tools such as git and Mercurial, where anybody can make a clone of the software and people can choose whom to accept changes from. “Everybody’s important,” he said.
Free software developers have created superb tools for sharing bug reports and other information with collaborators around the world on a single project, but we need to do more to allow such sharing between projects. Shuttleworth contrasted our development silos with Microsoft, where people on widely distinct projects can get in touch with each other over IM within minutes.
To reach this stage, we need to create standards for data exchange between different bug trackers and other tools (as well as between data formats), and end the current situation where someone who wants to submit bug reports to different projects has to create an account on each project. Sharing should be accompanies by digital signatures to prevent the projects from becoming vulnerable as they become more open.
He also praised formal planning, saying that when starting the Ubuntu project he was inspired by the GNOME developers’ ability to explain to users what they were developing and to deliver the projects relatively on time; that was also one reason Ubuntu was released with GNOME support first.
Finally, while expressing satisfaction with the 2-3 month release cycle of the Linux kernel, he asked that larger cycles of experimentation and bug-fixing be layered on top of it.
Linux adoption
There were certainly warnings about things that need to be fixed. Brian Aker of MySQL AB said that the new Linux threads were buggy and that most MySQL users had reverted to the old threads implementation–or in some cases switched to OpenSolaris. Aker also said support was difficult because the kernels in different distributions had different bugs, even if they were compiled from the same kernel version.
Although the Linux Standard Base makes development and support much easier, as reported by some major vendors such as Real Networks, adoption is still slow.
I’ll end on some pleasant statistics voiced by industry leaders. Dan Frye of IBM said Linux was ahead of its competition in real-time. (A patch now brings real-time into the kernel core.) Christy Wyatt of Motorola said her company would base 60% of its upcoming phones on Linux, and reported that “even the most conservative industry predictions” says Linux will soon tie for first place in the mobile market.
My impression is that Linux and free software are expanding their hold in areas where they have traditionally done well, such as in the back office and on specialized devices created by sophisticated developers who have time to tinker. But there are still big challenges to overcome in reaching the desktop, user tools, and other areas less well understood by the free software community. That doesn’t mean the proprietary vendors have it all figured out and give users everything they want. It just means that free software doesn’t have a strong enough basis for overturning the lead of the proprietary software.


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Source: ONLamp.com

Ruby on Rails may get all the attention as a quick and easy way to implement CRUD-type screens, but there are similar packages available for other languages. Phil Crow shows how Gantry, a Perl-based CRUD generator, saved Christmas.



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Source: Linux DevCenter

Last week I finally finished installing Condor (a distributed computing project) on our machines here. The install packages didn’t seem to include a Debian startup script (or I couldn’t find it), and a little light Googling produced nothing either. So I wrote my own, & reproduce it here to assist the laziness of others.


#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/condor: start and stop Condor

set -e

test -x /soft9/condor/sbin/condor || exit 0

if test -f /etc/default/condor; then
. /etc/default/condor
fi

export PATH="${PATH:+$PATH:}/usr/sbin:/sbin:/soft9/condor/sbin"
export CONDOR_CONFIG="/soft9/condor/etc/condor_config"
PIDFILE="/var/run/condor.pid"

case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting condor"
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec /soft9/condor/sbin/condor_master -- $CONDOR_OPTS
PID=`pidof condor_master` || true
echo $PID $PIDFILE
echo "."
;;
stop)
echo -n "Stopping condor"
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --pidfile /var/run/condor.pid
echo "."
;;

*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/condor {start|stop}"
exit 1
esac

exit 0



I may write more about condor when we’ve been using it a bit longer.



Updated: Fri Jun 15 23:55:03 2007


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