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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Damn Small Size: 46.80 MB Status: 2 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-07-31 16:03:22

Source: vyatta

Dave Roberts has announced the availability of a beta release of Vyatta, a Debian-based firewall distribution: "Vyatta is pleased to announce that version 2.2 (code name Camarillo) has been released to the testing repository. This code is beta quality and is suitable for anybody running Vyatta that wants .

Source: damnsmall

Robert Shingledecker has announced the second alpha release of Damn Small Linux 4.0. From the changelog: "Fixed bug reported upon shutdown - cleanup now working; added more associations for dfm; updated exit.lua to support swm 'exit to prompt'; fixed bug with dfm when booted 'legacy'; added .mtoolsrc mtools_skip_check=1; .

Source: Linux Today

Search Enterprise Linux: "Here's a question for Linux systems administrators out there: Do you know what your users are up to? You probably think you do, but Kurt Lingel, the principal product architect at Sugar Land, Texas-based JME Software LLC, begs to differ."

Source: Linux Today

developerWorks: "The GNU tool gperf is a 'perfect' hash function that, for a given set of user-provided strings, generates C/C++ code for a hash table, a hash function, and a lookup function "

Source: Linux Today

Shift+Backspace: "Let's keep this review ball rolling! After a few incoming links from the Vector Linux website I decided to give their latest offering, Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO, a look "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Networking Planet: "Fedora patches its kernels all to heck, to the point that a vanilla kernel may not work. Of course it costs nothing but a bit of time to try. But if you want to use genuine Fedora kernel sources they come in source RPMs, so you'll have to build your kernel and then package it into an RPM. First fetch your kernel SRPM from your favorite Fedora mirror "

Source: Linux Today

Internet News: "The Web browser is the most basic common unit of the Internet experience for much of the global community. It's also one of the most attacked. And it's not just the bad guys breaking the browsers anymore, but also the browser vendors."

Source: Linux Today

The Linux Beacon "Markus Rex, who is chief technology officer for the Open Platform Solutions Group at Novell and who was one of the cornerstone executives named to the Linux Foundation board of directors back in April, is going to take a hiatus from Novell and work as CTO for the Linux Foundation. Rex is one of the key techies behind the SUSE Enterprise Linux Server distribution, and is the top executive that remains at the formerly independent SUSE since Novell bought the German Linux distro in November 2003 for $210 million."

Source: Linux Today

The Wisdom of Ganesh: " that's what these licenses are being rushed out to do - slow down the adoption of GPLv3.

Fat chance. The GPL version 3 is a juggernaut. And Microsoft is roadkill."

Source: Linux Today

The Register: " history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago."

Source: Linux Today

Krishwords: "It is disgusting to see the so called saviors of open source kneeling in front of a company known to strangle the freedom of users."

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet UK: "Acer will not release Linux-based laptops in the UK due to a lack of demand, despite launching an Ubuntu-based machine in Asia."

Source: Linux Today

OSWeekly: "Linux is Gone, Now What? You wake up one morning and you suddenly realize that Linux no longer exists. Regardless of how absurd this sounds, it does provoke some interesting points from various Linux users, and today, we'll be exploring these closely.
Personally, I believe that I would likely end up using OS X or PC-BSD."

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "This tutorial describes how to edit the GRUB menu. It will also show how to add operating systems and how to add splash screens "

Source: Linux Today

Polish Linux: "I consider the MOC player to be a better solution for some users (including myself) than the very popular applications Xmms or Amarok, and the other visually appealing players. Why do I think so? Read on. I am about to describe some of the lesser known options of this excellent player."

Source: Linux Today

Citadel.org: "The developers of the Citadel messaging and collaboration system are pleased to announce that we are now releasing all of our software under version 3 of the GNU General Public License."

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "Rafael Wysocki posted a lengthy status report 'describing the current state of development of the suspend and hibernation infrastructure: how it works, what known problems there are in it and what the future development plans are '"

Source: Linux Today

Phoronix: "If you have been reading our ATI/AMD Linux display driver reviews for some time, you will know that there are periods where it doesn't look like the fglrx driver is actively being worked on, but in fact changes are being made 'under the hood '"

Source: Slashdot: Linux

coondoggie writes "Today IBM will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux, saving $250 million in the process. The 4,000 replaced servers will be recycled by IBM Global Asset Recovery Services. The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot: Linux

onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot: Linux

An anonymous reader writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has given legal clearance to OpenHAL, a wireless component for Linux, based on their pro-bono review of the code. This announcement dispels allegations of infringement on Atheros' proprietary HAL software. 'We believe that this outcome will clear the way for eventual acceptance of a new wireless driver into the Linux kernel,' said John Linville, the Linux kernel maintainer for wireless networking."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Building Internet applications with Rails is getting even easier as projects like ActiveScaffold and Hobo mature.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Remotely control your tunes with MPD and ncmpc.

Source: ONLamp.com

At OSCON last week, my favorite tutorial was Simon Peyton-Jones’s A Taste of Haskell (A Taste of Haskell presentation materials (PDF)). I’ve dabbled with the language before (and pair programmed with Audrey Tang once to find and fix a bug in Pugs), but I’ve never really felt comfortable with the language.

It’s nice to report that function composition actually makes sense to me now. (At Foo Camp, I spent ten minutes explaining to Brian O’Sullivan why and how it tripped me up every other time I tried to figure it out, so hopefully Real World Haskell will smooth out that path for other people.

Most of my work these days is in C, though. As a junior language designer, I spend a lot of time considering the differences between languages (and, yes, rarely at the syntactic level).

I sat next to Nat Torkington at the tutorial. He kept rubbing his temples. At one point I leaned over and said, “The interesting thing about Haskell is that its functions only take one argument.” He turned green.

In all seriousness, well-factored Haskell code resembles well-factored Smalltalk code: if you have functions (or methods) longer than a handful of lines, you’re probably doing too much. Lower level languages such as C rarely give the opportunity for composition and abstraction that you can get out of functional languages. The presence of pure functions–functions which never change global state and which return the same output for the same input–is also immensely important.

It’s actually the combination of the two features which give these languages such power. When Haskell forces you to mark impure functions explicitly, it gives you tools to isolate behavior which can change global state in the smallest possible scopes, and prevents you from composing impure and pure code together accidentally. When Haskell lets you compose functions into larger functions, not only does it help you write code more concisely, but it provides well-defined units of behavior which work along well-defined and isolated boundaries.

If you can get your program into a succinct form where the important features of your algorithms are in isolated units, you can use tools such as Quick Check to test their behavior in isolation.

The desire to test small, individual pieces of a large pile of C code has gone further to convince me of the benefits of Haskell and similar language than anything else. I’m tired of keeping track of side effects and global state and trying to figure out exactly what I have to mock up before I have to tackle the work of linking and exporting symbols and calling a C function from a shared library.

I just don’t know how to write a concurrent-safe garbage collector in Haskell to use in a large, cross-platform project written otherwise mostly in C.

Source: ONLamp.com

CIO Magazine just ran an article looking at how one CIO coped with going cold-turkey from Windows in a corporate environment. Although there were the usual glitches with proprietary corporate software, it is on the whole a very positive look at the practicality of bringing da Penguin into enemy territory.

Source: Linux DevCenter

Back in February I wrote about using xli to add a desktop background of your choice to a minimalist window manager. I chose to write about xli for two reasons. First, several window manager developers choose to use xli by default. For example, if you look at a .jwmrc file, the configuration file used by JWM, a lightweight window manager I am rather fond of, you will see that xli is used in the section. The second and perhaps more important reason I chose to write about xli is because it’s what I knew and used for years. One thing about Linux and UNIX: there are always different ways to do things. It turns out that many distros include something a bit newer and perhaps better than xli.
Esetroot can also be used to change the contents of the root window in X. The root window is your desktop background. The advantage of Esetroot over xli is that it supports transparency in applications. This is a low resource piece of eye candy that I particularly like in terminal emulators like mrxvt, aterm, and xfce Terminal. I like seeing my background, albeit shaded, perhaps in a color of my choice, in the background of my terminal window. pypanel, a small panel or toolbar application for minimalist window managers written in Python, also supports transparency nicely.
The command:
Esetroot -fit /usr/share/wallpapers/iceberg.jpg
gives me a desktop background photo of icebergs at sea that fits my entire screen. This is functionally equivalent to:
xli -onroot -fullscreen /usr/share/wallpapers/iceberg.jpg
in terms of setting a background. Either command can be used at the command line for the current session or placed in an appropriate configuration file to run when your window manager is started.
I could conceivably use the sample Esetroot command above in place of xli in my ~/.jwmrc file. If you use PekWM you can add it to your ~/.pekwm/start file, replacing iceberg.jpg with your favorite background, and voila, a nice background every time the normally minimalist PekWM starts. If your favorite little window manager doesn’t have it’s own configuration file this command could also be added to your .xinitrc file.
There’s nothing wrong with xli. If your favorite distro includes an xli package but not an Esetroot package and you don’t feel like compiling from source then xli is probably your best choice. If you don’t particularly care about transparency support then either command is equally good.