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9th Aug 2007
8th Aug 2007
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News Alert


Linux and Open Source News for 8th August 2007

Open Source Software

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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Puppy Size: 86.82 MB Status: 4 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-08-08 19:44:03


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Puppy Size: 93.33 MB Status: 3 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-08-08 19:40:34


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: DragonFly Size: 283.71 MB Status: no seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 19:01:11


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: PCLinuxOS Size: 543.59 MB Status: no seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 17:03:08


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 4.04 GB Status: 20 seeders and 32 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 15:15:49


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 4.00 GB Status: 41 seeders and 63 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 15:10:18


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Slackware Size: 590.49 MB Status: 82 seeders and 10 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 04:55:50


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Slackware Size: 640.61 MB Status: 91 seeders and 11 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 04:53:57


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Slackware Size: 638.16 MB Status: 109 seeders and 17 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 04:51:56


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Slackware Size: 3.63 GB Status: 250 seeders and 118 leechers Added: 2007-08-08 04:41:46


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Linux Distributions Size: 100.61 MB Status: no seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-08-08 00:42:54


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Source: mandriva

Adam Williamson has announced the first beta release of Mandriva Linux 2008: "The first beta of Mandriva Linux 2008, code-named Cassini, is now available. This beta is available only as a 3-CD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 architecture, with a traditional installer ..



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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "One of the nice things about the X Window System is its ability to display X apps running remotely on a local machine "


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Source: Linux Today

developerWorks: "This is the fourth and final part of a series that covers the installation and setup of a large Linux computer cluster "


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Source: Linux Today

iTWire: "Over the past year and a bit, at least two Linux distributions which were based on Debian GNU/Linux have stated that they will be switching their base to Ubuntu. Now it appears that one distribution has backtracked "


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Source: Linux Today

desrt: "i was concerned that gnome had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. i think i was very wrong "


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Source: Linux Today

OSWeekly: "Without a question, having access to a truly entry level notebook like this one running Linux is going to make a lot of lower income families very happy "


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Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "Over these months I've learned a lot--a lot about Linux, a lot about the Linux community and a lot about myself and how I look at and interact with PCs "


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Source: Linux Today

Planète Béranger: "The Final draft for openSUSE Guiding Principles is very nice and a pleasant reading, but as it should serve as sort of a Constitution (or at least as a defining writ), it has a weird way of putting the cart before the horses "


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Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "Consider the following: You're a big open source shop that spends a lot of time developing Linux code. Now you get a vehicle to cross-license Linux-related patents without all the licensing hubbub from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Google "


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Source: Linux Today

Mad Penguin: "Make no mistake about it, if you are using a Linux distribution, you are not a friend to the software giant in Redmond "


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Source: Linux Today

Computer Business Review: "After all, when it comes to eroding the meaning of 'open source,' one need look no further than the apparent protector of all things Linux, IBM "


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Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "There is an ugly feeling growing against Microsoft in its attempts to have a few of its shared-source licenses certified as OSI (Open Source Initiative)-approved. The general sentiment is that OSI approval is for everyone except Microsoft "


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Source: Linux Today

iTWire: "This past month has seen a flurry activity from a number of players in the Linux desktop space. Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Dell, Lenovo and even Intel white box system builders are getting into the act "


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Source: Linux Today

Libervis: "Due to the increased diffusion of 'Open Source' as a term this article suggests its gradual phase out in favor of the original 'Free Software' term and renaming of the 'Open Source Initiative' into 'Free Software Business Initiative' (no matter how controversial the proposal may be) "


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Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "At LinuxWorld today, SPI Dynamic's senior security engineer, Matt Fisher, talked about the vulnerabilities of Web 2.0 "


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Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "AMD announced that major x86 operating system vendors are preparing modifications to their OSes in advance of the release of its quad-core Opteron processor, Barcelona, due to ship to OEMs this month and to customers in September "


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxInsider: "Open source started as a small community with a set of ideals about software development, believing that developers should make their products more expedient and user-friendly by making the underlying code accessible to everyone "


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Source: Linux Today

New York Times: "Intel insists that its project to make low-cost laptops for school children in poorer nations began nearly three years ago, before it heard of Nicholas Negroponte's initiative, One Laptop Per Child ."


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Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Oracle is continuing to push hard with its Linux efforts, today announcing a series of new open source projects and initiatives "


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Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "According to Novell President and CEO Ron Hovsepian, there needs to be more application availability on Linux in order to accelerate Linux adoption "


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "Sprint will offer a Mobile WiMAX-enabled version of Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet to North American customers next year "


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Source: Linux Today

Ars Technica: "According to Mozilla, only fifty percent of the people who download Firefox actually try the browser and only about half of the people who try it continue to use it "


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Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "It may be thankless, boring work, but you have to get more involved in building the Linux kernel "


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Source: Linux Today

InfoWorld: "ELCOT, whic provides IT services to the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has already migrated its own infrastructure from Windows to Suse Linux Enterprise "


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Source: Linux Today

Groklaw: "I was noticing on the schedule for SCO v. Novell that tomorrow is the day to file the Final Pretrial Order "


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Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "The OpenSUSE project celebrated its second birthday on Aug. 7 by making the first beta of OpenSUSE 10.3 available at the LinuxWorld trade show here "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: " Dell and Red Hat on Aug. 7 will be delivering a simplified way for customers to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss to migrate from costly legacy application infrastructures using open-source software and standards-based hardware "


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Source: Linux Today

InfoWorld Nederland: "The debate over use of the open document format among U.S. states appears to have hit a wall as experts representing both sides of the issue offered few new insights into the subject "


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Source: Linux Today

Mandriva: "The first beta release of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available "


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Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Sometimes, the promises that vendors make on a show stage turn out to be empty. That's not the case with Dell "


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Source: Linux Today

Linspire: "Building on the best of open source software using Ubuntu as its baseline, Freespire 2.0 adds legally licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and applications in its core distribution, to provide a better user experience "


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Source: Linux Today

The Register: "The fashion for 'web mashups' just got a steroid boost with the release of a browser that is really a desktop database, with full SQL scripting and the ability to manipulate tabular data found on the Internet "


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Source: Linux Today

Blue GNU: "The IPMI specification defines a set of interfaces for platform management "


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxLinks: "However, unless a desktop user is provided with real alternatives to the existing software he or she currently uses, migration to a different operating system is going to be very difficult "


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Source: Linux Today

Open Review: "It seems like commenting on half cooked solution, when everyone knows that it is not finished yet. But I would like to make an exception in case of Freespire "


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Source: Linux Today

RiK0's Tech Temple: "Since Apple dropped PPC, the Linux PPC world is quite in turmoil "


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Source: Linux Today

On-Disk: "Predictable things begin to happen with Linux distributions as newer technologies become available "


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Source: Linux Today

WINE Review: "So why would anyone want IE on Linux when we already have superior browsers ?"


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Source: Linux Today

Open Review: "Sabayon is the new name for earlier RR4 distribution. It is based on Gentoo and modified according to the needs of users "



previous    News for nerds, stuff that matters    next


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Source: Slashdot: Linux

eldavojohn writes "Our friend Jeremy at the Kernal Trap has dug up some interesting criticism of atime from Linus Torvalds. As Linus submitted patches to improve relatime he noted: 'I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_.' And later severely beat atime about the head with a pointed stick: 'It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache do a write to the disk!'" Well, I guess I can expect my Linux machine to become a little bit faster!"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

Microsoft will lose market share to open-source desktops, a Dell strategist says at LinuxWorld.


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Source: eWEEK Linux

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explains the controversial deal with Microsoft as a way to move forward in a "mixed-source world."



previous    The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs    next


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Source: ONLamp.com

Piers Cawley decided that his little language embedded in Ruby is a pidgin:

Casting the problem domain as the colonial power and ruby as the native language, it’s obvious that I’ve invented a pidgin language.

The nice thing about a pidgin (or a dialect, as Ben Scofield suggests) is that all of the power and syntax and semantics of the host language are available if you need them to express concepts that your little language cannot–without modifying the little language at all.

There you go; there are two good terms for describing the use of domain-specific language within a full-fledged programming language without co-opting a term with a perfectly good, existing definition.


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Source: ONLamp.com

Yesterday I heard of a government agency where the manager required employees to post their account names and passwords on a bulletin board, so they could get into each other’s systems in case one of them was out for a day. This was told to me, along with examples of other security policy lapses, by an IT consultant who works for government agencies.



Many workers in human services, she told me, are reluctant to provide data that would be useful to improve the services. She’d like to track homeless people as they move from one jurisdiction to another for instance, to provide better continuity of service and find out what works and what doesn’t. The agency staff are afraid that sinister forces within government will misuse data. While we have no lack of sinister forces in government, it appears that the people needing human services are more at risk of snooping by random staff people, facilitated by the awful security practices just mentioned.



I’m not surprised that employees would treat passwords as just one of the many random impediments they have to bypass each day to do their jobs. Given how many regulations reflect political grandstanding rather than life on the street, and how many well-meaning regulations outlive their usefulness, workers have to interpret the rules in a (shall we say) creative manner. I’m sure many employees in private industry get through the day the same way; it’s not limited to government. But an even deeper issue is at work.



Security systems are, to many ill-trained workers, indistinguishable from the other odd computing annoyances they suffer from every day. From the beginning of data centers over fifty years ago, we’ve felt that computer systems were impersonal and somewhat supernatural. Like too many government regulations, we’re never told why the rules in place, and nobody can seem to update them.



To this day, our passivity is reinforced by designers’ rigidity. We perform a certain operation fifty times a day and still have to press a button in an “Are you sure?” dialog box. We have to go to one menu to enter a header on a document, and another menu far away to add fields to that header. We assume that elements of Microsoft Office’s interface take on the immutability of a force of nature (and reproduce those elements in all sorts of other products) until suddenly a new release changes them.



It becomes inconceivable that a particular element of our daily computing, such as a requirement to enter a password, might actually have been rationally designed by some human being and put in to protect us.



Luckily, savvy computer users complain. They also call for more adaptable systems. I know that the drive in the computer industry nowadays is to make systems more intuitive and easier to use, but I don’t know whether we can anticipate the needs of every user enough to achieve those goals. What we can do it make systems more open, document them better, and make them easier to change. And then maybe employees will start to become responsible guardians of security procedures. As a security researcher at CERT confirmed for me recently, no computer system can be secure if the end-user undermines the policy.


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Source: ONLamp.com

For everyone who read my A Taste of Haskell, A Taste of C, and whose eyes glazed over when I told Nat that Haskell functions only take one argument, John Goerzen explained what I meant in Haskell manipulates functions with the same ease that Perl manipulates strings..

If you watched A Taste of Haskell - Part I, Simon Peyton-Jones answers my question about parenthesizing expressions about halfway through; that’s when I was trying to explain this feature to Nat and made his brain hurt. (I realized halfway through SPJ’s answer that I had forgotten about associativity.)

If none of this makes sense to you and it still all sounds somehow cool (and once you get past the syntax and avoid some of the math, it’s seriously cool), check out Adam Turoff’s Why Haskell?, Pure Functions in Haskell, and Monads, for a great introduction to the language for LAMP programmers.

You could do a lot worse than to grab a lazy Saturday afternoon and work through the code. It’ll expand your mind in very good ways.



Updated: Thu Aug 9 23:55:03 2007


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