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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Foresight Size: 1.31 GB Status: 2 seeders and 23 leechers Added: 2007-09-26 04:46:49

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: LinuxMint Size: 690.54 MB Status: 38 seeders and 97 leechers Added: 2007-09-26 00:56:04

Source: Linux Today

Join the Revolution: "In many households there are more TV sets than persons living in it. In my house it's the same with computers "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "This guide explains how to integrate eAccelerator into PHP5 on a Debian Etch system "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "FaunOS offers a full KDE desktop system with a comprehensive set of applications as either a live DVD or a live USB flash drive "

Source: Linux Today

Mad Penguin: "I have watched Miro (formally known as Democracy Player) grow and mature over the last few years, and I have to admit, it's become quite the addition to my Linux desktop "

Source: Linux Today

Frederick's Blog: "There were great ideas at the start of the development phase, and in in those six months that have passed, Mandriva has always been one of the most active projects on CIA.vc "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Open Source Magazine: "This article offers a review of the top reasons that can influence your company to contribute source code to open source or to start new open source projects "

Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "One of the adages about Linux that gets passed around a lot goes something like, 'It's a great system, but you really have to know what you're doing '"

Source: Linux Today

A Blog Of Gentoo and Other Stuff: "I'd like to challange a little the Linux community. In all recent press, me, my friends and many other people I know are reading about Linux all sorts of information "

Source: Linux Today

Hoosier Penguin: "Microsoft-centric vendor gets the idea from current and potential customers that this Linux thing is not such a bad idea "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Open Source Magazine: "During my career I have had the privilege and the misfortune to be involved with quite a few nascent businesses "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "Linux is by far the software most commonly associated with (and often mis-identified with) open source and free software, where free refers to liberty, not costs "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "But it is taking enormous effort for Microsoft to hold its server market share against Linux' inroads in the enterprise "

Source: Linux Today

Motho ke motho ka botho: "Simply remind the average Linux user that they have a choice on any issue, and a frenzy of infighting erupts. Watch "

Source: Linux Today

Maison Fleury: "Douglas, a SUN employee, from the comments asks: 'Marc, what do you think about Glassfish?'. And I am thinking to myself: not much "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "One of the touted features of the $200 OLPC laptop is the peer-to-peer mesh topology networking feature "

Source: Linux Today

SearchOpenSource: "The trend has been called alarmist and over the top. Even a Microsoft conspiracy theory or two has been floated as justification for dismissing the rising tide of licensing concerns surrounding open source software "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "A thread on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list compared the security of SELinux in the 2.6 Linux kernel to what's available in OpenBSD "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet UK: "Veteran Microsoft security expert Jesper Johansson has said he may dump Microsoft's Windows Media Center in favour of Ubuntu-affiliated LinuxMCE after struggling with the software giant's digital-rights management software "

Source: Linux Today

Phoronix: "On the X.Org mailing list, Alan Coopersmith had raised concerns over the release criteria for X11 and how with recent releases (namely X.Org 7.3), the de facto standard for making a release was far from being met "

Source: Linux Today

OSWeekly: "It's been a wild ride, but I have definitely not regretted my choice to make Ubuntu a major part of my life "

Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "IBM said Wednesday that the beta version of its free Lotus Symphony productivity software has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since the company made it available on the Internet a week ago "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "MontaVista will ship a 'fifth-generation' Linux-based operating system for mobile phones in mid-November "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "Mathieu Desnoyers posted an updated version of his Linux Kernel Markers patchset "

Source: Linux Today

CertCities: "What made me pull the textbooks were the ads that Microsoft has been running lately comparing Windows Server 2003 to Linux "

Source: Linux Today

Underexposed: "Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxWorld: "After the International Organization for Standardization voted to reject Microsoft's Office Open XML document format as a standard, the detailed results from ISO member countries give us a lot of material to analyze "

Source: Linux Today

AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "'You can buy a nerd and he'll fix your computer, help you with stats homework, or if you're really adventurous, take you to dinner!' Ben Ford, president of the Linux Users Group, said on its Web site recently "

Source: Linux Today

Reuters/IT Pro: "Originally delayed until this month, the Linux operating system company has today confirmed that the new desktop version of its OS will now be held-up until October at least "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Linux vendor Red Hat, is re-organizing itself into three lines of business in order to better capitalize on market opportunities "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "Contrary to yesterday's report, the lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for violating the GNU General Public License in its distribution of BusyBox may not be headed for a quick settlement "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Open Source Magazine: "In the early days the sheer novelty of open source software being free had a certain allure "

Source: Linux Today

SearchOpenSource: "Agoura Hills, Calif.-based Symark Software recently joined a long list of vendors offering a cross-platform authentication and configuration application for managing Linux and Unix servers using Microsoft Active Directory "

Source: Linux Today

UneasySilence: "Has the OLPC project and the 'Sugar' OS piqued your interest with all the press coverage it has received ?"

Source: Linux Today

Phoronix: "We have several DDR3 related articles in the works, but in this article we will be looking just at the DDR3 system memory performance in the RAMspeed synthetic benchmark under Linux "

Source: Slashdot: Linux

elrous0 writes "As part of a PR stunt, a Washington Linux user group is holding a "Nerd Auction" and appealing to local sororities to exchange dates and makeover advice for their computer skills and homework assistance. 'The problem is that we're all still nerds. Let's face it, guys. If anyone's going to bid on us, we'll need some spicing up,' writes Washington State Linux Users Group president Ben Ford on the group's website. 'And who better to help with that than sorority girls who like nothing better than a makeover?' So far there has been no comment on how a Linux user group is going to help sorority girls with their Windows machines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot: Linux

superglaze writes "ZDNet.co.uk has a fairly comprehensive feature on the progress being made by Linux for cellphones. Seems a pretty consumer deal for now, but there are some interesting hints of Linux eventually challenging Windows Mobile and Symbian in business use. The article also seems to suggest that the two big groups pushing mobile Linux could be amenable to a merger due to common interests."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Every time I talk about multi-core, I seem to start out with something like "back in the day" or "when things were much simpler," or some such lament. Now prepare yourself for a stunning bit of insight. Cue music.

Source: ONLamp.com

Another article of the series “Yet Another Perl 6 Operator”
In Perl 5, we expect values to DWIM (”do what I mean”) in various contexts. For example, if we use a string containg “42″ as a number we expect it automagically act as a number. Perl 6 keeps this tradition of DWIMmery and introduces several new explicit coercion operations.

? to get booleans
+ to get numbers
~ to get strings

These are all prefix unary operators.

? '' # Bool::False, because '' is a kind of false
? 42 # Bool::True
+ '1' # 1
~ 3e4 # '30000'

These operators ('+', '~', '?') allow you to explicitly coerce values to the types you expect. This can lead to code that is more “self-documenting”, rather than relying on implicit type coercion.

Where these operators really shine is when you overload them as part of an object’s API. This can let you provide all sorts of API cleverness, which some people will love and others will hate.
Here is a simple overloading example with a Roman numeral class. This object provides the Roman numeral in a string context, but acts like a regular integer when you do arithmetic.

my $x = Roman.new(42);
print ~$x; # 'XLII'
print +$x; # 42
"in the year {$x} of the Hyborian era" #[
'in the year XLIV of the Hyborian era' ]
$x == 42; # Bool::True
print $x + 1; # 43
print ~($x + 1); # 'XLIII'

As you might have guessed from the examples so far, in Perl 6 we now have a proper boolean type Bool, which provides two values: Bool::True and Bool::False. Of course, because of DWIMmery, you can use other types of values in a boolean context and get sane results.

So why booleans? Well, without a proper boolean type in Perl 5, we had to fall back on representing boolean values using integers or strings. These types allow many values besides just { 0, 1 } or { '', 'true' }, which can cause confusion, especially if you end up with other true values like "maybe" or 10 in the mix.


Some of the readers may have noticed that I left the Monday deadline slip by. But let’s resume from here. Next article will be due Friday (September 28, 2007).
My thanks for the continued help by Dave Rolsky and the crew of #perl6 freenode channel.

LINKS

Synopsis S03, the official source

The introduction of this series

Official Perl 6 Documentation

Perl 6 in your browser

Source: ONLamp.com

Michael Feathers addresses the question “How do you test private methods?” in The Deep Synergy Between Testability and Good Design. (If you’re stuck in a language with a fetish for compile-time access control on the part of the library writer, you have my sympathy.)

The answer is more interesting than the question. As Michael points out, the desire to test private methods extensively often indicates that he has too much behavior in the class. Other comments suggest that the barrier to creating new classes is too high–we don’t do it often enough.

I’ve often suggested that a major benefit of TDD is that it encourages better design, not only because of YAGNI but because you immediately have to use the API you’re designing. If that’s painful, or awkward, you may need to refactor. Testability is one part of the aesthetic necessary to write good code.

Source: ONLamp.com

Issue 13 of [IN]Secure Magazine is now available. It contains my article: Social Engineering Social Networking Services: A LinkedIn Example (originally a blog post, but now with cool graphics). Download it here.

Source: Linux DevCenter

I am working on finding a way to enable developers working in a wide variety of languages to directly access computationally-intensive libraries written in C++, C, and Fortran. The libraries will have been multithreaded using Threading Building Blocks (TBB), the open source project for which I’m “community mananger.” TBB is a C++ template library (like STL). I don’t expect to have much of a problem calling C and Fortran libraries from C++/TBB code. But, what’s the best path to enable someone writing in Perl or Python or Ruby or — whatever — to call these multithreaded libraries?


This search has led me to reinvestigate some techniques I’ve looked at in the past — for example, Perl’s XS — but the idea of having to create an interface for each individual calling language is unappealing. I looked at, and did some experimenting with, SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator). But before I got very far, Parrot was suggested to me by some people on the #tbb IRC channel (on FreeNode.net).


During my initial investigation of Parrot, I write a blog about my research. Parrot looked promising to me:



Hence, if we can wrap C++ libraries threaded using TBB, then the Parrot NCI should make it possible for all the languages that have Parrot support to call those libraries. Then, high level scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, and Perl will have convenient access to computationally-intensive libraries that have been threaded for optimal performance on multicore processors.



This post elicited an interesting response on another site: “Will Parrot Ever Truly Deliver?” The author acknowledges that “Parrot does sound like an interesting piece of technology”, but wonders “will it ever be a platform suitable for serious, production usage?” The author’s concerns include the length of time Parrot has been in existence (quite a long time), the instability of the code base (lots of significant changes), and the incompleteness of the support from other languages.


Does multicore change the Parrot equation?


Sometimes a technology is invented, and the time simply isn’t right, the need at the moment for solutions that apply that technology is nearly non-existent, though many people readily admit it’s a “wonderful” technology. I wonder if this might apply to a certain extent to Parrot prior to the age of many-core computing?


In a few years, inexpensive PCs will have 8, 16, or more processing cores. Some people doubt that the average home or office user is going to have any use for all these cores. I think that’s like saying “no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM.” Once it’s possible for the average home or office user to apply algorithms and image analysis and video processing and stock market simulators that were previously available only on high-end workstations in data centers, you cannot tell me they won’t want to do this.


It’s going to take programming techniques like Threading Building Blocks, OpenMP, perhaps new languages such as Erlang, or Transactional Memory applied in Haskell, to multithread these computationally-intensive libraries. I doubt that applying conventional low-level threads is going to be an efficient way to accomplish this in terms of programming time (I’ve worked at this level for a long time).


But on the other side: no one is going to want to convert the mass of existing software platforms/applications that could potentially apply these computation libraries to C++ or C. A convenient means to enable a broad spectrum of languages to call multithreaded C++, C, and Fortran libraries is going to be needed. Otherwise, again we face enormous software development inefficiency, as a separate interface has to be constructed for each library for each calling language. That’s not a solution that is going to fly, in my opinion.



It seems to me that Parrot is an excellent candidate for addressing this problem. If this is the case, the Parrot team may soon find itself lent increasing support from independent developers, and possibly from companies who recognize the need for this capability with respect to their own applications.


I don’t think this need was really there when PC performance could be improved simply through ever-increasing clock speeds. Single-threaded software that did a few simple calculations was fine then. Multicore, however, changes everything. As highly-scalable multithreaded computation / simulation libraries become available, and people realize they want them, and developers realize they need to be able to call these libraries from every language platform, Parrot’s time may arrive.

Source: Linux DevCenter

O’Reilly is running an interesting series of articles written by a number of different women in tech, about how they got to where they are and their adventures along the way. It’s a good read with a lot of different experiences and viewpoints.
http://www.oreillynet.com/womenintech/

Source: developerWorks : Linux : Technical library

Too much cleverness in programming makes designs more complicated, code more
fragile, learning curves steeper, and worst of all, it makes debugging harder.
Michele and David feel, in part, responsible for some excesses of cleverness that
followed the enthusiastic reception of their earlier articles on Python metaclasses.
In this article, they attempt to make amends, by helping programmers eschew
cleverness.