Take Five
Realeyes Technology: "Jazz fans will recognize the title of this post as one of the most famous jazz pieces ever written. It was composed and performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and was part of the album Time Out, which contained several pieces in unusual time signatures."
Sun Wrestles Itself With StarOffice 9
Linux.com: "StarOffice 9 reminds me of the classic Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman wrestles himself. Although StarOffice is being aggressively presented as an alternative to Microsoft Office, it seems to be equally marketed and bundled to compete against OpenOffice.org, the free software project that is sponsored by Sun and that shares a common code base with StarOffice. The trouble is, the differences between the two have diminished with each release, until, with StarOffice 9, you have to wonder who the potential customers might be."
O'Reilly Webcast: Everything You Wanted to Know About Drupal but Were Afraid to Ask
O'Reilly Media: "Join us for this free live webcast:
Everything you wanted to know about Drupal but were afraid to ask; Presented by Jeff Eaton and James Walker, authors of "Using Drupal"
Linux Dedicated server
Dedicated Server are cost effective solutions for your organization's most challenging linux hosting and application needs. Each linux dedicated server is built with high-quality Intel components, with high-speed SATA disk storage and plenty of premium Internet bandwidth. These linux dedicated servers are perfect for advanced users who have the expertise to configure and manage a Linux dedicated server and who need the flexibility to run their own Internet applications. All linux dedicated servers come with the latest software and utilities to get you up and running quickly.
Hardening The Linux Kernel With Grsecurity (Debian)
HowtoForge: "Security is based on three characteristics: prevention, protection and detection. Grsecurity is a patch for Linux kernel that allows you to increase each of these points."
Mounting Xen Virtual Machine Storage on Physical Hosts
SearchEnterpriseLinux: "In the event that something happens to a Xen virtual machine (VM) that prevents you from starting it, it's a good practice to have the virtual machine storage back end mounted in the Linux file system of the Xen-based server. By doing so, you'll be able to repair the VM quickly and painlessly. In this tip, I'll cover how to do this for physical devices that are used as storage back ends."
Ulteo Unveils the First Open Source Virtual Desktop
Ulteo: "Following its commitment to desktop virtualization solutions, Ulteo, an Open Virtual Desktop Infrastructure company, announced today that they were releasing the first installable version of their Open Virtual Desktop solution for enterprises."
Phoronix 2008 Linux Graphics Survey
Phoronix: "This year we're hosting the survey again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information."
Bash Cable, Dish and Local TV Listings Script For Linux Or Unix
The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script continuation, we're following up on our script from last week. If you liked that one, please revisit last week's cabletv.sh script, as this one introduces some features which (while nice) introduce a bit of extra run time. This week's improvements include making the script output more readable..."
Authenticate Linux Clients with Active Directory (Technet)
LWN: "Microsoft's Technet Magazine has a lengthy article on authenticating Linux clients with Active Directory. "Originally, Linux (and the GNU tools and libraries that run on it) was not built with a single authentication mechanism in mind. As a result of this, Linux application developers generally took to creating their own authentication scheme."
Book Review: C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King
Free Software Magazine: "A good starting point for learning is K N Kings popular book "C Programming: A modern approach", published by Norton, which has just reached its second edition and hence worthy of a new review."
Tip: Simple Regular Expressions For Reviewing Log Files
LinuxPlanet: "LinuxPlanet Classics: With a few simple regular expressions you can quickly search your logfiles for problems, nasties, and even good news. These regexps are also useful for all kinds of text searches"
On Feedback
jonobacon@home: "This has been something on my mind for a long time - how can we see the great many interconnecting lines between different parts of community. In effort to make progress this area, I have worked closely with my team to build some metrics to understand our community."
iBGP: Synchronizing the Internet
LinuxPlanet: "Last week in our classic Networking 101 series we learned about Border Gateway Protocol, the networking protocol that powers the Internet. This week Charlie Schluting leads the dive into iBGP-- Internal Border Gateway Protocol-- to learn how to connect all those BGP routers together, and how to route between thousands of computers without going nuts."
Good (Linux) Things on the Horizon
Jamie's Random Musings on Video IM: "We seem to be in a particularly good period for Linux at the moment. We've recently gotten the Mandriva 2009.0 and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex releases, and both of them seem to be very good. There will be a number of new releases coming in the next few weeks, as well:"
Bash One-Liner Script To Produce Somewhat-Fancy Output Of Who's Logged In
The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "Today we're going to shoot out a quick one liner script that can come in handy from time to time. It doesn't fall under the "necessary" category (or, maybe not even the "useful" one ;), but it's nice to have for those times when you just don't feel like doing any extra typing or expending the effort required to separate the wheat from the chaff on a screen full of garbage output."
VIA Publishes 2D/3D Documentation, Partners with OpenChrome
Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.
Kerneloops.org Records its 100,000th Oops
Arjan van de Ven from Intel Open source centre has posted the news that http://kerneloops.org has recorded its 100,000 oops. An oops in the Linux kernel is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel which produces a certain error log. kerneloops is a client side software that helps record oops more automatically on the website with the same name and is available as part of many distribution repositories and even included by default in Fedora. This is part of the QA efforts in the Linux kernel and when posting the news, Arjan has noted that Linux kernel developers have been fixes most of the top oopses quickly
Microsoft, Novell See Profits in Partnership
Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers. "I was surprised at the number of over 200 customers, so I actually went back and double checked it just to make sure," Susan Heystee, General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Novell told InternetNews.com. "That represents over 250 percent growth in terms of the number of customers that are part of the partnership which is really great. A real positive surprise has been the great customer momentum."
Five Reasons HP Is Outperforming The Market
Tech pioneer Hewlett Packard has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it's currently on the upswing, even during these trying economic times. #5 probably hits closest for OSNews readers: a renewed focus on innovation.
Debunking the "2x Ram as Swap Space" Rule
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?
Linux Distros and Apple beat Microsoft's Homepage Uptime
Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft's record. 13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft's homepage. 5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple's homepage. Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora. Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.
A Mozilla End of Year Report
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of Mozilla corporation has posted a report the details the financial status of Mozilla for this year. "Our revenue remains strong; our expenses focused. Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2006"
Red Hat Offers Mainframe-class Support
Red Hat has announced a new program where customers would get higher service level guarantees and updates for up to 10 years for a new release instead of the usual 7 years for every release. "The targets for this are the most conservative companies currently on Unix-based systems and with a need for unusual levels of support," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's Platforms business unit.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) Possibly in Q1 2009?
From MacRumors: "Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week. [...] This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms". The presentation slides (PDF), besides generally interesting info on Mac OS X, feature a table that shows a release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Leopard.
Nvidia Announces "Personal Supercomputer"
Nvidia and partners are offering new "personal supercomputers" for under $10,000. Nvidia, working with several partners, has developed the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, powered by a graphics processing unit based on Nvidia's Cuda parallel computing architecture. Computers using the Tesla C1060 GPU processor will have 250 times the processing power of a typical PC workstation, enabling researchers to run complicated simulations, experiments and number crunching without sharing a supercomputing cluster.
Judge Dismisses Computer Maker's Claims Apple Is a Monopoly
Strike one for Apple. Curling is a better sport anyway - the first end goes to Apple. The Cupertino company sued clone maker PsyStar for licensing and trademark violations and copyright infringement, only to be greeted by a counter lawsuit from PsyStar, who claimed Apple was a monopolist. U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with Apple on the counter lawsuit Tuesday. In his 16-page decision Tuesday, Alsup ruled Apple's products don't constitute a market to dominate. As a consequence, Apple then can't be considered a monopolist, Alsup wrote. An Apple spokesman had no comment. A representative for Psystar couldn't be reached for comment. The original lawsuit is still running, so PsyStar can, for now, continue selling its clones.
How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go?
OStatic: "While I remain in agreement with many observers who see the economic downturn as potentially very positive for open source, I have to wonder whether we're going to see some of the leadership open source companies swallowed up in all the financial carnage."
Ubuntu Muslim Edition 8.10 Released
Softpedia: "The hard working team behind the UbuntuME (Ubuntu Muslim Edition) project announced today a new version of their Linux-based operating system. Ubuntu Muslim Edition 8.10 is based on Intrepid Ibex, also known as the Ubuntu 8.10 operating system."
Some Open Source Attacks on Windows May be Unfair
ZDNet: "Over the course of a month Apple's downtime was 2 minutes, putting them in the middle of the pack. Microsoft's? An hour and 19 minutes. This proves what, exactly?"
Linux Distros and Apple Beat Microsoft's Homepage Uptime
Royal Pingdom: "All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month."
Linus Torvalds' Old Company Acquired and Gone
TGDaily: "The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linux Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta’s journey is over."
Apple's New MacBooks Have Built-in Copy Protection Measures
AppleInsider: "The Intel-developed technology is called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and aims to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across a variety of display connectors, even if such copying is not in violation of fair use laws."
64-Bit Linux Adobe Flash Player: Surprisingly good
Cyber Cynic: "Talk about a change in priorities! When Adobe decided it was time to start work on a 64-bit Flash Player, they didn't release the first test version on Windows or Mac OS X. No, they released it on Linux and Solaris. Wow."
Mozilla Revenues Hit $75 Million - Hello IRS
Netstat -vat: "Mozilla Chief Wrangler Mitchell Baker today reported Mozilla's financial position which shows 2007 revenues of $75 million up by 12 percent from 2006 revenues of $67 million. Though Mozilla is on the upswing, Baker's report shows some areas of potential future financial concerns."
TMI Google?
Neowin: "But if they were to hit Google, they would be getting much more that just names and credit card numbers and an address - they would essentially be getting everything that makes us... us. Search history, emails, friends lists, past conversations, pictures and even a voice sample"
Window Kit: Investigating Windows Systems With Linux
Linux Magazine: "Criminals, intruders, and corporate saboteurs leave data behind on the hard disks of any computers they visit. Many of these computers are Windows systems, but you don’t need Windows to extract valuable forensic information from a Windows hard disk. In this article, I will describe some simple techniques for getting forensic data from a Windows disk using Linux."
Name: SyroBro