LXer Weekly Roundup for 07-Feb-2010

LXer Article

5 Linux Speed Tips: There are many ways to do the same tasks in Linux, which is a lovely thing because it means we can tailor our workflows to suit our own personal needs. Here are five of Carla Schroder’s favorite speed and efficiency tips.

The Great Oracle Experiment: For the first time, we get to see what happens when a company that has built up an immense global business empire on the basis of its proprietary software takes over some of the most important open source projects around. Does it destroy them through mutual incomprehension? Or is it *changed* by them, moving towards their approaches? That’s what we’re going to find out over the next few years in the Great Oracle Experiment.

Asus 9 inch Netbook: A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of our Clients, he owns a company that does hooks up for prospective Employers with prospective Employees in the Fitness Industry, and in the process makes a few bob. He was complaining about his Asus netbook, which had Windows XP loaded on it, and how it has been getting progressively slower over time and knowing I use Linux, in fact I had recommended last year that he get someone, or do it himself and install Ubuntu UNR. He asked if I would install Linux on his machine.

Android code removed from Linux kernel
: Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Novell developer who maintains the staging, USB and driver core for Linux, has announced that the driver code for Google’s Android operating system has been removed from the 2.6.33 Linux code base. Kroah-Hartman says that “I love the Android phone platform” but that the code for supporting Android has not been cared for, and as is his policy, uncared-for code is removed from the source code control system. The change was committed to the Linux source tree on December 11th, last year.

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast: One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
: An insiders view of the slow motion disaster that is Microsoft. Heart-warming stuff and proof that all bureaucracies private or public fail eventually without some kind of proper connection of their outcomes with the customers real needs.

Linus Torvalds named one of the 100 most influential inventors: The book “The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time”, part of a series from the Encyclopaedia Britannica titled “The Britannica Guide to the World’s Most Influential People”, lists the top one hundred most important and influential inventors since Cro-Magnon man. Linus Torvalds, creator and chief architect of the Linux kernel, is listed among the IT innovators for his contribution to open source software.

Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy: The venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is undergoing a significant transformation. The next major release, version 2.8, will introduce an improved user interface with an optional single-window mode. Although this update is still under heavy development, users can get an early look by compiling the latest source code of the development version from the GIMP’s version control repository.

Is Google forking the Linux kernel?: Disclaimer: This post reflects my personal opinion and is in no way related to the company I work for. LWN tells us what is happening with the android kernel patches in upstream. The short version: They are gone

LXer@FOSDEM 2010: Anyone else going?
: Tonight FOSDEM 2010 starts with the beer event, and tomorrow the main conference starts. It’s held again at the University ‘ULB’ in Brussels south-east (near the embassies) in Belgium.
Just like last year, LXer will be there. I will try to go both days to cover some talks for you. The schedule promises some interesting talks like that of Greg Koah Hartman, another talk about the RepRap ‘cheap’ 3D printer that prints its own parts. There’s also a Mozilla-room, a distro-room, an embedded room. a KDE and a Gnome room, the Drupal room, the 20-minute Lightning talks which could be about anything and many more.

A fresher Linux desktop: Gnome 3.0 promises to give Linux the desktop polish it needs. It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.

LXer Weekly Roundup for 31-Jan-2010

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Why Microsoft Suddenly Wanted to Be More Interoperable – Comes v. MS Exh. 7068 Tells Us: Guess why Microsoft suddenly decided it wanted to be more interoperable? It’s so it can get customers to quit using Linux and switch to Windows & .NET. Remember when Microsoft told us it was interested in greater interoperability with Linux because their customers were demanding it? That part is true, as I’ll show you. But the purpose of developing greater interoperability at the request of Intel, according to this exhibit, was so that Microsoft could get Intel to switch its development environment from Linux to Windows. Intel’s Paul Otellini had reportedly asked his people to figure out how to do that.

10 scripts to create your own Linux distribution: Those familiar with Linux will be able to tweak settings, add and remove apps and customise the menu, toolbars and other desktop elements. Incredibly, those are about all the skills you need to create your very own Linux distro. We’re going to take a look at some scripts that’ll help you customise different distros.

Schedule of talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized: The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging – check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.

SourceForge no longer serving open source to US sanctioned countries: SourceForge has confirmed that it is now blocking access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria to its open source project hosting site. The access blocks come as a result of the company moving to comply with US export restrictions, which make it illegal to transfer or export certain technologies to countries on the US government’s sanction list. Failure to comply with the sanctions list can incur penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment.

10 old-school Linux tools I refuse to let go of:
There are many days when I show my age with Linux. In some instances, I just refuse to embrace some of the more modern applications. In many ways, I fully accept the modern computing desktop. (I use a full-blown Compiz desktop with all the bells and whistles now.) But there are still some holdovers that will have to be pried from my cold, dead hands. I thought it would be fun to list 10 of these old-school Linux tools and then see what other people refuse to let go of (regardless of platform). Not only will it be a trip down memory lane for some users, it might show others a tool they hadn’t thought of that could solve a perplexing problem.

Linux Motherboard Follies: It all started with upgrading a CPU. It should have been a simple, inexpensive task, but it has taken on a life of its own, resulting in battles with warranty service and shopping for yet more new parts. Will the madness ever end?

7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators: One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

What Would Life Be Like Without Windows?
: It’s the thought experiment we all like to engage in. What would life be like without Microsoft Windows? To listen to the free open source software crowd, the demise of Windows — and by extension, Microsoft’s hegemony over the PC universe — would signal a kind of rebirth for information technology. Software would finally be free of the corporate shackles that have stifled innovation and dragged down the best and brightest among us. Such thinking is naïve, at best. Rather than freeing IT, the demise of Microsoft would plunge the industry into an apocalyptic tailspin of biblical proportions — no visions of hippie utopia here. The withdrawal of the Redmond giant’s steady hand would cause today’s computing landscape to tear itself apart at the seams, with application and device compatibility and interoperability devolving into the kind of Wild West chaos unseen since the days of the DOS big three: Lotus, WordPerfect, and Ashton-Tate. [The author's take is nothing short of hilarious. - Scott]

LXer Weekly Roundup for 24-Jan-2010

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5 Great OEM Linux Servers: Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.

Healthcheck: Mono: Moonlight was written in three weeks in June of 2007 by a group of Mono developers working round the clock to fulfil a promise made by Miguel de Icaza. Despite such heroics Moonlight continues to face resistance from the wider developer community…

IE is so secure we just had to build an OS out of it. : Microsofts new Gazelle concept is the greatest thing to hit Linux or the computer industry as a whole ever. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. I never thought I would live to see the day that Microsoft announces its own suicide.

6 of the Best Free Linux Office Suites: An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.

A no-cost Windows killer: On Sale Now, only $26!: You just can’t make this stuff up. This alleged news article at Technology Marketing Corporation (there is a clue in the site name) makes grandiose, breathless claims about Ubuntu..

Thoughts on Youtube ‘abandoning’ Firefox and Opera: A new test version of Youtube offers HTML 5 video support, meaning watching videos without Adobe Flash, but only when browsing with Chrome or Safari. While this might seem strange at first, and might sound like Google is abandoning its Firefox users, things are a little bit more complicated.

Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream: Obviously, I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to think of a suitable intro to this column. But I couldn’t find anything appropriate to express my disgust and disappointment at Ubuntu’s missed opportunity. So I’ll state it plainly – Ubuntu, you got us this far and then, just when it mattered, you blew it for all of us. Unlike many, I’m not ranting about Karmic Koala’s technical glitches. In fact, it’s still one of the best options for the desktop, and it’s technically superior to the new Windows OS that its release coincided with. But this is where it hurts. For the first time ever, the mainstream tech press mentioned an upcoming Linux release in a Windows preview article. And what did Ubuntu do to capitalise on this new-found exposure? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Why GNU/Linux is ready for the Average User: Linux is more than ready for the average user to be using, but just like any operating system it may be a bit much for the average user to get it setup and thats just fine if you ask me.

Five *nix Myths Busted: You probably believe at least one of these awesome *nix myths. I love mythology and there’s nothing like hearing a technology myth to make my day complete. Just today someone applied one of the following myths in a conversation with me. I didn’t say anything but it gave me the idea for this post. Here are the five myths related to *nix systems that I hear most often when dealing with technical and non-technical people alike. You’d be surprised as to how often even the most technical people spout these myths to each other and to the unsuspecting and unknowledgeable bystander. I have to bite my tongue when I hear them. And now that you know them, I hope it ruins your day too when someone slips into mythland with one of these gems.

LXer Weekly Roundup for 17-Jan-2010

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Linux Will Save The World: Remember Apple’s famous 1984 commercial? That is one of the most brilliant TV commercials of all time, which isn’t surprising- Ridley Scott directed it, and legendary advertising agency Chiat/Day produced it. It is a superb piece of filmmaking that still gives me chills, even in the lo-fi YouTube version. And then the spell wears off, and I realize Orwell was a prophet, the commercial bears no relationship to the product, and the athlete wearing the Apple shirt should have a penguin logo on it instead of the Macintosh logo.

Mozilla Starts to Follow a New Drumbeat: As Firefox gets closer and closer to that 50% market share around the world (it’s already there in some countries), the question is: what next? The answer is Mozilla Drumbeat, an ambitious project to “make sure the internet is still open, participatory 100 years from now.”

Microsoft needs swift kick in the boot-up: That long wait while Windows cranks up can be avoided, says Rich Jaroslovsky It took about 20 years before television viewers no longer had to wait for their sets to warm up. Yet here we are, 30-plus years into the personal computer era, and the instant-on PC remains elusive. That may be about to change.

An Android Developer’s Top 10 Gripes: Put on your favorite self-pitying emo music and get ready for some developer frustration. I’m running down the top 10 things I love to hate about Android.

Watching TV and Linux: This all started a couple of weeks ago when I finally got around to putting the tv capture card I had picked up a year or two ago into my computer. Happily like most things in Linux, it just worked, that was a great plus. Sadly the software packages in existence that I ran across were either too much or too little, nothing was just right.

The biggest threat to Microsoft isn’t Apple or Linux, it’s falling hardware prices: Two interesting tidbits of news about Microsoft today. First is that the company is to make it legal to rent both Windows and Office. The second is an analysis on how slates will affect the Redmond giant’s bottom line. Both are interesting reading, but both also are indications of the problems that Microsoft is likely to encounter over the coming years.

Canonical To Bring Closed Source Apps Like iTunes And Photoshop To Ubuntu?!?!: A recent official post on the Ubuntu Forums asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu..

7 Alternatives for Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office is one of the most popular application suits which no doubt facilitates the users to the full extent. But due to its high price or due to any compatibility issue with the operating system, it is always desirable to have some alternatives. Lets have a summarized look on the available alternatives.

The best Linux file system of all?: Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the better text editor, another surefire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are the best. Google, which knows a thing or two about fast systems has decided, for their purposes anyway, that Ext4 is the best and close to the fastest file system of all.

LXer Weekly Roundup for 10-Jan-2010

LXer Article

Six office alternatives: Microsoft will release Office 2010 in June but until then there are some great alternatives. In June Microsoft will release a final version of its Office 2010 productivity suite. Naturally many users will upgrade, at substantial cost, to the latest version of the popular Office suite, but for those not so eager to hand over their money to Microsoft there are still many great alternatives. And they are free.

SCO’s IP Rights After Distributing UnitedLinux Under the GPL: Since Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn’s lawyer, Bonnie Fatell, reportedly opined at the most recent bankruptcy hearing that SCO would never have given away its Unix intellectual property rights to UnitedLinux, I thought I would show you exactly what was in UnitedLinux — some, if not all, of the very code they now claim IBM had no right to put into Linux and others can’t use without infringing SCO’s rights. But they put it in their very own SCO Linux Powered by UnitedLinux distribution themselves, and under the GPL.

What will it take for Linux and Open Source to dethrone Microsoft?: We are currently in one of the best situations ever to think about moving to open source and Linux on the desktop. With Windows XP’s end of life, many companies are already considering upgrading to Windows Vista or 7. The user interface has changed, and many existing applications aren’t compatible. I am currently reviewing a list of hundreds of applications for compatibility with Windows 7 to decide what will have to be upgraded or replaced. What is missing or needs improvement on Linux from an I.T. perspective?

Welcome to Google’s Nexus One – and the “Nexus” Device: Most people have been asking whether the Google Nexus One is an iPhone-killer; but there’s a phrase in the official Google blog that suggests it’s something much bigger: the fusion of computer and mobile, with the Internet as the digital glue – a true “nexus” device. If Google can encourage other manufacturers to come out with more, lower-cost models, this could be the device that the billions of people currently with neither computer nor mobile phone could use to access the Internet. And all running on Linux.

I Just Want Something to Happen When I Click: In the olden days of personal computing, we were on a continual hardware upgrade path seeking better performance. Now our low-end PCs would have been supercomputers ten years ago, and they’re still bogging down. Is there no end in sight?

10 things to know about Linux and Open Source: Compilation: In case you missed some of the Linux and Open Source content in the 10 Things blog in 2009, I thought I would do a round-up of some of the best posts that appeared, many authored by our own Jack Wallen. If you’re new to Linux yourself (or want to introduce others to the world of open source), these concise lists provide a good jumping-off point on a number of topics.

Ubuntu Linux and Your iPhone / iPod Touch: Not content with the roadblocks Apple had erected for users who wanted to connect to their digital devices (that they had paid for, natch), Apple decided to up the ante with its iPod Touch and iPhone series. This meant that a whole new round of reverse engineering was necessary just so that, and this bears repeating a thousand times, users could connect to a device that they paid for and actually access content they legally possess. Does that make sense to you? Me neither. Welcome to the 21st century.

Preparing Yourself for the Linux Admin Market: Tips for Linux administrators entering and moving through today’s Linux admin market as traditional qualifications become less relevant and the need for real skills increases.

Can You Top This? 15 Practical Linux Top Command Examples: This article is part of the on-going 15 example series where 15 examples will be provided for a specific command or functionality. In this series, earlier we discussed about find command, crontab examples, grep command, history command, ping command, and wget examples. In this article, let us review 15 examples for Linux top command that will be helpful for both newbies and experts.