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Linux Today

  • Linux coolness: Linux Cooler, Linux serves you beer
    Handle With Linux: "Linux is cool, Linux users know that much. There are a lot of cool things Linux, and to kick off, here is one of them: A linux beer machine."
  • OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change
    IT World: "The OSI has been one of those organizations that seemed to fall short of its true potential, which is always a source of frustration; you want them to succeed, and don't understand when things go awry."
  • Top 10 IT Billionaires -- A Closer Look
    DevX: "Forbes released its annual list of the world's billionaires Thursday, and technology companies are well represented, even though Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is no longer the world's richest person."
  • Proof Of Concept: Open-Source Multi-GPU Rendering!
    Phoronix: "David's goals with Prime are to allow a second GPU to render 3D applications onto the screen of the first GPU, with it being configurable by the client, and just to handle the rendering side."
  • How to compile the Linux kernel
    TuxRadar: "Do you want to remove bloat from your Linux installation? Are you looking to enable extra features that aren't provided by your distro? Fancy trying some of the cutting-edge patches doing the rounds? You'll need to recompile your kernel, and while it might look like black magic if you've never done it before, it's actually pretty straightforward."
  • Novell's Motion to Allow Evidence: SCO Opened the Door
    Groklaw: "SCO's attorney Stuart Singer may have gotten carried away with his theatrical indignation. And when a party slips like this, what lawyers call opening the door, it can indeed have consequences. Novell was just waiting for a moment like this."
  • Blake Stowell Email to Maureen O'Gara: "I Need You to Send a Jab PJ's Way"
    Groklaw: "So. Now I know. Now we all know. Blake Stowell, then the PR guy for SCO, sent an email to Maureen O'Gara, saying "I need you to send a jab PJ's way," and then right afterwards she wrote that invasive so-called expose, in which she revealed, or at least intended to reveal, things like who I called on my phone."
  • 'Rising Tide' for x86 Servers Lifting Intel, AMD
    Serverwatch: "Stating it believes server sales are being underestimated by Wall Street, Broadpoint AmTech's latest report predicts both Intel and AMD will post better-than-expected earnings in the first quarter."
  • Digg Moves From MySQL to NoSQL
    Datamation: "Social networking and voting site Digg is rewriting its underlying software infrastructure in an effort to improve performance and scalability. Part of that effort involves moving away from the MySQL database that has helped to power Digg since its creation."

LWN.net

  • LinuxCon Japan Call for Participation
    LinuxCon Japan, formerly known as the Japan Linux Symposium, has announced its call for participation (CFP). This Linux Foundation sponsored conference will be held in Tokyo September 27-29. The CFP lists a number of topic areas that are of particular interest including desktop Linux, embedded and mobile Linux, Linux adoption, and so on; it closes on May 14. "LinuxCon Japan is the premiere Linux conference in Asia that brings together a unique blend of core developers, administrators, users, community managers and industry experts. It is designed not only to encourage collaboration but also to support future interaction between Japan and other Asia Pacific countries and the rest of the global Linux community. The conference includes presentations, tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, keynotes, sponsored mini-summits."
  • Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit keynotes announced
    The Linux Foundation has announced the program for the Collaboration Summit to be held April 14-16 in San Francisco. This is an invitation-only event, though invitations can still be requested. Highlights include a full-day session on Meego, the Linux kernel roundtable, keynotes by Josh Berkus, Dr. Daniel Frye, Jim Zemlin, and others, a cloud computing roundtable, and more. "The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only event where a true cross-section of leaders from the Linux developer, industry and end user communities meet face-to-face to tackle today’s most pressing issues facing Linux, including technical development, legal topics, ISV porting and end user requirements."
  • PyPy 1.2 released
    Version 1.2 of PyPy - an alternative implementation of the Python interpreter - has been released. "This version 1.2 is a major milestone and it is the first release to ship a Just-in-Time compiler that is known to be faster than CPython (and unladen swallow) on some real-world applications (or the best benchmarks we could get for them). The main theme for the 1.2 release is speed." It's still not quite ready for production use, but it appears to be getting a lot closer.
  • Security updates for Friday

    Debian has updated Egroupware (multiple vulnerabilities) and MoinMoin (multiple vulnerabilities).

    Fedora has updated nss (F12: TLS man-in-the-middle plaintext injection) and cups (fix for earlier denial of service fix).

    Mandriva has updated ncpfs (multiple vulnerabilities).

    Ubuntu has updated MoinMoin (multiple vulnerabilities).

  • Building an open source business (opensource.com)
    Over at opensource.com, OpenNMS's Tarus Balog looks at the process of starting an open source business. This article covers much of the same material as his recent SCALE 8x keynote. "You might think that I was motivated by some sort of idealistic love of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the time, I was still running a Windows desktop. I undertook the OpenNMS project because I believed one thing: in the area of network management, open source represents the best business solution."
  • Fedora's "stable release updates vision"
    The Fedora board has, in response to ongoing discussions about updates to its releases (as covered in the March 11 Weekly Edition), adopted a "vision statement" on how Fedora releases should be maintained. "Stable releases should provide a consistent user experience throughout the lifecycle, and only fix bugs and security issues. Stable releases should not be used for tracking upstream version closely when this is likely to change the user experience beyond fixing bugs and security issues."
  • Google's RE2 regular expression library
    Google has announced the release of its RE2 library under a BSDish license. "At Google, we use regular expressions as part of the interface to many external and internal systems, including Code Search, Sawzall, and Bigtable. Those systems process large amounts of data; exponential run time would be a serious problem. On a more practical note, these are multithreaded C++ programs with fixed-size stacks: the unbounded stack usage in typical regular expression implementations leads to stack overflows and server crashes. To solve both problems, we've built a new regular expression engine, called RE2, which is based on automata theory and guarantees that searches complete in linear time with respect to the size of the input and in a fixed amount of stack space." More information can be found on the RE2 project page.
  • Simon Phipps elected as OSI director (The H)
    The H reports that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps, formerly Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, to the board of directors. "As a director, Phipps hopes to help the organisation change so that it becomes more member-oriented, more active in promoting open source in education, in policy development and possibly in organisational support for open source projects; "My goal as a Director will be to facilitate that change, a change that is already well under way following recent face to face discussions and the great work that Andrew Oliver and Danese Cooper have already put in"."
  • Embedded Linux Conference 2010 Program is available
    This year's Embedded Linux Conference, which will be held in San Francisco April 12-14, has announced that its program is now available. The keynote speakers will be Greg Kroah-Hartman ("Android: a Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project") and Matt Asay ("Embedded in 2010: an End to the Entropy?") along with a whole slate of over 50 presentations, tutorials, and BoFs. "This is your chance to meet leading developers from the embedded Linux community, and learn about the latest changes in Linux. Also, you can talk to engineers working on real products at some of the largest CE companies in the world, describing how they solved real issues in their own development projects." Click below for the full announcement.
  • Linux Arpeggiators, Part 1 (Linux Journal)
    Dave Phillips looks at arpeggiators for Linux. "An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator."