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Source: finnix

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. A new maintenance release is now available: "Today marks the release of version 89.2 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms. Finnix 89.2 is a maintenance release. Base system has been dist-upgraded .

Source: Linux Today

Blog of Helios: "They think Ubuntu IS Linux many of them do anyway. When I tell them that there are other distros available, some give me that blank stare "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "What do Mozilla, Microsoft and monkeys have in common? A bit more than you might think "

Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: "A recent story entitled, 'Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die' didn't cover Linux or open-source companies. That got me to thinking "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "The founder of Wikipedia is aggressively building out his Wikia effort, a commercial collection of Web sites anyone can edit. One of its key parts? Search "

Source: Linux Today

Editor's Note: Let's face it, last week I was being a bit of a smart aleck.

Source: Linux Today

Spot: "I've been handling licensing matters for Fedora for at least a year now (maybe longer), and admittedly, the new GPL v3 makes things much more complicated (look at this chart if you don't believe me: Chart of Doom) "

Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "Tim notes that Microsoft will be submitting its shared-source licenses to the OSI for approval. He calls this 'huge, long-awaited, and earthshaking.' It's actually none of the above, but it is welcome "

Source: Linux Today

Wired: "It's common knowledge that getting kids excited about computers and technology is the best way to get them excited about learning "

Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "OpenAds is one of the most interesting open source projects/companies on the planet. Period "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxPlanet: "Thus, headlines like 'Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris' or 'Sun OpenSolaris to become more 'Linux-like' are published, with similarly themed articles. The problem is, some of this coverage is not quite on the mark "

Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: "NASA has selected an SGI Altix supercomputer to help it meet future high-performance computing requirements "

Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "The ones selected say a lot about those who frequent Sourceforge "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Many smaller companies don't bother with full ERP applications due to their complexity; it's a situation that xTuple President and CEO Ned Lilly is trying to fix "

Source: Linux Today

The Jem Report: "Yesterday the OpenBSD Foundation announced its inception as a legal entity in charge of donations of money and equipment for the OpenBSD operating system and its associated projects "

Source: Linux Today

PC World: "Mozilla Corp. has produced a patch for yet another critical flaw in Firefox, the latest embarrassment in a lengthening list this month for the open-source browser "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "'After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35,' 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml "

Source: Linux Today

Reuters/InformationWeek: "Dell Inc will soon offer more personal computers that use the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp's Windows, said the founder of a company that offers Linux support services "

Source: Linux Today

mitchell's blog: "We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny "

Source: Linux Today

SearchServerVirtualization: "Article after article and post after post have compared and contrasted Xen, VMWare, Veridian, and a host of other virtualization technologies, with opinions on performance, management tools, implementations, etc., etc. in abundant supply "

Source: Linux Today

Red Hat Magazine: 'The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn't that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were 'in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died '"

Source: Linux Today

Ars Technica:: "Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "This article shows how you can use an iPod on a Linux desktop with Amarok "

Source: Slashdot: Linux

LinuxFan writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating article about the first Linux kernel, version 0.01, complete with source code and photos of Linus Torvalds as a young man attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally planned to call the kernel "Freax," and in his first announcement noted, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He also stressed that the kernel was very much tied to the i386 processor, "simply, I'd say that porting is impossible." Humble beginnings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: eWEEK Linux

Sun's ODF plug-in can play an important role in broadening interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.

Source: ONLamp.com

The news over the past few years in open source establish it as the
natural way to release software. If there’s anything else you can do
to earn money–whether setting up a social environment like Second
Life, putting up ads like Google, or selling hardware like Intel–you
really need to search hard for a reason to keep software proprietary.
The benefits that free software reaps from contributions and community
are demonstrated beyond a doubt, and the mechanism for releasing
software as open source is now familiar.



Here’s my wrap-up of the

Open Source convention.
I published

an earlier blog on it as well.

Philip Rosedale on the economics of open sourcing

Second Life’s client, the world’s most popular 3D social experience,
is now open source and is receiving both bug fixes and exciting new
functionality from the community. Founder Philip Rosedale explained in
his
keynote
that the main thing holding up release of the server is troubling gaps
in security that Linden Lab wants to fix first.



Theorizing, Rosedale advised any company that hopes to benefit from
network effects (such as companies with social aspects) to open source
its software from the beginning. His reasoning starts with the common
observation that network effects lead to a power law distribution,
where the leader in each field gets the bulk of the traffic and
potential revenue. Therefore, contributing to the whole–putting your
innovations into the common pot as open source–increases your own
take even more than that of your competitors.

People matter: the new obsession
The Asperger’s phase of computing is over. Everyone at the Open Source
convention wants to learn how to work with people. The most salient
difference between conferences of earlier years and this one is the
proliferation of sessions about how to organize a team, how to handle
disagreement, how to motivate developers, and so on. Some of the
tutorials dissect these activities in a meticulous fashion (so maybe
Asperger’s is in effect after all) but for the most part, the insights
have been known in the business world for decades. However, the books
and presentations circulating in the computer field tune the doctrines
to the pressing needs of the second half of the first decade of the
century.

Intel contributes

There was a lot of participation by Intel on the convention stages,
and because it’s one of the major employers in the computer field here
in Portland, where the convention is held, no one was surprised that a
lot of Intel staff were in the halls as well.



I had a very pleasurable experience working with Intel engineer and
evangelist James Reinders on the book

Intel Threading Building Blocks: Outfitting C++ for Multi-core Processor Parallelism
.
It was really a team effort by a bunch of wonderful folks at Intel
(whom I finally met here in Portland this week), coordinated expertly
by James. The development process was insane, because Intel proposed
the book–along with an urgent requested to get it released at to the
Open Source convention–some three weeks before the production
deadline.



Should anyone think that the hallmark O’Reilly quality may have
suffered because of the rush, I encourage you to pick up the book and
judge it on its merits. It’s first chapter is a superb justification
of the subject matter, in the context of modern multicore computing
(and there’s no reason the library couldn’t run on AMD cores as
well). The last chapter is a history of research in high-level
concurrency. In short, Threading Building Blocks is a very elegant way
to hide the difficult and error-prone aspects of parallel programming.



I thought that Intel’s concern for keeping secret that they were
open-sourcing Intel Threading Building Blocks was a bit old-fashioned,
and that making a big splash about open-sourcing it at OSCon would be
anti-climactic. But in fact they generated a bunch of nice news
articles that way, and James greatly entertained us at his
keynote,
deliberately making himself the butt of laughter by pretending to make
a sales pitch for TBB.



I was nearly as much impressed by Intel’s release of its
Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit,
as described by

Rolla Selbak.
The pressing problem addressed by this kit is the difficulty of
vendors in making sure their BIOS works with Linux. They check it
against Windows, but the Microsoft testing tools are lax and don’t
enforce specifications. ACPI problems in the firmware can lead not
only to easily anticipated problems on Linux (such as with suspend and
resume) but a host of other surprises, such as in fan operation and
overheating. By inserting a CD with the developer kit, anyone can
check adherence to specifications with a two-minute automated test.
The output is easy to read, and developers can separate tests for open
and proprietary systems.

Where have the database programmers gone?

Attendance at sessions about databases were down this year. The
problem affected not only MySQL sessions (which could be explained by
the strength of the annual
MySQL Conference and Expo)
but PostgreSQL as well. On the other hand, I noticed good attendance
at sessions about data mining, such as Toby Segaran’s
Data-mining from Open APIs
and Lino Ramirez’s

Machine Learning Made Easy with Perl.
Perhaps the growth of public data sources has raised developers’ interest
in making creative combinations of other people’s data, as I reported
in my

earlier blog.
But sites are collecting more and more of their own data as well, and
a good understanding of database topics–such as storage engines and
schema management–could help them use it much more efficiently. One
interesting talk along those lines was
Mike Solomon’s

Super-sizing YouTube,
where he described the incremental ways that company reorganized its
storage and access methods as it grew into one of the Internet’s most
popular sites.

Odds and ends

OSCon was a very big show this year: over 2,500 attendees, and 15
parallel tracks. My own talk about my
research on free documentation
was up against some famous people doing interesting presentations at
the same time, which probably accounted the drop in attendance
relative to a talk I gave at a former OSCon. But the dozen people who
came gave me some excellent feedback, which I’ll describe in another
posting next week.



A star-studded

panel at Powell’s Technical Bookstore
celebrated the release last month of O’Reilly’s best-selling

Beautiful Code.
The panel consisted of Karl Fogel, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Simon Peyton
Jones, and Perl/Parrot developer chromatic, moderated by
Ward Cunningham. About 50 people attended, and the conversation raised
interesting controversies over such things as what makes one language
more or less appropriate and whether genetic programming can create
beautiful programs.

Source: Linux DevCenter

Mac rather than Linux, but never mind.
One of my users recently had his PowerBook fail, and needed to reinstall from an external source (as the DVD drive was broken). Apparently all the information he found online insisted that this could only be done via FireWire, either from an external DVD drive or by booting in Target mode (attached to another Mac). However, after some days of prodding at it, he eventually tried a USB external DVD drive, and that worked absolutely fine, albeit slowly.
While I’m on the subject, consider this a reminder to back your data up. I say this because my own laptop died last week (thankfully I did have a recent backup!). The Mac Target mode did come in handy here. My hard drive was showing errors when I booted verbosely (hold down Apple-V as you press the power button & hold it until the boot screen appears - may take some time). However, when I attached it to another Mac via FireWire, and booted it in Target mode (hold down Apple-T during boot), it (eventually…) showed up as a volume on the other Mac. This meant I was able to rescue the one really important file that hadn’t been backed up in its most recent version, as I’d been working on it that day. After which, sadly, it expired entirely. I do now have a lovely shiny new black MacBook (prioritising size over the increased power of the PowerBook - it’s a shame they no longer make 12″ PowerBooks) as a replacement.