Linux Today Sticky Page On this page we'll maintain links to important articles and documents that pertain to Free Software, Linux, and the tech industry. Please submit your suggestions to editors@linuxtoday.com. Thank you! (Jun 15, 2009)
Small Features
Is Bill Gates’ New Website Really Running On Linux? TechCrunch: "Sometimes tips come in that seem too good to be true. Take today, for example. I got a tip that Bill Gates’ new site, The Gates Notes, was running on a Linux-powered server." Feb 1, 2010
KDE.org Relaunched for Software Compilation 4.4 (Feb 9, 2010, 17:03 UTC) (670 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) KDE.news: "The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers."
The application is the new the operating system (Feb 9, 2010, 16:33 UTC) (959 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Open Road: "If you're a Google Nexus One user, you experienced a bit of magic last week.
In one click of an over-the-air update, your Nexus One became an iPhone--offering the ability to pinch and expand the screen to zoom in or out."
Linux can compete with the iPad on price, but where’s the magic?
(Feb 9, 2010, 16:03 UTC) (919 reads)
(7 talkbacks)
(feedback) Jim Zemlin's blog: "His main message about the iPad was “a magical device at a breakthrough price.” He repeated this many times throughout the pitch and twice at the end. This phrase demands an honest response: how will Linux-based devices compete with the iPad?"
HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight (Feb 9, 2010, 06:03 UTC) (1488 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Alp Toker: "I’m glad to announce the first release of our fully managed Theora audio / video decoder implementation for the Silverlight platform! The Highgate media suite will bring installation-free support for HTML5 streaming video to an additional ~40% of web users overnight."
SourceForge turns off "blanket blocking" (Feb 9, 2010, 04:33 UTC) (1099 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) The H Open: "SourceForge, the open source project hosting site, has announced that it has turned off the "blanket block" on access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria."
The kernel column by Jon Masters #83 (Feb 9, 2010, 00:03 UTC) (1559 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux User and Developer: "As I’ve mentioned before, one of the longer-term goals of the kernel development community is to kill off the Big Kernel Lock (BKL)."
GNOME Boston Summit 2009 (Feb 8, 2010, 21:33 UTC) (1138 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The GNOME Journal: "GNOME Shell--
Jon McCann from Red Hat ran the first Shell session, on design. An amazing amount of progress had been made since the hackfast one year prior that spawned the Shell project, but some major tasks remained."
Sketchpad (beta) (HTML5 drawing program) (Feb 8, 2010, 21:03 UTC) (2032 reads)
(6 talkbacks)
(feedback) Colorjack: "Sketchpad uses the little-known [canvas] tag to provide users and publishers with full control over the presentational qualities of their work. Directly accessing vector graphics, the [canvas] tag gives publishers real-access to their users’ display. The [canvas] tag will be available in HTML 5.0."
Cleaning Up The Linux Graphics Driver Stack (Feb 8, 2010, 20:33 UTC) (1314 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Phoronix: "Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop's graphics driver stack."
How To Reverse Engineer A Motherboard BIOS (Feb 8, 2010, 18:03 UTC) (1639 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Phoronix: "Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code..."
Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 3) - Graphics (Feb 7, 2010, 04:02 UTC) (3737 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The H Open: "The next version of Linux is not only the first to offer the Nouveau KMS graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, it also comes with a multitude of improvements for the two AMD/ATI and Intel graphics drivers which support Kernel-based Mode Setting (KMS)."
IBM hits graphene transistor breakthrough (Feb 6, 2010, 20:02 UTC) (3005 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) CNet: "IBM Research on Friday announced that it has demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest frequency so far: 100GHz."
BIOS flashing for Linux users now in the wild (Feb 6, 2010, 08:02 UTC) (4396 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) APC mag: "Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom."
If Obama guts NASA, the Open Luna Foundation looks bright (Feb 5, 2010, 23:32 UTC) (2261 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Network World: "With the Obama Administration gutting NASA’s return to the Moon program, we need to look to private industry to lead the way in returning humans to space. Open source could be the ticket to get us there better, faster and cheaper"
Raising Money for Open Source Projects: How Can We Improve? (Feb 5, 2010, 22:02 UTC) (1167 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) OStatic: "One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project"
Packaging Open Source, by Mark Webbink (Feb 5, 2010, 21:02 UTC) (1272 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Groklaw: "There is an article by Mark Webbink, Esq., "Packaging Open Source", in the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, Vol 1, No 2 (2009) that I think you'll find interesting. It compares various FOSS licenses and how they handle compilations and collective works."
Today, Delayed GPU Switching Comes To Linux (Feb 5, 2010, 16:32 UTC) (1900 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Phoronix: "Two days ago we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed switching between graphics processors on notebook computers that utilize dual graphics processors, one that's meant to deliver the best energy efficient performance while the other GPU is for maximizing the graphics performance in demanding environments"
Intel Previews Deep Dives on CPU Technologies (Feb 5, 2010, 15:02 UTC) (1667 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Hardware Central: "The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is not a show for the casual technology enthusiast or mere mortals with less than a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. They don't simplify the topics for easy, mass consumption. It's a forum for serious engineering discussions and it's up to you to keep up."
Mozilla Sponsors GNOME Accessibility Efforts (Feb 5, 2010, 03:02 UTC) (1308 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) GNOME.org: "The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce a substantial donation from the Mozilla Corporation to benefit the GNOME Project's accessibility efforts. The donation will help continue the collaborative efforts between GNOME and Mozilla on Accessibility. "
Code it the Google Way (Feb 4, 2010, 22:33 UTC) (2984 reads)
(7 talkbacks)
(feedback) Hacking Truths: "Google never seems to just be satisfied with the status quo, and when they run out of fields to compete in they create their own! Google’s new “Go” programming language is one of their newest ventures, a language which is an amalgamation of Python and C++."
HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided? (Feb 4, 2010, 21:33 UTC) (2310 reads)
(7 talkbacks)
(feedback) Deep Tech: "A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?"
Nokia Goes Even More Open Source, Opens Symbian (Feb 4, 2010, 20:33 UTC) (1962 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Planet: "Nokia, the new steward of Qt, and Linux kernel contributor, says it has has completed the largest transition from proprietary code to open source in software history."
GNOBSD - killed by GUI-is-for-wimps hacker culture (Feb 4, 2010, 19:33 UTC) (2420 reads)
(11 talkbacks)
(feedback) Distrowatch: "Stefan Rinkes, a big fan of OpenBSD, had decided to make an effort and create something that is now common in the Linux world, but which had not been done in OpenBSD - an OpenBSD-based live DVD with automatic hardware detection which would boot into a popular graphical desktop and which would also have a point-and-click graphical system installer. The result was a "distribution" called GNOBSD."
Symbian OS goes open source (Feb 4, 2010, 18:03 UTC) (1601 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Smartphone Daily: "Symbian has annouced that it has completed the migration of its entire platform to open source. The move, which was completed four months ahead of schedule, now makes billions of dollars of code available to developers for free"
Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy (Feb 4, 2010, 15:33 UTC) (2607 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) ars Technica: "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."
Kuhn: I Think I Just Got Patented (Feb 4, 2010, 12:33 UTC) (2403 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) LWN.net: "Indeed, the process described is so simple-minded, that it's a waste of time in my view to spend time writing a software system to do it."
Ten more essential Python tips (Feb 4, 2010, 04:33 UTC) (2242 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux User and Developer: "Following on from the popularity of our Ten essential Python tips for beginners article, we’ve compiled a further collection of ten gems to make your Python experience that much more worthwhile..."
Configure or Remove ETags in Apache/HTTP (Feb 3, 2010, 23:02 UTC) (1023 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) GeekRide: "ETag is a validator which can be used instead of, or in addition to, the Last-Modified header. By sending a ETag, the server promises that the content is not changed until the ETag changes for a specific resource."
Codesion Emerges from CVS (Feb 3, 2010, 22:02 UTC) (1464 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Developer.com: "There was a time when CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) dominated the open source, software-version-control landscape, but no more."
What's Java's Future? (Feb 3, 2010, 21:32 UTC) (2901 reads)
(7 talkbacks)
(feedback) Datamation: "With all of the screaming about the fate of MySQL under Oracle's thumb, there's been far less discussion about a much more important software project now under their control: Java."
An introduction to XML (Feb 3, 2010, 20:02 UTC) (1677 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "An Introduction to XML provides students and entry-level professionals with demonstrations of the basics of learning XML, covering topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, RSS, Web Services and managing XML data. These short Web-based video modules provide clear examples of XML as well as references to popular Web sites that use XML."
Is Android Forking from Linux? (Feb 3, 2010, 18:02 UTC) (3011 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Open For Discussion: "Which brings up this unpleasant question: did Android just become a fork from Linux? And, if it did, what might that mean?"
Android and the Linux kernel community (Android code removed from kernel)
(Feb 3, 2010, 16:02 UTC) (3421 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Kernel Monkey Log: "As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter..."
