Linux News for Aug 31, 2009

• Checking In On Ubuntu Karmic's Boot Time (Aug 31, 2009, 23:33)
  Phoronix: "By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth."


• Learn Linux, 101: Text streams and filters (Aug 31, 2009, 23:03)
  IBM Developerworks: "This article gives you an introduction to filters, which allow you to build complex pipelines to manipulate text using the filters. You will learn how to display text, sort it, count words and lines, and translate characters, among other tasks. You will also learn how to use the stream editor sed."


• The Global Conference on Open Source will be held in Jakarta on October (Aug 31, 2009, 22:33)
  GCOS: "Since the signing of Indonesia, Go Open Source! Declaration on June 30 2004, Indonesia aspires to be a leading force in the movement to promote open source. Global Conference on Open Source (GCOS) aims to bring the global open source community together in order to address the growing demand for open source technology in every social spectrum."


• Slackware goes 64-bit (Aug 31, 2009, 22:03)
  Desktop Linux: "The Slackware team released version 13 of its venerable Linux distribution, now supporting 64-bit computers. Slackware 13 provides "completely reworked" X packages, upgrades to KDE 4.2.4 and Xfce 4.6.1 desktops, a new .txz package format, and support for Ext4 and the GRUB bootloader, says the project."


• Open vs. Closed: the iPhone's Future or Folly? (Aug 31, 2009, 21:33)
  Standards Blog: "The two articles thus nicely make the point that openness is a matter of degree, and also illustrate the fact that the slope is slippery indeed between totalitarian requirements and proprietary decisions over what can, and cannot be done with as important an information, communication, and creation device as a modern smartphone."


• VMWare or Xen? Depends on Your Fluency in Linux (Aug 31, 2009, 21:03)
  EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: "You hear it all the time: Xen is not ready to take market share from VMware because it is not as mature a product. Many disagree, because all the core functionality exists in Xen, but it isn't configurable via a unified GUI."


• Apple's Snow Leopard Completely Blows It Virtually (Aug 31, 2009, 20:33)
  Tech Broiler: "Built-in Hypervisor-based virtualization and paravirtualizized kernels are now de rigueur with every major x86-based enterprise OS on the planet, including on Linux, on all major UNIX OSes, and even on Windows Server. But on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, it’s nowhere to be found."


• Five messages to never trust in your e-mail box (Aug 31, 2009, 20:03)
  Sure, it's Secure!: "I love Dr. Gregory House. As a journalist, I can really appreciate his view that "Everybody lies." That may be too cynical for most people, but when it comes to dealing with your e-mail I'm not sure it's possible to be cynical enough."


• Can Ubuntu 9.10 Outperform Mac OS X 10.6? (Aug 31, 2009, 19:33)
  Phoronix: "Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have some performance improvements as our earlier tests have shown, but Canonical engineers have not been exclusively focusing on performance optimizations with this release. Can the Karmic Koala outperform Snow Leopard? Yes and no."


• apache.org downtime - initial report (Aug 31, 2009, 19:03)
  Apache Software Foundation: "On August 27th, starting at about 18:00 UTC an account used for automated backups for the ApacheCon website hosted on a 3rd party hosting provider was used to upload files to minotaur.apache.org. The account was accessed using SSH key authentication from this host."


• How To Enable Adobe's Flash Player In Google Chrome (Ubuntu 9.04) (Aug 31, 2009, 18:33)
  Howtoforge: "This tutorial explains how you can install the Google Chrome browser on Ubuntu 9.04 and how to enable the Adobe Flash plugin in it. Please note that Google Chrome for Ubuntu is still in alpha state and should not be used on production systems."


• Bye Bye Linux (Aug 31, 2009, 18:03)
  TheSixthAxis: "Ripping of Blu-ray movies was also a common practice of some PS3 linux users..."


• OLPC will make children Microserfs: FSF (Aug 31, 2009, 17:33)
  IT Wire: "The Free Software Foundation has described the One Laptop per Child Project as one that will only help to "turn millions of children into Microsoft dependents.""


• OpenGEU 8.10 Review (Aug 31, 2009, 17:03)
  Que Pasa?: "Since my switch from Windows to Linux I have settled on 1 distribution, OpenGEU 8.10."


• Skeptical Shopper: The Pros and Cons of Buying E-Books (Aug 31, 2009, 16:33)
  PC World: "When Amazon recently removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' de­­vices and digital lockers, I suddenly re­­membered why I prefer physical media over virtual versions:"


• 25 Linux tips for Windows switchers (Aug 31, 2009, 16:03)
  TechRadar: "The experience of switching to Linux needn't be a traumatic one."


• 6 of the Best Free Linux Family History Software (Aug 31, 2009, 15:33)
  LinuxLinks: "This article highlights the best genealogy software that runs under Linux. Although there is not a wide selection of Linux native clients, we have also identified the best web based and Java software, so there is still a good range to choose from."


• Scaling the fence (Aug 31, 2009, 15:03)
  daverea.com: "In this case, our brief discussion centered around office suites, and before I could even recommend it, our friend informed me that she’d tried openoffice.org, and didn’t like it."


• The easiest operating system to update is... (Aug 31, 2009, 14:43)
  Cyber Cynic: "Over the weekend, I decided to see which of the major operating systems would be the easiest to update. The answer may surprise you."


• Windows Users - The Charlie Brown's of Computiing (Aug 31, 2009, 14:02)
  Blog of Helios: "Are we beginning to see a pattern emerge here? Every time Microsoft promises you a" new and secure environment for your computer", it ends up being the same old stuff with a fresh coat of paint and security features that take a 15 year old hacker about 12 minutes to circumvent."


• Webget ISO grabber, Wget Webinterface (Aug 31, 2009, 13:32)
  Raymii.org: "When I am at school, and I read that Slackware 13 is out, I need to have it. And I want it at home. So, what I can do is SSH into my machine, wget it, and it is done when I'm at home. But, at school SSH is blocked..."


• Supporting And Advocating Insecure Practices (Aug 31, 2009, 13:02)
  Ian MacGregor: "Anyone who uses Ubuntu quickly learns that one of the things you don't do is enable the root account."


• How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running System (Debian Lenny) (Aug 31, 2009, 12:32)
  Howtoforge: "This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running Debian Lenny system. The GRUB bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one)."


• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (Aug 31, 2009, 12:02)
  Paul Graham: "One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more."


• Installing Perl modules without root access (Aug 31, 2009, 08:02)
  Perl.jonallen: "local::lib is a Perl module that sets everything up so you can install distributions from CPAN into your home directory. This means you won't need root access, and ensures that anything you install will not interfere with the either the system Perl or any other users."


• Popping GNU/Linux out of the Virtual Machine (Aug 31, 2009, 04:02)
  Technology FLOSS: "At work I'm tied to a windows machine, however I have been able to use GNU/Linux which is where I'm most productive. First, I tried working with Portable Ubuntu."


• 7 Reasons to Use Debian (Aug 31, 2009, 00:02)
  Tuxarena: "1. Stable
  Any application needs time to be used and tested enough time in order to make it stable. One of the greatest goals of Debian is stability."