Archive for February, 2007
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
Corel Announces WordPerfect Lightening… for Windows
I’d try this out if they had a Linux version. It’s being billed as Writely, OneNote and Adobe Reader all-in-one with both online and offline capability…. sounds a bit over-promising.
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1171405162003
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
VC Investment in Linux and Open Source up 61% in 2006
Thought this article at CBR was quite interesting:
According to figures collated by CBR, VCs invested $475.2m in Linux and open source-related vendors in 2006, up 61.6% from $294.0m in 2005
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
IBM Real Time Speech Translation
Unfortunalely I can’t link directly to this (Flash) but go here and then click on the Read Time Speech Translation box for a description of a very cool technology I hadn’t ever heard of. Apparently it’s in use already. You can probably imagine a hundred uses of this technology – content could become language independent in some ways (albeit Godzilla-like if the content is video).
Monday, February 26th, 2007
SystemTAP on Ubuntu HOWTO
This needs to be fixed, but for now if you’re looking for a way to use stap / SystemTAP on Ubuntu, this should help.
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Virtual PC 2007 Released: Supports… Windows
I find this quite humorous actually… Microsoft announces Virtual PC 2007 is released and free to download. The press played it as Microsoft vs VMWare. You might think: “Hey cool, I can now run Linux in a virtual partition on XP” but… you’ll be disappointed when you see the list of supported operating systems:
Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86); Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition; Windows Vista Business; Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Enterprise; Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Ultimate; Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition; Windows XP Professional Edition ; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ; Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
Well… they at least support 13 versions of Windows including 6, yes, 6 versions of Windows Vista. Gee, thanks. I think I’d stick with VMWare Server…. I’m seeing blogs where some flavors of Linux are running in Virtual PC regardless of MS’s support, but how can you release something and compare it to VMWare when it doesn’t come close in guest OS support?
Oh, if you’re just dying to know, yes, it does appear to at least support OS/2 as a guest OS…
Monday, February 26th, 2007
More KVM News
http://news.com.com/KVM+steals+virtualization+spotlight/2100-7344_3-6161804.html
Debates in the community have a tendency to work themselves out over time and I’m sure competition on the ‘open’ hypervisor will only make the solutions that result even more robust and open for experimentation and innovative use above the hyp.
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Boost PHP App performance with XCache
Thought this was interesting… includes instructions for setting up a benchmark to test performance as well. I’d be interested in seeing the various PHP optimization techniques comparison benchmarked.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-fastapps1/index.html?ca=dgr-lnxw02PHPFastApps1
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Dell Responds to IdeaStorm’s Linux Demand
Dell’s full response here. An excerpt re: Linux below. I think this comes up quite short of what the users wanted – but I think this hits a continuously obvious market segment in the corporate desktop space. Should be interesting to watch this unfold. For the consumer segment, it is interesting to see Dell dodge any Linux or at least blank hard drive options… at a minimum, Dell could preload Ubuntu at no cost… and let the user install whatever distro they want.
Pre-Installed Linux Options
It’s exciting to see the IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. Your feedback has been all about flexibility and we have seen a consistent request to provide platforms that allow people to install their operating system of choice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.
As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don’t want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates.
To read about the recent addition of Latitude notebooks to our n-series family, read Direct2Dell from one of Dell’s Linux solution architects, or visit www.dell.com/linux and www.dell.com/nseries.
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
Ohio school district dumps Windows ME for Linux
First, anyone who architected a school district for Windows ME should have been fired before the first ME PC was purchased, but given that history is past us, it’s outstanding to see this district making quite a turnaround with Linux as the default go-forward desktop OS. I can’t tell from this article what distro was chosen, but they do cite $0.50 per user – not bad compared to Vista.
Ohio is an interesting haven for penguinistas – and plans are already finalized for Ohio LinuxFest 2007. It’s been a couple years since I last attended Ohio LinuxFest – and it’s grown quite a bit in that time. I’ll have to consider attending this years’.
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
13 things to do post-Ubuntu-install
Interesting list of 13 common things to do. Not sure I consider them all essential but it’s lists like these that make me wonder why they are not put into some sort of script/layer above the OS.
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
Using Atheros madwifi driver on ThinkPad T42 with Ubuntu Edgy Eft and Xen kernel
I followed this guide to get Xen up and running on my ThinkPad T42 running Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I ran into a roadblock using my laptop’s Atheros WiFi card with the Xen kernel. On a server, sure, you’re unlikely to need wireless, but on my laptop, it’s essential these days.
So I searched around Google and the closest solution I could find was here. The following are the steps I took to get the T42 wifi card working with the madwifi drivers on the xen kernel.
1) Follow this guide up until the domU section. Reboot into the Xen kernel and you will be up and running with a wired eth0 connection and ath0 will not work.
2) Get the necessary kernel headers
# sudo /bin/bash
# apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r'
# apt-get install xen-headers-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0 // version number to match your Xen kernel - I installed both xen-headers-# and also xen-headers-#-generic
3) Download the current madwifi drivers snapshot here (other releases are here)
4) Copy into usr/src, unpack, and build
# cd /usr/src
# cp home/[username]/Desktop/madwifi-ng-r2156-20070225.tar.gz . // insert your username and the madwifi version
# tar -zxvf madwifi-ng-r2156-20070225.tar.gz
# cd madwifi-ng-r2156-20070225
# nano ath/if_ath.c
5) In nano, search for “ieee80211_qosframe” using Cntrl+w and then comment out this section of code:
/* comment this section out
#ifdef USE_HEADERLEN_RESV
dev->hard_header_len += sizeof(struct ieee80211_qosframe) +
sizeof(struct llc) +
IEEE80211_ADDR_LEN +
IEEE80211_WEP_IVLEN +
IEEE80211_WEP_KIDLEN;
#ifdef ATH_SUPERG_FF
dev->hard_header_len += ATH_FF_MAX_HDR;
#endif
#endif
*/
6) Now, make your kernel modules
# make KERNELPATH=/usr/src/xen-headers-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0/
# make install KERNELPATH=/usr/src/xen-headers-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0/
7) Now edit /etc/modules and add the new driver
# nano /etc/modules
add in at the end
ath_pci
8) Reboot and you should now have wireless and Xen. Go back to the domU section here and continue along.
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
Forbes: Federal worker backlogs/delays cost private sector money…
Hmmm… what does an extra year of patent processing cost you?
The U.S. Patent Office received more than 440,000 applications in 2006, processed more than 332,000, and still started this year with a backlog of 700,000. The gargantuan workload is common. Hiring 1,200 new examiners annually for the next four years, however, is not.
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
Did you ever wonder ‘how did that get there’?
I can’t even explain this… and I’m listed as the ‘author’. but it’s just a link to my blog.. not sure how this became a LinuxToday.com story..
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2007-02-22-026-26-RV-DT-SS
What’s weirder is that under the title you can click on the link for more articles by this author (me – supposedly) and you get this list of articles I had nothing to do with… odd.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/search.php3?author=Michael:Dolan
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
Red Hat Challenge
http://www.redhatchallenge.com/
If you are a technology-savvy graduate student at a well-regarded institution in selected countries, you are invited to participate in the Red Hat Challenge.
This is your opportunity to help solve a real-world business challenge posed by the standard-bearer in the open source software industry. The top submission will receive $20,000 in cash and an opportunity to present in-person to Red Hat management during the Red Hat Summit. Participants may be considered for several full-time and internship positions with Red Hat in the US and abroad.
Learn more about the Red Hat Challenge.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Just who contributes to Linux? An in depth analysis of code commits
I had been considering creating something like this myself – I’d almost prefer to build scripts, have them run regularly, store in a database and have a website with the latest stats… but I haven’t found the time (yet).
Back to the analysis, I thought it was very interesting to see IBM’s contributions and leadership in the community. Others.. say… ahem… HP… (hint: look way down the list…) could probably give a little more. I also find it spectacularly exciting that the largest single group to contribute code to the Linux kernel is still random, individual developers. Apparently they reap enough return from participating in this community to make it worthwhile. I think back to my university days and all the academics studying, analyzing, writing, and fixing Linux code – contributing code back (if it made sense) – that’s what makes Linux so amazingly universal.
I’ve seen other analyses like this in the past and its nice to see Novell now up there at the top. Interesting for 2.6.20 was the rise of Quamranet (the guys behind KVM). Hopefully we’ll see them stay up near the top – KVM could be the “Xen” that actually makes Linux a ‘killer’ virtualization platform. One surprising name on this list was Sony – could they be assisting PS3/Linux?
One group of that’s missing are all the “behind the scenes” developers such as some of the developers in the IBM Linux Technology Center (LTC) that work on fixes and aggregate them together before a single point developer merges a consolidated contribution into the kernel. They are the “unknown soldiers” and I suspect other companies have many of them as well. Read the caveats in the analysis as they have an impact on what each list actually means. It’s easy to take something like this the wrong way.
The Linux developer community is what really keeps Linux steaming along – many vendors and many developers – it’s a train, and it’s very hard to stop a train this big. And this analysis is JUST THE KERNEL. Add in all the libraries, tooling, GUI work, packaging, and other supporting software around the kernel and the community explodes. This is why I laugh when I see “OpenSolaris this or that” from the Sun marketing machine – I took a look and 3 community developers accounted for over 50% of their “community contributions” accepted into the OpenSolaris codebase. That’s for an entire distribution – not just a kernel… I put the community contributions in quotes b/c most of the changes are corrections to comments or minor bug fixes – nothing architecturally significant or evolutionary. OpenSolaris forums are a good Solaris user forums – lots of discussions, users helping users, but very little code. Very similar to Gentoo forums but for Solaris users. Hence even 1.5 yrs later, some changes users have been demanding to make still plague the platform. These issues aren’t new, nor is it just a couple users pushing the idea, but you need developers with architecture (and code commit) control in the community to make anything happen – and generally those developers prefer vendor independence. Anyway, off my soapbox. Someone asked not long ago what my issues were… and that about covers it.
And here’s the full link to the LWN analysis report that I highly recommend reading (all the way through):
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/222773/1b982bab71b59bd9/
BTW, I wonder if we’ll see a microsoft.com domain on there soon with the interop labs with Novell… that would be a fun vendor to see on this list next time.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Alfresco goes GPL
I heard today that Alfresco ECM is being licensed under the GPL… with a FLOSS exception.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Google Apps: Time to through out the Fat Office?
I am very interested in how this goes… kudos for Google taking a great idea and making it real. I think they still have some steps to take, but from first impression, this is a great v1.0 launch.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
WordPress bump to 2.1.1
http://wordpress.org/development/2007/02/new-releases/
Time to patch.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Microsoft hit with $1.9B patent verdict
A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.
Aside from Ballmer’s new $1.9B pain, I am really interested in seeing if this brings the long awaited wake-up call to stop propogating everything in MP3 format. It’s essentially a “standard” now and having to pay two companies royalties for the right to include MP3 features could disrupt that. Just think of all the MP3-based products out there and you can imagine the magnitude of this verdict. Should be interesting to see if this is just a spat between the two and it ends here or if Alcatel-Lucent takes this to other MP3 technology vendors. If they do, I’ll bet the MP3 format is dead in 2-3 yrs.
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
More on Eye Candy: Awn on OpenSuse 10.2 (with Gnome/XGL)
I’ve had two pieces of eye candy on my mind lately – Beryl and Awn. Beryl has some cool features like making your close windows burn up in flames. Very cool looking. Well, I chose to try out Awn today. I installed it on my OpenSUSE 10.2 system which has admittedly ‘outdated’ hardware specs (1.6Ghz AMD Duron), but a decent graphics card (nVidia 5200) and is attached to a beautiful Samsung 941BW 19″ widescreen monitor. So if the eye candy works, it at least looks like a Vista Premium ;-).
Like I said, I’m using OpenSUSE 10.2 for this but for some reason could only find packages ready for FC6 or Ubuntu… odd. Anyway, there are two ways to install: 1) tarball and 2) svn. I used both b/c I followed version 1) and then decided I’d rather get the latest version from source to fix a couple bugs I found. I would recommend path 2) to anyone capable. Both paths are actually very simple if you already have XGL working.
BTW, during this entire process, I quickly realized why I’ve held onto Gentoo for so long… I’d rather watch OpenOffice compile from source than spend 1/4th of that time using YaST. I guess if you’re ‘new to Linux’, YaST is probably awesome, but despite being impressed by the performance speedups, over time, YaST has become bloated to the point where I can go get a snack while I start it up. Anyway, back to Awn.
Steps to setup on OpenSUSE 10.2:
1) Download tarball here
2) Unzip it: # gunzip -c avant-window-navigator-0.1.1-2.tar.gz | tar xvf -
3) cd into directory # cd avant-window-navigator-0.1.1/
4) C-M-MI as root: # ./configure then, # make, then # make install
* Note: I had an error at configure to install dependencies (gconf-devel and libwnck-devel) although the error doesn’t specify that you need the dev versions (I already had both non-dev binary packages installed)
5) cd into data dir: # cd data then type: # gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas and you should get output indicating success
6) Click on the Computer (start) button, choose “More Applications” and under newly installed, you should see “Avant Window Navigator” or type in # avant-window-navigator in a terminal as your desktop user. To set preferences, in a term type # avant-preferences as your user.
—— Subversion Method —–
Another option is to install from svn – this gets you the latest bits (which I recommend):
1) # mkdir [svndir]/awn
2) # svn checkout http://avant-window-navigator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk awn
3) # cd awn and then as root # ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr && make && make install
** Note: I had to install intltool, gnome-common, gnome-desktop-devel, gnome-vfs2-devel, and libgnome-devel with all their dependencies to proceed… miss portage…
4) exit root, cd into data dir: # cd data" then type: # gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas.in and you should get output indicating success
5) Click on the Computer (start) button, choose “More Applications” and under newly installed, you should see “Avant Window Navigator” or type in # avant-window-navigator in a terminal. To set preferences, in a term type # avant-preferences.
Tweaking Awn: You can tweak Awn settings using # gconf-editor then going into /apps/avant-window-navigator and in there you will see a number of options to tweak. One that you may want to start with is the launchers key under “window_manager” -> that is where you can setup all the default icons to appear in Awn at start.
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