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Announcements
- Free Software Foundation/Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software
- "The Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software to discuss how the free software community can cultivate and increase participation by women in free software's development and activism communities."
- The Linux Foundation/Jim Zemlin: The Perils of Linux Maturity: Torvalds Fakes Emerge in Twittersphere
- "For the next few weeks, four FakeLinusTorvalds (#flt1, #flt2, #flt3 and #lft4) will be tweeting from our Identi.ca (linuxfoundation) and Twitter feeds (www.twitter.com/linuxfoundation), posing as the real Linus. I expect some of them to be dangerously outrageous, while others will just be downright funny. And, the real Linus has given them his blessing. No infringements here, folks!"
- LinuxFoundation/LDN/Ben Martin: openSUSE Build System: Building Binary Packages for Many Linux Distributions at Once
- "The openSUSE Build System can be used to build binary packages for many versions of many Linux distributions without the need for you to have all these distributions installed."
Call for participation
- ABLEconf: Call for Presentations
- "The Arizona Business and Liberty Experience Conference (ABLEconf) is soliciting presentations for its second annual conference. ABLEconf will take place on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona."
Reports
- Phoronix/Michael Larabel: This Week: Linux Graphics Continue To Evolve
- "For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news. Also taking place this past week was the release of AMD Catalyst 9.8, which finally brought support for the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but continues to lack real public support for XvBA. X.Org 7.5 was also supposed to be released, but to no surprise that did not happen. ..."
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Coming in 2.6.31 – Part 4: Tracing, architecture, virtualisation
- "New performance counters allow developers to take a detailed look at the runtime behaviour of program code to target specific areas for optimisation. The recently introduced tracing infrastructure has been further modified and improved. Other changes affect the architecture, the memory subsystem, and various virtualisation solutions."
- DesktopLinux.com/Eric Brown: Google prepping 64-bit browser for Linux
- "Google's Chromium project announced it is working on its first 64-bit version of its Chrome web browser, which will will arrive first on Linux. Meanwhile, Linux is increasingly driving development of 64-bit software -- simply because Linux power users are demanding it, says an industry blog."
- Phoronix/Michael Larabel: NVIDIA Pushes Out New Linux Driver Updates
- "NVIDIA hasn't been updating their binary Linux drivers as frequently as they were earlier this year when it would be hard to go even just a week without seeing a new beta, an official update, or changes to either of their legacy drivers. However, there are some new NVIDIA Linux drivers to start off this week. For those sticking with the official NVIDIA driver releases there is now the 185.18.36 release while those willing to try out a beta driver there is the 190.25 build."
Reviews and Essays
- Dion Moult (Moult): My OpenDesktop Competition Submission: Wipup
- "Folks from PlanetKDE last heard me announcing my journey along the path to become a KDE developer. There are many ways to do this and unfortunately the path that involves learning a load of C++ and start developing applications is still making slow but steady progress and not (yet) eligible for public announcement. But – there are many ways to contribute!"
- Jacob Lludkrab: Fullscreen flash video in GNU/Linux
- "First, if you are unfamiliar with the problem, go to YouTube, pick any video, and double-click on the video, or click on the little fullscreen icon, and you’ll see that the video begins to get really slow, and choppy, from dropping frames."
- Linux.com/Todd R. Weiss: Analysis: How Moonlight 2.0 Fits into Novell's Linux and Open Source Plans
- "Now that Novell Inc.'s Mono open source project finally last week released the beta version of its Moonlight 2.0 code after several months of delays, what's its potential impact for Linux users and the open source community? It depends on whom you ask. ..."
- TheRegister/Tony Smith: Man mods 25-year-old phone into media centre PC
- "Most of us, if we had a 25-year-old mobile telephone - a Mobira Talkman, to be precise - hanging around, we'd flog it on eBay to some spotty kit collector. Not so one Finnish fellow - he turned it into a media PC.…"
- Reviewed: Scribus 1.3.5
- "We've reviewed Scribus a number of times in the past and even included a feature made using the tool in one of the back issues of Linux Format magazine. However, each revisit tends to throw up the same old problems: Scribus's lack of reliability and poor interface. Thankfully, after two years of solid development, these woes have been banished. Well, mostly - read on to find out what's changed."
- LinuxWeeklyNews/Jonathan Corbet: Coming soon: KMyMoney 1.0
- "Back in 2005, your editor wrote a review of personal finance tools for Linux, focusing on GnuCash, Grisbi, and KMyMoney. The conclusion at the end of that research was that GnuCash had the strongest feature set, but that KMyMoney looked to surpass it sometime in the near future. Four years later, KMyMoney 0.8 remains the current stable series, but that is about to change; the long-awaited KMyMoney 1.0 release is imminent. So it seems time to revisit this important piece of free software."
- ZDNet/Christopher Dawson: linux-for-education.org = a huge resource
- "Just a quick note tonight as I finished rebuilding our Active Directory and Windows Terminal Servers at the high school (humming along quite handily I might add, although we’ll see how things go when the students hit them first thing in the morning). If you need a break from Windows land (as I certainly do right about now), then linux-for-education.org provides a wealth of learning tools, both for the open source community and educators in general."
- The VAR Guy/Novell vs. Red Hat: 9 Days to Watch
- "From August 27 through September 4, The VAR Guy will pay particularly close attention to Novell and Red Hat. That nine-day period will provide a healthy reality check for the Linux market — and it may also reveal how open source initiatives are shaping up across the IT channel. Here’s why. ..."
- Computerworld/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: The SCO zombie wins one
- "Oh the irony. Today, August 24th, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that while the walking dead SCO still owes Novell big bucks for selling Unix to Sun and Microsoft, the District Court overstepped its grounds in ruling that SCO had never bought Unix's IP (intellectual property) rights in the first place. What's funny about this is that it's only after SCO is dead for all practical purposes, that it finally manage to win one."
- LinuxInsider/Katherine Noyes: The Joy of Linux Myth Debunking
- "It was with much joy that the Linux community saw two harmful myths about open source get put in their places recently. Myth #1: Linux is bad for business. Linux Foundation: More than 70 percent of work on the kernel today is done by developers who are being paid for their efforts. Myth #2: Linux netbooks have a high rate of customer returns. Dell: No more so than Windows netbooks."
- OSNews/David Adams: Linux User-Friendliness
- "A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks? My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?"
- Weird.com/Randy Alfred: Aug. 25, 1991: Kid From Helsinki Foments Linux Revolution
- "1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he’s working on. He’s built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free."
- Phoronix/Michael Larabel: Early Ubuntu 9.10, OpenSuSE 11.2, Mandriva 2010 Benchmarks
- "Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance."
Warning!
- InternetNews.com/Andy Patrizio: First WEP, Now WPA Encryption Falls
- "It's been known for years that the Wired Equivalent Privacy or WEP (define) protocol is easily broken, and that to be secure, wireless networks should use the more powerful protocol called Wi-Fi Protected Access, or WPA.
- Now security experts say they've proven that WPA can be breached just as easily. A pair of researchers in Japan said that they developed a way to break WPA encryption in about one minute -- and will show how at a conference there next month."
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