Thank You SGI, for Freeing the GNU/Linux 3D Desktop!
(Jan 7, 2009, 16:32 UTC) (2546 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
FSF.org: "In January of 2008, software code at the heart of GNU/Linux 3D applications was discovered to be non-free--a potential disaster for free software advocates hoping to see advanced graphical acceleration now common on modern operating systems."

Appeal for BtrFS Inclusion in Kernel
(Jan 7, 2009, 12:02 UTC) (1973 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux Magazine: "Chris Mason, lead developer of the copy-on-write BtrFS filesystem, has appealed for its inclusion in the Linux kernel."

Parallel Processing Shell Script Released
(Jan 6, 2009, 01:34 UTC) (1994 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Google Code: "PPSS is a shell script that processes files or other items in parallel. It is designed to make full use of current multi-core CPUs. It will detect the number of available CPUs and start a thread for each CPU core. It will also use hyper threading if specified. Please note that you can start any number of processes in parallel if you like."

Android-powered G1 phone is an enticing platform for app developers
(Jan 2, 2009, 12:03 UTC) (2562 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "The free and open source software community has been waiting for the G1 cell phone since it was first announced in July. Source code for Google's Android mobile platform has been available, but the G1 marks its commercial debut. It's clearly a good device, but is it what Linux boosters and FOSS advocates have long been anticipating?"

The Future of Compiz In Question
(Jan 2, 2009, 04:03 UTC) (5792 reads) (12 talkbacks) (feedback)
Phoronix: "Kristian Lyngstol has shared some grave concerns for this project that brought "desktop bling" to Linux. Kristian has outlined a few areas that that he believes need to be addressed otherwise it could mean the death of Compiz. Compiz in fact is just losing developers at this point and with the different forks taking place there is much stagnation occurring within Compiz."

AMD move brings open source gaming closer
(Jan 1, 2009, 16:04 UTC) (5004 reads) (19 talkbacks) (feedback)
ZDNet: "The problem has always been that the graphics drivers needed for really high-end gaming just were not available through open source. Yesterday AMD tore down that wall."

Look Ma! A Drive-In Theatre for Ants!
(Dec 31, 2008, 17:32 UTC) (1625 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Tech Broiler: "Here's some neat Star Trekky-tech that you'll be able to get your hands on shortly -- Texas Instruments' DLP Pico Projector Development Kit. The kit includes a Zippo lighter-sized 7.5 lumen projector unit, combined with a BeagleBoard embedded Linux developer platform"

Keeping it All in Mind
(Dec 31, 2008, 04:04 UTC) (1297 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
/var/blog/messages: "Back in the 50's, the psychologist George A. Miller wrote a paper entitled 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information'. While quite a dry and involved read, it's findings (and other corroborating evidence) are of great significance to anyone creating a software design, architecture, process, checklist, API or code listing"

Debian, Philosophy, and People
(Dec 30, 2008, 22:02 UTC) (1414 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Thoughts by Ted: "More blood's been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man."

Gedit Runs on MacOSX
(Dec 30, 2008, 20:32 UTC) (1874 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Club Silencio: "In its war to dominate the World GTK+ has just won another battle:"

AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code
(Dec 30, 2008, 17:32 UTC) (1699 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
Phoronix: "It has taken longer than expected for AMD to complete and release this information, but it's now available. AMD has released the fundamental Linux code needed to begin fostering the development of an open-source R600 3D driver. Furthermore, this code also concerns the latest R700 series of graphics processors! The microcode for the newest GPUs has also been released."

One Laptop Per Hacker Program
(Dec 30, 2008, 05:33 UTC) (2456 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
EeePC: "Emtec has launched a new program called “One Laptop Per Hacker."(named after the "One Laptop Per Child" project) The goal is to build a more robust developer community around the upcoming Gdium netbook platform."

The Linux Robot - Progress, Software & a Video
(Dec 29, 2008, 21:32 UTC) (1193 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Adam's Tech Talk: "Over the past week I've made a couple of hardware improvements, as well as building the majority of the software library, a TCP server and making a good start on a client."

Real Web 2.0: Battling Web spam, Part 2
(Dec 29, 2008, 04:02 UTC) (1109 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
IBM Developerworks: "This two-part installment provides a thorough guide to anti-spam techniques. This second article discusses content analysis, the problem with spam in linkbacks, and how to share in the anti-spam effort with a community of other Web site managers through blacklists and anti-spam services."

Patterns and string processing in shell scripts
(Dec 28, 2008, 20:03 UTC) (1835 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "Shell programming is heavily dependent on string processing. The term string is used generically to refer to any sequence of characters; typical examples of strings might be a line of input or a single argument to a command. Users enter responses to prompts, file names are generated, and commands produce output."

pNFS and the Future of File Systems
(Dec 26, 2008, 00:03 UTC) (2949 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
Enterprise Storage Forum: "High-performance file systems such as Panasas PanFS, Sun QFS, Quantum StorNext, IBM GPFS and HP File Services can add plenty of value to storage implementations"

Starting, Stopping, and Connecting to OpenOffice with Python
(Dec 25, 2008, 20:04 UTC) (2030 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux Journal: "Using pyuno you can script OpenOffice with Python. Pyuno allows you to create macros inside OpenOffice and it also allows you to create external Python scripts that talk to a running copy of OpenOffice."

Displaying Maps With OpenLayers
(Dec 25, 2008, 12:04 UTC) (2043 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "Google Maps gives you a quick and easy way to add maps to your Web site, but when you're using Google's API, your ability to display other data is limited. If you have your own data you want to display, or data from sources other than Google, OpenLayers, an open source JavaScript library, can give you more options."

Building an Arduino-Based Laser Game
(Dec 25, 2008, 04:04 UTC) (2078 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
IBM Developerworks: "Arduino is an inexpensive, easy-to-use electronics platform. The entire platform, both the hardware and the software, is completely open source, and the language is loosely based on C/C++. Arduino was built for makers, tinkerers, and artists who want to take the plunge into creating interactive physical objects."

Higher and Further: The Innovations of Linux 2.6.28
(Dec 24, 2008, 03:04 UTC) (3900 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Heise Open Source: "The Ext4 file system leaves its main development phase and will soon be ripe for productive use. Major renovation work on the code for memory and disk management promises GPU speed increases and better scalability. Hundreds of new and revised drivers improve hardware compatibility significantly."

Alan Cox: Moving on from Red Hat
(Dec 23, 2008, 17:19 UTC) (2209 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LXer News: "Linux Kernel developer Alan Cox has announced that he will be departing Red Hat for Intel. In an e-mail to the editors he explained that this move allows him to spend more time with his family and work even closer on the low level stuff that he really likes."

Perl 5 Completes Move to Git
(Dec 23, 2008, 14:31 UTC) (1242 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Heise Open Source: "The Git distributed source code management system has won over another major project, Perl 5. The Perl Foundation has announced that they have completed moving the source code of Perl 5 from Perforce to Git and are now opening the system up for developer use."

Python 3 Changes Breaks Backwards Compatibility
(Dec 23, 2008, 10:31 UTC) (1914 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
IBM Developerworks: "Python 3 is the latest version of Guido van Rossum's powerful general-purpose programming language. It breaks backwards compatibility with the 2.x line but has cleaned up some syntax issues. This article is the first in a series that talks about the changes that affect the language and backwards compatibility, and it provides examples of new features."

Return of the Xvid: Check Your Outputs!
(Dec 22, 2008, 22:01 UTC) (1556 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Free Software Magazine: "I once wrote an article on Xvid 1.1.3, and the speed boost one could get by enabling assembly-optimized code. Well, this is a case of my being hoisted by my own petard -- however, I must admit that several things were against me."

Howto Create a custom Debian Amazon Machine Image ( AMI )
(Dec 22, 2008, 17:31 UTC) (1148 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linuxconfig: "This guide will provide all necessary steps on how to create, bundle, upload, run and connect Debian ETCH AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For this guide we have used a Ubuntu 8.04 however Debian as a host system can be also used."

Boxee - You are NOT "Open"
(Dec 22, 2008, 16:31 UTC) (2201 reads) (8 talkbacks) (feedback)
Me and U(buntu): "Another vivid example of how so many companies are only paying lip-service to the term "Open"."

11 Ways to Create a Successful Linux Distro
(Dec 22, 2008, 14:01 UTC) (1480 reads) (3 talkbacks) (feedback)
Tech Radar: "What can you do to stand out from the hundreds of other Linux distros that already exist? There are a number of angles you can explore for this -- choose one, two or all of them if you want!"

Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind
(Dec 22, 2008, 12:01 UTC) (795 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
IBM Alphaworks: "Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind is a prototype "accessible rich Internet application" (ARIA) that gives blind users the ability to participate in many virtual world activities. It provides basic navigation, communication, and perception functions using GUI (graphical user interface) elements that are familiar to blind computer users."

in this post, i rant about licensing
(Dec 21, 2008, 20:02 UTC) (1559 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Tom Callaway: "Second, on either definition, you'd need to do an incredibly thorough audit of every file in the system to be sure that every single file is under a known license. We (Fedora) continue to find new licenses on a weekly basis, if not daily. When we find something non-free, it almost always exists in the "100% Free GNU/Linux distributions"."

Debian Secretary Quits Over Lenny Release Vote
(Dec 19, 2008, 17:04 UTC) (3306 reads) (4 talkbacks) (feedback)
IT Wire: "Long-time developer Manoj Srivastava has resigned as the secretary of the Debian GNU/Linux Project and is thinking of leaving the project altogether."

Open Source Programming Languages for Kids
(Dec 19, 2008, 16:34 UTC) (1769 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "Developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, Scratch is a graphical programming environment implemented in Squeak that works in a very Lego-like fashion. The basic premise is that you build programs by snapping together colorful blocks of code."

Quotes of the Week - All About Documentation
(Dec 18, 2008, 13:03 UTC) (1553 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
LWN.net: "I expect better: You never see me hard with time word making sentence coherent stuff. Ever."
Link fixed--ed.

Why Linux owes (part of) its success to Microsoft
(Dec 17, 2008, 15:04 UTC) (2740 reads) (4 talkbacks) (feedback)
Managing L'unix: "Similarly, when Linus Torvalds decided to build a "free Unix for the 386" he stripped away Tanenbaum's layered micro-kernel and hardwired Intel's approach to interrupt management directly into what has since become the largest monolithic kernel still in use."

Debian Developers Vote on Linux Release
(Dec 17, 2008, 04:34 UTC) (1948 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
Netstat -vat: "Debian is on the verge of its next major release codenamed "Lenny" - but before it gets released, Debian developers will have to vote on it. Debian developers have until 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, December 21st, 2008 to vote on six key issues collectively titled the Lenny Release General Resolution."

Adobe Learns Lessons of Open-Source Flex
(Dec 17, 2008, 03:04 UTC) (1929 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
The Register: "Just a year and a half after Adobe released its Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to encourage developer buy in, it's the company - not the community - that continues to shoulder the burden of building and fixing Flex."

A Linux Literary Trilogy
(Dec 16, 2008, 22:02 UTC) (1705 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
/var/blog/messages: "When I started delving into the world of Linux development, I was not only befuddled by the strange code layout and conventions, I also found the culture and ethos of Linux very confusing. There were three books that were invaluable in pulling my understanding out of this quagmire, which I'll mention briefly:"

OpenLDAP Quick Tips: Interacting with LDAP from shell scripts
(Dec 16, 2008, 21:32 UTC) (1438 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
suretec: "The 21st tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series shows you how to carry out LDAP operations using shell scripts."

Can Open Source Save Gaming Companies?
(Dec 16, 2008, 20:32 UTC) (1648 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
ZDNET Blogs: "News that Myst Online is going open source has excited some people. But is this a valid test of the open source concept?"

Google Grants Outsider Chrome-Coding Privileges
(Dec 16, 2008, 13:02 UTC) (1280 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
CNet: "I guess that Google Chrome really is an open-source project."

Open Source - the Ultimate Globalization Tool
(Dec 16, 2008, 10:32 UTC) (1078 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
451 CAOS Theory: "I've been hearing a lot from open source software vendors about internationalization and more specifically, localization of their software by, logically, local community members and contributors that take the code and run with it in Japanese, Russian, Spanish and a variety of other languages in places all over the globe."

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