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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Open Source Software Size: 11.61 MB Status: 3 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-07-13 21:07:08

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 125.38 MB Status: 1 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 21:00:13

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 636.31 MB Status: 3 seeders and 4 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:54:43

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 619.97 MB Status: 2 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:52:51

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 537.75 MB Status: 4 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:51:25

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 255.03 MB Status: 2 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:48:23

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 343.44 MB Status: 3 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:44:37

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 694.41 MB Status: 1 seeders and 4 leechers Added: 2007-07-13 20:36:59

Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "Most of us, even confirmed Windows users, have accepted on some level the idea that Linux really is a better operating system, on a technical level. Not me; not anymore "

Source: Linux Today

Free Software Magazine: "To contrast, in my capacity as the local 'geek about town,' I recently attended a one-off event intended to bring together the local geek community to examine the future of the Web 2.0 technology platform "

Source: Linux Today

Editor's Note: How Microsoft used a few empty promises and threats to validate Open XML.

Source: Linux Today

Computerworld: "This is Thursday's IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft squirms out of GPLv3's clutches, perhaps "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxLookup: "Japan has adopted a policy under which government ministries and agencies will solicit bids from software vendors whose products support internationally recognized open standards "

Source: Linux Today

Groklaw: "You know how I always tell you when I make a mistake? Well, it looks like I made one when I told you that I didn't think Massachusetts would care what you said in any emails about Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML specification "

Source: Linux Today

Ars Technica: "The One Laptop Per Child Project and Intel have put their differences aside, at least for now, as Intel agrees to take a seat on the OLPC Board of Directors "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "The answer to connecting all the information into a local semantic Web of information is closer than you might think "

Source: Linux Today

Shuttleworth: "With projects like Gobuntu and gNewSense aiming to provide a platform that is zealous about free software, the obvious question is 'where can I run it ?'

Source: Linux Today

BBC News: "Calls to make the BBC's on demand TV service work on all computer operating systems are to get a fresh look "

Source: Linux Today

Groklaw: "SCO seems to have started something, when, after releasing software under the GPL for years, it now claims it never knowingly did so. As you know, Microsoft has now declared its GPL-virginity as well "

Source: Linux Today

Network World: "With about a week remaining to collect comments on a plan to adopt Ecma's Open XML standard, Massachusetts is mum on how the issue is fairing, but some who disagree with the action are already voicing their opinion publicly "

Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "Dell Ubuntu Linux buyers were recently outraged when a price comparison between identical Inspiron 1420 laptops showed that instead of the Ubuntu system being cheaper, it actually ended up costing $225 more than the same laptop with Vista Home Basic Edition "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Four months after he joined Sun Microsystems, Debian Linux distribution creator Ian Murdock discussed his plans to bring Linux-like distribution sensibilities to Sun's OpenSolaris operating system "

Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: "Now, in a surprising development, Michael R. Sweet, CUPS' creator, revealed on CUPS' Web site that Apple has bought CUPS' source code and other intellectual property "

Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "Five years after the debut of its popular open-source drawing program for children, New Breed Software announced the release of Tux Paint 0.9.17 "

Source: Linux Today

Daniweb: "Over the past few years, 3-D rendering in window managers has become a new trend in the desktop environment "

Source: Linux Today

Linux Dummies: "The most suitable distros for a total Linux dummy are Freespire, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Ubuntu, according to online test called Linux Distribution Chooser "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "Another thread discussed potentially merging the swap prefetch patch into the mainline Linux kernel "

Source: Linux Today

BinaryPower: "I got a virus and I couldn't do much else than backup and reformat. No big deal but I realized after I formatted it it did not come with a recovery CD (at least one I could find) "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "A computer running Linux can outperform the same computer running Windows XP or Vista. Even so, you may be able to make your Linux system even faster "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Linux Log: "First of all, it's really true that many IT pros use Linux commands even when GUIs are available "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "Zabbix is a solution for monitoring applications, networks, and servers "

Source: Slashdot: Linux

AlexGr writes "We've heard conflicting tales regarding Linus Torvalds' acceptance of GPLv3. InformationWeek reports on comments by Mr. Torvalds that would seem to decide the issue: 'Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites For Torvalds' part, it appears unlikely he'll ever adopt GPLv3 for the Linux kernel. He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3. "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality," Torvalds wrote.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: eWEEK Linux

So, you want a job in Linux do you? Well then get your tickets for San Francisco to see Dice's free Technology and Engineering career fair at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

Source: ONLamp.com

Large, complex, cross-platform applications with multiple developers sometimes have bugs. Some of those bugs never appear on your own machine; they lurk for a while until someone else builds and tests the software on a different platform, in different circumstances.

Tracing that bad behavior back to a particular checkin can be frustrating, even if you have a huge smoke farm that rigorously tests every configuration of every checkin on every important platform.

Parrot meets all of those criteria, except for the huge smoke farm. (Smokers welcome.) When I want to pinpoint a regression to a likely checkin culprit, I use a binary search. Will Coleda’s App::SVNBinarySearch promises to automate that process. Here’s what I found.

Usage

Installation is reasonably easy, from the CPAN shell. There are a few dependencies. Also note that you must have a Subversion client installed on your machine, along with read access to the repository which you want to search.

The module itself mostly exists to install the program svn_binary_search, which does the real work.

Within a pristine Subversion checkout of the project you wish to search (I recommend a clean checkout in its own directory), run svn_binary_search with a range of revision numbers to search and the path to a shell script to build and test the checkout.

I know that sounds a bit confusing. It’s actually pretty simple.

The program checks all of the revisions within the range you give it with a binary search. Think of this as the number guessing game. If I think of a number between 1 and 128, you guess 64 and ask me if your guess is equal to or higher or lower than my number. If it’s higher, guess 96 (halfway between 64 and 128). If it’s lower, guess 32 (halfway between 64 and 1). Continue guessing the halfway point until you find the exact number.

Of course, identifying the exact number in a Subversion checkout is somewhat trickier. That’s the purpose of the shell script. All this script has to do is give a true or false exit code. Everything else depends on the question you’re asking. In my case, that question was “Does this Parrot checkout pass a particular test?”, as that test recently started to segfault on one machine and I couldn’t easily figure out why.

I created a shell script that cleaned up from any previous build, re-configured and rebuilt Parrot, and ran the test. svn_binary_search works best when there’s a single state transition within the revision range; either the test started to pass at a single point in that range or it started to fail.

The results were interesting. At first, I had strange error messages. My command line looked like:

$ svn_binary_search -r 19000:19700 -c find_shootout_failure.sh

After a few moments of confusion, I changed the final argument to include a path to my shell script:

$ svn_binary_search -r 19000:19700 -c ./find_shootout_failure.sh

After that, the program runs along, hopefully finally finding the single revision where the test script’s exit code changes.

Problems can occur, however. If there were a lot of additions or deletions or moves, sometimes the underlying Subversion application can get confused and decide not to continue. (The error message will say something about trying to add a file where one exists.) It would be nice if the program could delete these files, or always create new checkouts (time- and network-consuming), or at least detect this condition and offer the chance to restart after human intervention to fix the problem.

I ran into that in a couple of cases. However, having such a wide range of checkouts may not have helped. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to search more than a hundred revisions at once. Note that performing a binary search of a hundred revisions is easier and faster than performing a binary search of a thousand.

If you do use this application to search a project that requires a compiler, I highly recommend the use of ccache, especially if you’ve already used it to build the software you’re searching. The faster the compile, the easier it is to narrow down the problem.

Overall, the time it took to install and understand how to use this program paid off in the time it saved by using it only once. Despite a few fixable points, I highly recommend it for developers trying to track down that one little bug. In particular, the flexibility of writing a shell script (or other executable program) is impressively useful.

Source: ONLamp.com

I just noticed a post on Grig Gheorghiu’s blog that mentions that Pownce is built on the Django web framework. Here is an interview with Leah Culver, the lead developer for Pownce, and here is Leah’s blog post on Pownce. For anyone not aware, Pownce is the new brain child of Digg creator Kevin Rose. Pownce is supposed to be a better Twitter and/or Jaiku.