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Linux and Open Source News for 17th December 2007

FreeBSD Download

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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 4.07 GB Status: 9 seeders and 15 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 20:58:05


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: SUSE Size: 4.07 GB Status: 19 seeders and 41 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 20:47:45


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ubuntu Size: 1.77 GB Status: no seeders and 7 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 16:00:58


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: CentOS Size: 2.49 GB Status: 2 seeders and 6 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 03:34:47


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: CentOS Size: 2.25 GB Status: 3 seeders and 7 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 03:29:36


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: CentOS Size: 2.50 GB Status: 9 seeders and 17 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 03:23:09


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: CentOS Size: 2.25 GB Status: 19 seeders and 31 leechers Added: 2007-12-17 03:14:06


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Source: damnsmall

Robert Shingledecker has announced the final release of Damn Small Linux 4.2. From the changelog: "New mtpaint replaces xpaint; New black/blue theme with "Fractal Movements" background; New folder for better support of Visual Styles for JWM .jwmrc-theme and downloadable themes; New setTheme.lua, drag-n-drop or double click application style; .


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Source: weekly

This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Commentary: Distributions in 2007 News: Mandriva enters alpha development, Fedora loses project leader, MEPIS updates desktop artwork, Ulteo announces online services, Daniel Robbins releases Gentoo "stages" Released last week: CentOS 4.6, LliureX 7.11, Litrix Linux 7.12 Upcoming releases: NetBSD 4.0, FreeBSD 6.3 New .



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Source: Linux Today

Phoronix: "Last month AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series as 'enthusiast gaming performance for the masses' through the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, which are both sub-$250 graphics cards "


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Source: Linux Today

Defensive Computing: "The main defensive computing advantage it provides is protection from bad web sites, most importantly from phishing scams. ID theft is, to me at least, the worst thing that can happen to a computer user, so any extra protection helps "


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Source: Linux Today

TechieMoe: "It's been a while since I've played with Damn Small. The last time I used it regularly was on an old Gateway Solo laptop someone at work dumped on me "


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Source: Linux Today

DaniWeb: "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Beta is built upon Xen source code, a project partially funded by Microsoft, so Linux interoperability is a given "


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Source: Linux Today

ONLamp: "Recently, I started a job where I'll likely be working more mingled in with other developers on the same code at the same time "


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Source: Linux Today

The Tech and Other Cents: "I know I hurt some people with my post about how Linux blogging sucks. I apologize for that "


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Source: Linux Today

ConsortiumInfo: "Or so, at least, Google would like you to conclude "


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Source: Linux Today

Numerodix: "If you haven't been living under a rock the past decade (I suppose Stonehenge qualifies) you may have walked in on some incarnation of the famous GPL vs BSD flamewar "


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Source: Linux Today

TechIQ: "As he looks ahead to 2008, The VAR Guy knows hundreds of open source software providers are seeking to catch on in the corporate market "


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Source: Linux Today

Allan Packer's Weblog: "Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL "


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Source: Linux Today

Commercial Open Source Software: "Open source software selection costs are high, as results also from COSPA's findings: up to 40% of migrations' support costs, considering both searching for software and searching for documentation costs "


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Source: Linux Today

Mindless Techie: "I remember when I first started using Gentoo (back in the Gentoo 1.4 days), the community activity was just amazing. Each and every day or week, there was always something new and exciting going on in the Gentoo community "


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Source: Linux Today

as the days pass by: "Alex Russell calls for a return to the browser wars, citing (among other things) the stagnancy of the W3C as a part of the problem "


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Source: Linux Today

One Laptop Per Child News: "When One Laptop Per Child announced Give One Get One, Jon Camfield worried about the unintended consequences of USA sales on XO laptop distribution in the developing world "


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Source: Linux Today

Sys-Con: "SAP is recommending SUSE as its preferred Linux platform, the stuff of which stacks are made, and Novell is going start being the first line of defense for people running SAP applications on SUSE "


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Source: Linux Today

Roundup: A slew of recent corporate name changes is leading some pundits to wonder if it'll do any good.


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Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in "


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Source: Linux Today

LinuxPlanet: "Pardus is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography. I'd never seen it before this week and only heard the name briefly in passing, so I had no idea what to expect "


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Source: Linux Today

Software Freedom Law Center: "The Software Freedom Law Center today announced that it has settled the GPL violation lawsuit filed on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against Xterasys Corporation "


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Source: Linux Today

eWeek: "MySQL AB has released a beta of the latest version of its MySQL Connector/ODBC that features performance enhancements and Unicode support "


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Source: Linux Today

Newsvine: "According to major newspapers, starting with the municipal elections of 2008, Brazil's e-voting machines will use the Linux operating system "


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Source: Linux Today

RCRWireless News: "Separate mobile Linux efforts have been cited by competitors as likely to lead to fragmentation "


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Source: Linux Today

AllAfrica: "It is ironical that the telephone, the internet and other communication technologies we think help to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, could widen it "


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Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "Mark Shuttleworth says he's more lucky than smart, but his record says otherwise "


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Source: Linux Today

Government Computer News: "As open-source coding begins to appear with increasing regularity in commercial software products, government users need to be aware of the potential security vulnerabilities in open-source code, industry experts say "


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Source: Linux Today

Computerworld UK: "Interest in the deployment of open source enterprise applications is lagging far behind knowledge of and deployment of the Linux operating system, according to a survey from analyst group Forrester Research "


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Source: Linux Today

Reuters/CNET News: "The Linux operating system, which so far has made little headway into cell phones, is set to become more widely available next year, helped by Google's mobile push, Linux creator Linus Torvalds says "


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Source: Linux Today

Provo Daily Herald: "More layoffs are expected next year at Novell Inc. after the Waltham, Mass. software maker disclosed in a federal filing Thursday "


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Source: Linux Today

Open Review: "CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System. As a group, CentOS is a community of open source contributors and users "


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Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception "


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Source: Linux Today

cubicgarden: " don't try and create samba shares on top of NTFS formatted partitions "


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Source: Linux Today

Wine Review: "Developed for the conceptual stages of design, Google SketchUp is a powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool that combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design "



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Source: Slashdot: Linux

h4rm0ny writes "After previously limiting their iPlayer to only the Windows platform (as we discussed earlier here and here), the BBC's content is now available to UK-based users of Linux and Mac OSX. From their site: 'From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programs on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of Flash. Another change is that you do not have to register or sign in any more to download programs ' It seems that the BBC have listened to people who petitioned them for broader support and an open format. Well, Flash isn't exactly open, but its a lot more ubiquitous than Windows Media and Real Player formats."Read more of this story at Slashdot.



previous    The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs    next


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Source: ONLamp.com

If you read my feed, you probably saw that I changed the name of the project mentioned in SAP’s Composition on Grails. After I published that, my contacts at SAP said “You know, we had been meaning to change the name.”

If you’re interested in the project, you should definitely follow Will Gardella’s weblog, starting with Composition on Grails - New Version, New Name. He answers some of the most common questions he’s heard over the past few months about the project.

I realize that SAP doesn’t want to offer official support for languages other than Java and ABAP, but every demo I saw there with interaction between services over WS-* makes me think that the company could spend $50k in tech marketing very well by posting bounties with the appropriate F/OSS communities to beef up WSDL and SOAP support in languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP such that they can be first-class consumers of SAP middleware services in the same way as Groovy now is.

Again, it doesn’t have to be official support, and it’s just the price of a full-page ad in a decently-read magazine, but it would be a shame not to take advantage of these rich ecosystems with an architecture that already supports such a thing….


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Source: ONLamp.com

Another article of the series “Yet Another Perl 6 Operator”
Among the new Perl 6 operators, there is the handy operator '//', known as defined-or or the default operator. This novelty was anticipated by the introduction of this syntactic bit in Perl 5 (see the upcoming 5.10 release) — so you won’t need to wait for Perl 6 to start using it.
# dor.pl
use 5.010;
print "arg: '", shift // "?", "'n";

$ perl dor.pl one
arg: 'one'
$ perl dor.pl ""
arg: ''
$ perl dor.pl
arg: '?'

The purpose of this operator is very close to the well-known high-precedence OR, the operator '||', with some subtle and useful differences.

Expressions with '||' are evaluated like this:
exp1 || exp2 = exp1, if the result of exp1 is true
exp1 || exp2 = exp2, otherwise

It was very common to use this operator when one wanted an expression to have a certain default value if something was not explicitly specified.

For instance, the following Perl 5 code can build a rule of length $n with a given char or '-'.
sub rule {
my $n = shift;
my $char = shift || '-';
return $char x $n;
}

Then

rule(3) gives '---'
rule(4, '+') gives '++++'

But

rule(5, 0) gives '-----' (and not '00000')


because 0 is false (as the other Perl values of falsehood: ‘’ – the empty string, 0 – integer zero, 0.0 – floating point zero, undef).

The solution was to replace the simple expression shift || '-' by another one, more complex and precise:

my $char = defined $_[0] ? shift : '-';


But that is the semantics of the '//' operator:
exp1 // exp2 = exp1, if the result of exp1 is defined
exp1 // exp2 = exp2, otherwise


So since 5.10, you may use the exact same code above replacing '||' with '//' and keep your code compact and elegant.

To be really fair, the Perl 6 rephrasing of this code won’t need the '//' operator. Instead, that sub would be even prettier due to the improved sub signatures that become possible.

sub rule ( $n, $char = '-' ) {
return $char x $n;
}



Next article is due tomorrow.


LINKS

Synopsis S03, the official source

The introduction of this series

Official Perl 6 Documentation

Perl 6 in your browser



previous    The O'Reilly Network's Linux DevCenter Articles and Weblogs    next


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Source: Linux DevCenter

The Fedora Project is looking for a new Fedora Project Leader. Skill set includes being able to juggle a community of around 1500 members, mostly volunteers with the needs of the Fedora Projects flagship product: Fedora the operating system. Must be smart, calm, cool and collected under stress and have an attention span that can be spread in many directions at once. Must have vision of the current landscape of Linux and Open Source in general as well as where it can / should be headed.
Max Spevack has done an excellent job positioning Fedora in a way that allows the volunteers and non volunteers to work directly with each other. This mix was difficult to maintain and is partially organizational but mostly I think it’s been attitude. When Max started the Fedora landscape was quite different. There was a very clear division in every team between a Red Hat employee and a volunteer. Through the direction of Max, Fedora Board members, and a large community of smart dedicated volunteers, Fedora has positioned itself in a way that will allow it to grow like no other distribution can.
Many people consider Ubuntu to be a direct competitor with Fedora but I don’t think thats strictly true. For example, Ubuntu is based off of Debian. Fedora is built from scratch and has many other distributions based off of it, not the least of which is RHEL/CentOS. Also Ubuntu seems very much to be targeting the desktop. Fedora is more the place for innovation and the exchange of free ideas. In the majority of examples Fedora will have newer software then other distributions, even if it is by a minor release or revision. Exceptions, of course, can be named but the general rule stands. Fedora is at the cutting edge of software. Thanks to our community, there’s not much blood.
Max and the Fedora leaders value freedom, some say to a fault. But the fact is, every bit in Fedora is free, this includes all of Fedora’s Infrastructure. From source control, to websites, to databases, to build system, to distribution. Anyone could duplicate any part or all of Fedora at any time and it will stay that way. This is something that Fedora values. Our focus is on invention, being dynamic, being transparent and taking risks.
Fedora also views Open Source in it’s entirety in that it’s important to work with upstream. Many of the packagers and developers in Fedora work hard to make sure that patches that come in make it upstream. I think this attitude and relationship with upstream is invaluable.
Do the ideas and principals above fit your moral compass? If so you might be a good candidate to lead the Fedora Project. It’s probably one of the most unique opportunities available in Open Source.
https://redhat.ats.hrsmart.com/cgi-bin/a/highlightjob.cgi?jobid=3060
Those not interested in being the leader but want to get involved, just stop on by and get started



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Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library

The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive
laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The XO laptop
includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design
and the use of GNU/Linux as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an
application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar,
accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to
develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.



Updated: Tue Dec 18 23:55:02 2007


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