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Linux and Open Source News for 18th December 2007
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Linux Today News Service
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Source: Linux Today vnunet: "Although sponsored by Novell and used as the base for its Suse Linux Enterprise products, Opensuse is a community-developed Linux distribution, available free for use on servers or desktops "
Source: Linux Today KernelTrap: "'The http://www.kerneloops.org website collects kernel oops and warning reports from various mailing lists and bugzillas,' noted Arjan van de Ven, announcing the new website "
Source: Linux Today LugRadio: "Alexandre Juillard from the Wine Project talks about where Wine is, why it isn't finished, and what's coming next "
Source: Linux Today OSWeekly: "Admittedly, this is not an issue for me, since I know better than to put anything Ubuntu puts out right off the bat on my daily use machine "
Source: Linux Today Datamation: "However, in the last six weeks, this issue has been sidetracked by a debate about whether the GNOME Foundation, which oversees development of the popular desktop, has betrayed or assisted the community by being involved with the development of OOXML at all "
Source: Linux Today DesktopLinux: "Dell has told DesktopLinux.com that it will be announcing later today, Dec. 19, that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs.
Source: Linux Today Microsoft Watch: "My Linux-Watch colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' definition of desktop Linux popularity is rather disturbing "
Source: Linux Today Polish Linux: "BBC iPlayer after a lot of complains, petitions, talks and discussions is finally available for GNU/Linux as beta "
Source: Linux Today 451 CAOS Theory: ""One area in which I did the company a disservice was in doubting its past commitment to open source "
Source: Linux Today The Open Road: "An analyst friend emailed me the other day to get my opinion on the analyst community's negative Red Hat pile-on "
Source: Linux Today LinuxDevCenter: "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 "
Source: Linux Today Datamation: "There is, to be sure, no lack of 'top software' lists in the open source world (or in software in general). The Internet is drowning in such lists "
Source: Linux Today iTWire: "There are at least three contenders jostling for a share of the growing market for Linux-based mobile device platforms. Now giant Japanese cellular operator, NTT DoCoMo, is throwing its weight behind a fourth "
Source: Linux Today InfoWorld: "The growing prominence of Linux in China is resulting in an industry event to take place there in February, co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Chinese OSS Promotion Union, the foundation announced Monday "
Source: Linux Today internetnews.com: "Although Ethernet is the dominant interconnect for LANs, when it comes to storage and SANs, it lags other technologies, notably Fibre Channel. That's about to change "
Source: Linux Today SaigonNezumi.com: "It is hard to believe that my 10th and 11th Grade Vietnamese and foreign students at the American International School in Saigon have been using Linux for about one month now "
Source: Linux Today Linux.com: "Thomas Howe is a telecommunications developer and consultant who is passionate about the role of open source software in the telephony industry "
Source: Linux Today ComputerWeekly: "The Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has selected Red Hat Linux systems to run the organisation's mission-critical applications "
Source: Linux Today SearchEnterpriseLinux: "After years of Linux loyalty, a New York City-based open source company called Sapotek Inc. switched to Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris 10 operating system with no regrets "
Source: Linux Today CIO: "Open-source advocates may not consider enterprise adoption to be the holy grail of the distribution model's success, but acceptance among large companies has several significant benefits "
Source: Linux Today CRN: "So we get to the final smackdown in CMP Channel Test Center's World Series of Linux. It's Ubuntu vs. Fedora "
Source: Linux Today Ars Technica: "Building on the technologies that he presented at FOSSCamp, Müller recently published a blog entry that demonstrates his latest impressive experiments with OpenGL, GTK, and offscreen rendering "
Source: Linux Today obsethryl's lab: "Self-hosting GNU/Linux distributions are one of our major interests here since we will be exploring that field as thoroughly as possible "
Source: Linux Today iTWire: "Some people tend to take a fancy to something or the other after being exposed to the same at an early stage in life. In Tim 'Mithro' Ansell's case, it was exactly the reverse "
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News for nerds, stuff that matters
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Source: Slashdot: Linux jcatcw writes "An IDG analysis of Dell's attempts to reinvent itself concludes that there are some positive results, but there are problems with the company's supply-chain management and support. One area analysts want to see more improvement: the company's Linux business. 'Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. "It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot," Cole said.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot: Linux sofar writes "Intel has just announced and released source code for their Open-FCoE project, which creates a transport allowing native Fibre Channel frames to travel over ordinary ethernet cables to any Linux system. This extremely interesting development will mean that data centers can lower costs and maintenance by reducing the amount of Fibre Channel equipment and cabling while still enjoying its benefits and performance. The new standard is backed by Cisco, Sun, IBM, EMC, Emulex, and a variety of others working in the storage field. The timing of this announcement comes as no surprise given the uptake of 10-Gb Ethernet in the data center."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs
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Source: ONLamp.com As you may know already, Perl 5.10 came out today. Today is also Perl’s 20th anniversary (see also Perl Simplifies the Labyrinth that is Programming Language — and to be fair, Perl doesn’t include David Bowie in extra eye makeup and tight pants).
You might not know that the Parrot porters have released Parrot 0.5.1. It’s pure happy coincidence that the monthly release cycle of Parrot coincides with Perl’s 20th anniversary, but in honor of the occasion, there’s a nice puny easter egg in this release that might bring back a stab of nostalgia. It’s an interesting comparison of how far the language and platform have evolved in two decades. Oh yes, and the Parrot tarball also contains an implementation of Perl 6 which has made tremendous progress in the past month.
Source: ONLamp.com Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago today. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl!
Perl 5.10 isn’t just a bug fix version: it’s full of new features that I’m eager to use: named captures in regular expressions, state variables for subroutines, the defined-or operator, a switch statement (called given-when, though), a faster regex engine, and more. You can read more about the changes in perldelta.
The perl-5.10.0.tgz file is making its way to all of the CPAN mirrors, but if you can’t wait for that, you can its torrent file. Once it makes it to the CPAN mirrors, it will the new stable.tar.gz
This time around, Perl 5.10 installation will work the same on unix and Windows: Strawberry Perl is a Perl distribution for Windows that comes with a C-compiler and everything else you need to do it yourself. Give it a couple of days to catch up, though.
Source: ONLamp.com I setup trac 0.11dev last night on CentOS 5 to manage the review process for our book, using svn 1.4.5 and python 2.4.3. It was very nice! The new admin interface is great, and allows you to easily load plugins:
Just a note, it is not 100% beta yet, but from the traffic on the list, it appears it should be beta any day now. Nice work Trac team…this rocks!
Source: ONLamp.com Another article of the series “Yet Another Perl 6 Operator”
In Perl 6, you may construct ranges with expressions like
$min .. $max
$min ^.. $max
$min ..^ $max
$min ^..^ $max
and even
^$limit
These operators are Range object constructors, specified by their endpoints. These endpoints are excluded if there is ^ in the corresponding side of the range operator. Thus,
0 ..^ 4 # equivalent to 0, 1, 2, 3
1 .. 4 # equivalent to 1, 2, 3, 4
1 ^.. 3 # equivalent to 2, 3
-2 ^..^ 2 # equivalent to -1, 0, 1
Range objects are lazy iterators. So they can represent efficiently very large or even infinite lists.
Reversed ranges cannot be constructed by just exchanging the endpoints. So 2..1 is always a null range. The solution is to use one of the expressions below.
2 .. 1 :by(-1)
reverse 1 .. 2
where reverse has the benefit of working even for alphabetic ranges.
To build possibly unbounded ranges, * may occur in any of the
endpoints.
0..* # 0 .. +Inf
'a'..* # 'a' .. 'zzzzz '
*..0 # -Inf .. 0
1.2.3..* # Any version higher than 1.2.3
May..* # May through December
These examples also show that to build ranges it is enough to have endpoints whose types are Ordered, which basically means there exist sensible comparisons among its instances. To know more about Perl 6 Ranges, their methods and expected semantics, read section “Range Semantics” from Synopsis 03 .
The upto operator (unary '^') is really a shortcut to generate a range from 0 up to one less than its argument.
^$limit # 0 ..^ $limit
which is handy for cases like this:
.say for ^4 # 0, 1, 2, 3
If applied to a type name, ^Moose is short for Moose.HOW, taking from its argument to the metaclass instance instead. This behavior is akin to “what’s this thing’s domain” which correlates abstractly to how ^$n works.
The operator '..' was relieved of the Perl 5 semantics of flip-flop operator, whose Perl 6 counterpart will be seen in yet another article of this series.
As a curiosity, notice that to construct ranges within Perl 6 regular expressions, the '-' was consistently replaced by '..'.
tr/a..z/A..Z/;
Next article is due tomorrow (Dec 19, 2007). Thanks to rhr and Auzon at #perl6 @ freenode that spotted some mistakes and a better phrasing to improve this text.
LINKS
Synopsis S03, the official source
The introduction of this series
Official Perl 6 Documentation
Perl 6 in your browser
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The latest content from IBM developerWorks
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Source: developerWorks : XML : Technical library This is the first article in a four-part series about using XForms, DB2 pureXML, and Ruby together to more easily create Web applications. In this series you will develop a hypothetical application for managing patient information at a doctor's office. You will get a taste of the individual strengths of each technology, but you will also see how to integrate them together. In this first part of the series, you will examine how XForms, DB2 pureXML, and Ruby on Rails can all help more rapidly build XML-centric Web applications.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library This tutorial presents an innovative use of the well-known Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) format's associative properties to emulate the functionality of a
simple relational database. It demonstrates using RSS channels to store contact
information and meeting information -- much as a personal address book and calendar
does. It uses RSS elements and attributes such as items and guids to create a neural-network-like mesh of related data.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology, a server-side framework that offers a component-based approach to Web user-interface development, has come a long way. JSF 1.2 (incorporated into Java Enterprise Edition 5) has fixed some JSF pain points and added some nice features. This tutorial series covers how to get started with JSF 1.2. It's heavy on examples and light on theory -- just what you need to get started quickly.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library WS-* users and REST users have an ongoing debate over which
technique is most appropriate for which problem sets, with WS-* users often claiming
that more complex, enterprise-level problems cannot be solved RESTfully. This
article puts that theory to the test by trying to create a RESTful solution for a
problem area that is not often discussed by REST users: systems management. In a previous
developerWorks tutorial, I showed how to create a Web services interface for managing
HTTP server products; the tutorial used concepts from WSDL and the WS-* standards to
define the management interface and software from Apache Muse and Apache Axis to
create the management application. For this article, I use Project Zero and REST design principles to recreate the interface and function of the original application and determine if REST is a valid option for this enterprise project.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library "Test on multiple browsers" has been a mantra ever since there have been multiple browsers to test on. Testing them all -- especially these days -- is impossible. But you can come a lot closer than you may think. In this article, learn a variety of techniques for cross-browser testing, from the very thorough to the quick and dirty. The choice you make will depend on your resources, but this is an issue you can't ignore.
Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library Using JSEclipse, JavaScript programmers now have their own Eclipse plug-in
that provides many important features to aid in the development of JavaScript
applications. JSEclipse gives JavaScript developers the same ease of use that
Eclipse has been providing in the Java language and others for years. Learn to use
this tool, while creating a colony of evolving "creatures" on your page.
Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library It's a good time to be a Web developer. You've never had more choices in terms
of technologies. There are so many great open source Web servers, databases,
programming languages, and development frameworks. No matter what combination of
technologies you prefer to work with, there is a single integrated development
environment (IDE) that can increase your productivity: Eclipse. In Part 1 of this
three-part series on how to use Eclipse for Web development in Java, PHP, and Ruby, you
saw how the latest release of Eclipse -- Europa -- can be used to rapidly develop Java
Web applications. In Part 2, you saw how easy it is to develop PHP applications using
a different set of Eclipse plug-ins, collectively known as the PHP Development Toolkit
(PDT). Here in Part 3, we introduce the RDT and RadRails Eclipse plug-ins and show you
how to get these plug-ins and start using them. You will learn how to use RadRails to
do many common Ruby on Rails development tasks.
Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library A Web site or intranet has such a high volume of information available that you need special tools to index the content and provide access to it in a fast and convenient way. Learn how to do just that and provide a state-of-the-art search facility with the help of an Ajax library coupled with mature technologies like ColdFusion and Windows Indexing Service.
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