FOSSPlanet

Based on Fedora, VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC, it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files , and download the cover art.

The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation. When the CodePlex Foundation was established by Microsoft last year, an interim board of directors was assembled to help get the organization off the ground while permanent board members were being chosen. A number of the interim board members, including Novell's Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza, will be turning their seats over to new representatives. Former Microsoft open source evangelist Sam Ramji, currently VP of strategy at Sonoa, will be remaining on the board, along with Microsoft .NET Framework program manager Davies Boesch.

This year's CeBIT, held each spring since 1986, took place from the 2nd to the 6th of March, 2010 in in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT, an acronym for "Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik", which means "Centre of Office and Information technology", is the world's largest trade fair showcasing the latest in information technology (IT) products and solutions from more than 4,150 companies from 68 countries. The trade show is held on the Hannover fairground which features its own railway station, 5.3 million square feet of covered indoor space and consists of 27 halls and pavilions plus a convention centre with 35 function rooms.

The GNOME Developer Kit is a Linux distro based on Foresight Linux. Its new release shows a somewhat reduced collection of software for GNOME developers.

I can make Netflix Watch Instantly work on my Linux media center. Almost. Yes, almost. No, I don't have it working. But I thought that with a little help from the community along with instructions on how I've gotten this far might help bring some support to the topic.

Novell Inc. lied about owning the copyrights for the Unix computer operating system then collaborated with IBM to damage Unix owner The SCO Group, the latter's attorney told a federal court jury Tuesday. In the first day of testimony in a trial to settle a long-running legal dispute between SCO and Novell, SCO went on the attack by calling as its first witness the former CEO and chairman of Novell. Robert Frankenberg testified that despite Novell's claims of ownership, his intent was to sell the copyrights in a 1995 deal that's at the heart of the conflict.

In my last article I looked at performance loopers for Linux. This week I begin a 2-part review of similar applications called arpeggiators. What Is An Arpeggiator? An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 11, 2010 is available.

A post on Microsoft's Port 25 blog manages to talk about open source platforms without mentioning Linux once: instead it refers to "POSIX-compatible" code. Feeling threatened, are we, perhaps?

Google seems to develop new tools every week defying the stereotypes of the large, slow company, but with each new tool, it gathers more information about us and at some point, we have to consider if the trade-off is worth it.

In this ongoing series on lightweight Linux desktops, Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of Windowmaker, the popular fast, lightweight window manager based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface. How does Windowmaker measure up in this era of fancy special effects GUIs?

Red Hat already focuses on Linux, JBoss middleware and virtualization. But there are multiple signs the open source company will make a business intelligence move soon. And Red Hat’s move could involve either Jaspersoft or EnterpriseDB — or both. Here's why.

Linux is an excellent choice for a server operating system, no matter what the size of business. However, it is still not very easy to administrate. Recently many distributions have launched their own interface to configure these server components, but really failed at delivering an easy-to-use interface to configure it. eBox is trying to fix this particular issue.

Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it's the first OS deploying Nouveau's Gallium3D driver (there's benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

Access subsidiary IP Infusion announced a new Linux-ready "stateless tunneling" product that enables the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Based on the IETF's "6rd" (IPv6 rapid deployment) specifications, ZebOS Rapid Deployment forwards IPv6 traffic though existing IPv4 networks, enabling carriers to more easily transition to IPv6, says IP Infusion.

The SCO case has long since dropped off the radar for most. It is worth noting, though, that the Novell "slander of title" trial is now underway in Utah. Groklaw has detailed coverage of the testimony thus far. "Why did Novell slander SCO's title? Because of Linux. Linux started as a hobbyist tool. It's open source; 'nobody can be completely sure where the code comes from'. Starting around 2000, IBM inserted into Linux stuff that belonged to SCO. SCO sued, and started their licensing program (SCOsource). Novell stated that SCO doesn't have the copyrights and can't sue IBM."

The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth. But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other "intellectual property" law. Every once in a while, a good status check on the legal dimension is healthy for the typical developer, and SCALE 8x offered just that in a series of talks.

Barely a day goes by when you switch on your computer, plug into the web and come across yet another deranged scheme to restrict freedom in the name of security, safety or morality. RIAA, DMCA, RIPA, Pallidium computing, the list almost seems to grow exponentially. So, some guys got together in a dark room, brainstormed and came up with yet another ruse to curtail access to and use of the internet. Relax, this one won’t fly. Trust me. But the sheer audacity of it! Even the bovine docility of Windows users wouldn’t stomach this one (or would they?)—and here’s the irony. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Debian has updated tdiary (cross-site scripting).

Fedora has updated samba (F11: filesystem access privilege escalation).

Mandriva has updated php (two safe_mode bypass vulnerabilities).

Clamav is the most popular free anti virus program for Linux environment.( Of course it scans for widows virus) However, clam is a command line utility and you need some skills for manipulating is properly. There are several graphical front ends for clam av which can make your life easy. The most popular among them are clamtk and Klamav.

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

SpringSource has announced a new lightweight edition of its open source application development and management server optimized for the virtual datacenter, cloud computing — and VMware products, of course.

VMware acquired SpringSource in September. SpringSource’s Apache Tomcat-based server is used by more than half of the Global 2000 companies.

The tc Server Spring Edition, which will be available as part of the 2.0 product line in April, gives customers a small footprint that is “ideally suited” for virtual server environments as well as public and private clouds. VMware said it is heeding the call of customers who maintain that deploying Java applications properly in virtualized environments requires a lean architecture.

The server is also designed to make it easier for customers running Spring applicatiions on Java -based enteprise servers to migrate to the Spring edition and for customers running applications on Tomcat servers to move to the more enterprise ready tc Server Sring edition, the company added.

As part of the rollout, VMware, has also announced a special promotion cutely dubbed “Spring on VMware” that offers two licenses of the Spring edition free and 60 days of evaluation support free for a limited time with the sale of select VMware products through VMware channel partners. The promotion runs between March 8 and May 8th.

The Spring edition SpringSource tc server 2.0 will start at $750 per CPU while the standard edition is priced at $500 per processor and the developers edition will be free.

The 2.0 platform also offers deeper visibility into Spring applications, an enhanced tool suite to speed code development and find performance flaws and a template-driven tool for configuring and deploying multiple application server instance per machine, VMware said.

It is also integrated with VMware Workstation and VMware Lab Manager, which allows for applications to be quickly debugged and deployed in virtualized environments.

VMWare featured in its release today a quote given by a portal webmaster for NPC International who said he was able to deploy dozens of application instances on one server virtualized by VMware and said he could not have deployed his web based applications into the private cloud he built without tc’s small footprint.

From the Vroom VROOM! dept.:
Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla's new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple's WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple's JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox's JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla's browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race.

Operating systems market share is something that is hard to judge. There are lots of numbers out there provided by lots of different people. Which figures are you to believe and which ones should you take in with a grain of salt?

The Mozilla Foundation has launched a process to update the Mozilla Public License. The project is described this way:

While the update process is inspired by the GPLv3 update, the objectives are far less ambitious: Mozilla would like to smooth various rough edges without making major changes to the license. They hope to have the process complete - after releasing three drafts for comments - by November of this year.

The biggest science story to hit the mainstream media in the last year was of course the big switch on at CERN. What made it such a great story for me was not just the sheer and audacious enormity of the enterprise or the humbling nobility of the colossal experiment but the story behind the story. That story was the absolutely central role of free software philosophy at the heart of everything CERN was (and is) doing. Despite the false start, CERN’s search for the Higgs Boson has got into its stride. The same cannot be said for the car crash that is climate science, which may have inflicted terminal damage on the reputation of science. I believe the rigorous application of free software methodology in conjunction with the Fourth Paradigm may save it. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Jonathan Schwartz writes about patent attacks, and Apple's attack on Android in particular. "Having watched this movie play out many times, suing a competitor typically makes them more relevant, not less. Developers I know aren’t getting less interested in Google’s Android platform, they’re getting more interested - Apple’s actions are enhancing that interest." He also says that Microsoft tried to shake down Sun with patent claims on OpenOffice.org.

Swedish MEP Christian Engström reports that the European Parliament has passed a resolution coming out against the secretive ACTA copyright treaty negotiations and demanding transparency in the process. The vote was rather definitive: 633 for, 13 against. "At last, the elected representatives in the parliament have sent a strong message. We have shown that we do not accept secrecy. We have shown that we are prepared to stand up for a free internet open to everybody."

Konstatin Dmitriev's Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation's Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code. Subscribers can click below for a look at the project from this week's edition.

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There's a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack...

Once again, Google has bought something only to open source it.

This time it’s ReMail, first acquired, then put on Google Code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. (It previously did the same thing with DocVerse.)

ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat features, like autocomplete.

Founder Gabor Cselle now lists himself as just a software engineer at Google, the rest of the development team has also scattered, and Apple has taken ReMail off its app store.

What’s going on? Well, it’s not a bug it’s a feature.

For Google, open source simplifies vendor relationships. You can join the Google software ecosystem without signing a contract. You can exploit Google projects like Android and ReMail and profit from them, because they’re under an Apache license.

Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process.

Why did this not happen before? One reason is you leave a lot of “money on the floor” by doing this. The other reason, of course, is that Google can afford it.

As I have written here many times, Google’s advantage lies in its infrastructure. It is the low-cost producer of full Internet infrastructure. This includes more than bandwidth. It includes all the tools and hosting needed to deliver Internet transactions.

This advantage can be exploited against any rival. In this case it is being exploited against Apple.

Until someone is willing to try and match this advantage, and even the phone companies seem for now unwilling to even try, Google will exploit this advantage against all comers.

These advantages lean in favor of anyone with ideas, but they also put a limit on the degree to which you can profit from those ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lone programmer in your pajamas or Steve Jobs — Google’s advantages both enable you to bring your ideas to market and squeeze your potential profits like the view of buildings you see on Google Earth.

It’s easy for Google not to be evil in such an atmosphere. There is no one for it to be evil to.

But it does make open source start to feel a bit like Orwell’s Animal Farm. All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

It's been just a month since releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 and that was followed by the release of our PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 operating system, but since then work has been flowing into the next release of the Phoronix Test Suite and related benchmarking technologies. The next release, Phoronix Test Suite 2.6, is codenamed Lyngen and will be officially available in May. Today the first alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 is available...

When it comes to Intel's X.Org driver for Linux, xf86-video-intel, the most recent release was version 2.10 and it arrived in early January complete with Pineview (their next-generation Intel Atom systems) support, X-Video improvements, and various other features. The xf86-video-intel 2.11 driver is now emerging as their next quarterly update that brings in the KMS page-flipping and DRI2 swap events support. However, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is set to be released in April, will not be shipping with either of these drivers. Instead Canonical has decided to stick with the xf86-video-intel 2.9 driver that was released last September...

So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell. In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary "content delivery service" known as "Steam" is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse's mouth. In addition the actual client and "Steam-works" being brought to Apple's operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games.

[Not directly FOSS related, but interesting since Windows is seen as the powerhouse of gaming. - Sander]

Can you install every Operating System on Windows Mobile devices? When you can live with small fonts and a tiny screen on your WinMo this is a geeky way to install Ubuntu on your smartphone.

A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.

Julien Lavergne has released the next Alpha 3 of lubuntu. lubuntu is a faster, more lightweight and energy saving variant of Ubuntu using LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. The lubuntu team aims to earn official endorsement from Canonical. Lubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3 Screenshots at My SEO Company

Ask any knowledgeable mobile user, and she will tell you that the best way to securely access the Internet in public places is through a VPN (virtual private network) connection.

Case studies of open source success are always useful - especially when, like this one, they show how a UK government project that cost £100 million ($150 million) using traditional approaches but still didn't work properly, was fixed for just £35,000 ($53,000) using free software.

We've all seen countless articles, blog and forum posts explaining how to back up a server with rsync and other tools. While I've cringed when people talked about using non-scalable methods, there actually is a place for quick and dirty backup mechanisms. Small companies running just a few virtual machines in the cloud, or even enterprises with test instances, may wish for a quick and effective backup.

Texas Linux Fest has announced the initial list of speakers and presentations for its inaugural event. Keynote speakers include Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and Randal L. Schwartz, with additional presentations by Linux, free software, and open source experts such as Jon "maddog" Hall, Amber Graner, Bradley Kuhn, and Max Spevack. The event will take place on Saturday, April 10th, in Austin Texas. Registration is available online. The complete list of talks is available as well.

Listen is an audio player which comes with many very useful features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory, provides direct access to lyrics, lastfm (currently playing song info and future events) and wikipedia information. One feature I really enjoy in Listem Music Player is it's option to create playlists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to. And another feature creates dynamic playlist based on some criteria you choose:

In the important realm of science, technology and ideas, I believe that the continual conversion of ideas and development effort into the private property of companies like Apple is a great threat to continued free innovation.

Nautilus image converter is a nautilus extension to mass resize or rotate images. if installed an additional menu entry will appear when you right click the mouse inside nautilus. It is a convenient utility which can save you lot of effort.

Parallels, the virtualization and cloud enabler, has officially announced they’re supporting Chrome OS, Google's Linux distribution. Here are the implications for corporate customers, consumers and partners.

The Linux world is all excited about Ubuntu's new look but surely there are more important things that need to be done to make Ubuntu more appealing?

Showtwell is an open source photo organizer for the Gnome desktop which we were telling you about some time ago. Since then, Shotwell progressed a lot and the latest version 0.5 will bring (it has not been released yet, but it's available in our PPA) a lot of cool new features: * Picasa Web publishing (just like gThumb did a few weeks ago) * Tags as another way of organizing your collection * Printing * Adjust photos dates and times, both to a single moment and shifting several forward and backward in time * more!

Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density, always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive, worth-reading summary stating that "4 KiB logical sector support is broken in both the kernel and partitioners." As the subsequent discussion revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that we're not quite that badly prepared; click below (subscribers only) for details.

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.” My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.

The LibrePlanet conference, being held March 19-21 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will be featuring a day-long Women's Caucus on Sunday March 21st. That track will be focusing on finding concrete ways to increase women's participation in free software, including a panel on recruiting and retaining women, a presentation on mentoring, and a workshop on how non-coders can take up critical roles in free software projects. In addition, LibrePlanet has keynotes from FSF founder Richard Stallman and EFF founder John Gilmore. More information can be found on the web sites or in the schedule.

Remember Terra Soft and its Yellow Dog Linux for Power processors? Well, Yellow Dog is no longer the darling Linux for Apple machines since the latter company switched to Intel Core and Xeon processors for its PCs and servers a few years back. And Terra Soft doesn't exist any more, after it was acquired by a Japanese company called Fixstars in November 2008. But Yellow Dog is still digging in the back yard to find a cool spot to lay down, and this time around it's playing with Nvidia's CUDA programming environment for its Tesla family of GPU co-processors.

Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence.

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Bruce Byfield takes a look at innovations in GNOME and KDE. "Of course, GNOME and KDE have long had features that Windows lacked, such as multiple desktops and finer controls for customizing the user experience. However, in the last few years, both major free desktops have added features that show not only an interest in usability, but, at times, an effort to anticipate what users might actually want. The focus is by no means consistent, yet scattered here and there are features that can make any user glad that they're using a open source desktop."

The H covers the CeBIT Open Source Forum. "The CeBIT Open Source Forum, a prominent feature in the Open Source area of Hall 2, featured several lectures, demonstrations and keynote speeches on several topics, from Open Source in data centres and security, to web browsers, mobility and multimedia. The H attended several of the Open Source Forum sessions, including the introduction of the latest 6.3 release of the popular Knoppix Live Linux distribution by Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper."

Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, reminisces about some achievements during his tenure. "Got some of the most important software in the computer industry released under Free licenses that guarantee software freedom for people who rely on them, regardless of who owns the copyrights. Unix, Java, key elements of Linux, the SPARC chip and much more have been liberated."

Debian has updated typo3-src (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated bournal (F13, F12, F11: multiple vulnerabilities), F12: curl (arbitrary code execution), and F11: sudo (unintended privilege escalation).

Pardus has updated sudo (unintended privilege escalation) and firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).

Slackware has updated httpd (multiple vulnerabilities).

Linux is cool, Linux users know that much. There are a lot of cool things Linux, and to kick off, here is one of them: A linux beer machine.