Monthly Archive:: January 2006

So you might have heard of the new GNU Gnash Flash player from GNU.org. While still in it's infancy, it's the first non-Macromedia stand alone flash player available. Here is an article walking you through installing Gnash on Linux. It's geared toward Mandriva, but can be used by anyone to compile Gnash from source.

Alan Cox, a leading UK Linux developer, has expressed his support for the next version of the General Public License. His viewpoint is in direct contradiction to Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, who said last week that he won't convert Linux to GPL 3 as he objects to its proposed digital rights management provisions. Cox said that the DRM provisions "don't really matter" to the Linux kernel as DRM is generally used by applications.

While Sun Microsystems is open to licensing Solaris under Version 3.0 of the GNU General Public License, it will not reconsider its decision not to license the operating system under GPL 2.0, the current version of the license. Sun created the CDDL for Solaris after rejecting GPL 2.0 as too restrictive for its purposes. Sun will not consider licensing Solaris under the current GPL for the same reasons it gave when it created the CDDL, which is based in large part on the MPL (Mozilla Public License), Tom Goguen, Sun's vice president of software marketing, told eWEEK in an interview.

Microsoft has solidified the time frame for the release of its Team Foundation Server and will be releasing a preview of another key piece of Visual Studio technology, a company executive said at the VSLive conference here. In a keynote address, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of developer tools at Microsoft, said that in the next week or so, Microsoft will "make the first CTP drop of Visual Studio Tools for Applications." Somasegar also said the TFS (Team Foundation Server) component of VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) will reach release candidate status by the end of this week and will reach RTM status in March.

Microsoft has begun e-mailing its corporate customers worldwide, letting them know that they may need to start using a different version of Office as a result of a recent legal setback. The software maker said Monday that it has been forced to issue new versions of Office 2003 and Office XP, which change the way Microsoft's Access database interacts with its Excel spreadsheet. "It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."

IBM is outfitting its line of System i5 servers with the new Power5+ processor and is introducing the newest version of its i5/OS operating system. The enhancements are designed to improve the performance and reach of the systems - which are targeted at SMBs - while upgrading the flexibility, security and disaster recovery capabilities in the operating system, according to Ian Jarmen, product manager for IBM's iSeries platform.

"In this interview, OSBC director Matt Asay contends that Microsoft has been missing out on a huge opportunity with open source, but it is beginning to wake up. Whether Microsoft can become one of the guys remains to be seen, but if Asay is correct about OSS being on the cusp of core enterprise adoption, it will be an interesting year for open source."

"Among the many free software projects out there, I think ReactOS is particularly worth some discussion. This is an effort to create a complete, clean room re-implementation of the entire Microsoft Windows NT operating system. Here is why I think this project is important."

"In an important new development, the administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has not only appointed a permanent replacement to State CIO Peter Quinn, but also dedicated the press release announcing that appointment to reconfirming its steadfast commitment to the implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument Format. The announcement that Louis Gutierrez would replace Quinn was made today by State Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco, the immediate supervisor of the State CIO. The appointment of Gutierrez will be effective on February 6, 2006."

The OpenVZ project has released a beta kernel based on 2.6.15 (their current stable kernel is based on 2.6.8). Kernel 2.6.15 brings in some new features like CFQv2 I/O schedulers, enhancements in memory management, ext3 online resizing, and so on. This kernel is already stable enough to be used for testing/evaluation. Some things such as 4GB split and Fair CPU scheduler are not yet ported, but they are working on it. For interested kernel developers, they have also released broken out patch sets for the 2.6.15-based kernels, available from here.

Dave Miller of Red Hat has published three presentations from his keynote speech at the LCA Linux kernel conference which cover the Linux port to the SPARC64 Niagara architecture (Dave Miller is a long term primary SPARC port developer and maintainer) as well as two presentations covering Kernel Developer Social Interactions and TCP/IP networking.

"It's cool to say you have a dual-core machine, but in the grand scheme of things, having it doesn't make much difference in performance. If, however, your software can share the computational burden across your collection of processor cores, it's a different kettle of fish. Then you actually get more work done in a given amount of time. The technique is called thread-level parallelism, more commonly known as threading, and it requires some mental adjustment on the part of the developer."