Via announces COM Express modules

The COM Express computer-on-module specification has gained a high-profile advocate, as Via announced it will begin producing its own products compatible with the format. The Eden- and C7-based modules will target "larger OEMs only" in gaming, healthcare, and industrial automation, says Via.

Via says its COM Express modules will offer Eden or C7 processors ranging from 500MHz to 2GHz, plus the option of soldered system memory. The modules will sport a wide range of I/O and be offered with an evaluation baseboard. "Extensive technical support" will be given to customers who want to produce their own custom baseboards, the company adds.

The 4.5 x 3.7-inch COM Express form-factor allows for a substantial complement of I/O controllers and ports, thanks to the COM Express Type 2 pinout, which makes conventional I/O connectors unnecessary. With Type 2, I/O and bus signals, including high-speed point-to-point PCI Express lanes, are passed to the baseboard via two high-density surface-mount connectors.

While Via has not released any specifications for its new COM Express modules, the PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group) standard includes support for:

• Up to 32 PCI Express lanes with 80Gbps aggregate bandwidth
  
• External x16 PCI Express graphics
  
• Up to four SATA-150 links with 600Mbps aggregate bandwidth
  
• Up to three gigabit Ethernet ports, with provision for 10-Gbit Ethernet in the future
  
• Up to eight USB 2.0 ports
  
• Up to two channels of LVDS
  
• Up to two channels of Serial DVO

Previous COM Express modules using Via chipsets have been somewhat rare, compared to those based on Intel. One example is Kontron's ETXexpress-CN8 and microETXexpress-CN8, based on the C7 processor and CN896/VT8251 chipset. Functionally identical to COM Express, ETXexpress was originated by Kontron.

Further information

The first samples of Via's COM Express modules are available now, but, as mentioned above, the company has not released specifications. Large OEMs are requested to contact Via directly at embedded@via.com.tw for further details.

Original link: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news...

Open Mobile Browser Market on Track for Strong Growth

The mobile open Internet browser segment will grow from 76 million browsers delivered in 2007 to about 700 million in 2013, according to ABI Research. The mobile browser market in general will be installed on 1.5 billion handsets by that year, the company predicts.


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The mobile browser market is currently "transforming," and sophisticated Web browsing software will be installed on 1.5 billion handsets by 2013, analysts predict.

ABI Research said that a growing number of smartphones incorporate browsers which support the latest capabilities such as Ajax and RSS (really simple syndication).

The analyst firm expects this market to account for the "vast majority" of growth over the next five years.
Accessing Content Without Limitations

ABI predicted that the mobile open Internet Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here. browser segment will grow from 76 million browsers delivered in 2007 to nearly 700 million in 2013.

"The focus today for mobile browser developers is to take advantage of the latest Web standards while developing solutions tailored to the unique experience of using a browser on a mobile phone," said ABI Director Michael Wolf.

"The most recent commercial solutions from Opera, Openwave and Access, as well as those using open source solutions such as Webkit, allow consumers to access content on the Web without limitations due to browser constraints," he noted.

Wolf added that it is important to note that, despite the best efforts of browser vendors and handset manufacturers, Web usage on mobile devices has a "significant distance" to go in closing the gap with PC-based browsers.
'Increasingly Important Components'

"The absence of important plug-ins such as Flash on many handsets, and the constraints of many phones compared to the PC, mean that even open Internet browser vendors such as Skyfire continue to see a need for server-assisted architectures for transcoding and Web acceleration," he said.

"The move towards Web-based applications means that browser and Web services engines will become increasingly important for mobile, whether in a commercial browser implementation or a customized widget.

"Ultimately, the long-term trend away from native applications to Web-based applications means that browser and Web services engines will be increasingly important components in the mobile environment," Wolf said.

Original link: http://linuxinsider.com/story/Op...

Open Source Census launches

By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, 04/16/08

The Open Source Census, an effort to pin down hard statistics regarding the implementation of open-source software around the world, gets underway on Wednesday.

The census was first announced in December by founder OpenLogic, a vendor of tools and services for managing open-source software deployments. It has provided an automated census tool called OSS Discovery under an open-source license for the project.

Companies and individuals can use the tool to scan their computers for open-source software and then anonymously upload the data to the effort's site. The information will be available in two forms. Those who contribute can get reports summarizing their own use, as well as comparative data based on similar companies' results. Aggregated data untraceable to any company will be available publicly on the site.

There is a practical reason for enterprise shops to participate in the effort, one observer suggested.

"Survey stuff like this -- and OpenLogic isn't the only one talking about or doing it -- are really examples of Enterprise 2.0 philosophy in action," said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk. "Why not pool together the collective product-use intelligence from all enterprises to help enterprises make build-buy decisions, instead of relying on vendors, analysts and other middlemen in the process of doing IT procurement?"

Sample census data provided by OpenLogic showed several ways the numbers could be crunched. They could list the popularity of various Linux distributions, chart the countries of respondents, or even list the top 20 open-source packages.

This level of data can be tough to obtain through traditional survey techniques, said Matthew Lawton, an IDC analyst covering open-source software business models.

IDC targets a range of respondents for its surveys, from CIOs to developers, but no single person can have "complete visibility over all the open-source software in an organization," he said. For example, a respondent might have a good sense of the major open-source projects in use at their company, but not a full accounting of every small module or pilot project in existence, Lawton explained.

"This type of census approach, to scan computers and get a complete list of what has been loaded on those computers, is a fundamentally more sound way to measure the amount of open-source software," he said.

IDC is among a number of additional project sponsors being announced Wednesday. Others include CollabNet, the Open Solutions Alliance, the Open Source Business Foundation and O'Reilly Media.

Apache Foundation Chairman Jim Jagielski and Tony Wasserman, director of the software management program at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus, are acting as advisers to the project.

Original link: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2...

MySQL upgrade now slated for June, Sun says

By James Niccolai, IDG News Service, 04/15/08

Sun Microsystems pushed out a "near final" version of MySQL 5.1 on Tuesday, but is holding back the production release of the open-source database until it irons out some remaining bugs, officials said Tuesday.

Sun wants to avoid issuing another buggy release of the database, which is what happened when MySQL, which Sun acquired in January, released MySQL 5.0 two years ago, said Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL who is now a senior vice president at Sun.

"When we released MySQL 5.0 it didn't really meet our quality standards," he said Tuesday at the start of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California. "With 5.1 we are being much more conservative, much harder on ourselves."

Sun made a "release candidate" of the software available for download on Tuesday. Mickos said it will release the production version by the end of June, or about three months later than planned.

This marks the first MySQL conference since Sun acquired the company in January. MySQL had been planning an initial public offering before Mickos decided to accept Sun's US$1 billion acquisition offer at a dinner with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz last November.

Mickos showed a photo on Tuesday of himself and two other MySQL executives, taken on the beach at sunset in Santa Cruz, California, standing around a fire and ceremoniously burning the IPO documents that they never used.

"We took all those bankers' documents and our stock ticker symbol and everything else and we burned it," he said. "It was a sad moment, but also a moment of leaving things behind" and accepting the company's future as part of Sun.

Sun says the deal makes sense because it will be able to bring its vast sales, engineering and support resources to MySQL. Sun has about 32,000 employees worldwide and MySQL had only 400. Sun also hopes the deal will open new doors for it to sell its server hardware and other products.

Mickos and Schwartz, who also spoke here, sought to emphasize the synergies between the companies. Schwartz said he has been a champion of open-source software since he took over as CEO two years ago last week.

"The number one thing we are working on with Sun now is performance and scale," Mickos said. "We are known as one of the fastest databases, but all our big customers tell us they want more scale."

MySQL already has some very large customers, including Amazon and Google. But such customers typically modify the open-source software to support their large-scale Web applications.

Sun's goal is to add better scale and performance to the official, supported releases of MySQL, and to better support traditional back-end applications where IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are the dominant vendors.

My SQL 5.1 adds some of those capabilities, including table and index partitioning, which will improve query response times; and row-based replication, for faster and more reliable replication. The update also includes an event scheduler that lets administrators automate common SQL tasks.

The release candidate issued Tuesday is not recommended for production use unless a customer needs the new features right away, Mickos said. He said the delay in the release was not related to Sun's acquisition. The release candidate already has fewer bugs than there were in the production release of MySQL 5.0, he said.

Original link: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2...

Kate Developers Meeting

A Kate Developer Meeting was held last weekend hosted by basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt to great success. Developers interested in improving KDE's advanced text editor met to shape the roadmap of Kate. An impressive nine attendees turned up including several new faces.

On Saturday we started early and discussed the following agenda

• Scripting
• Indentation
• Kate Sessions
• Extending the highlighting system
• Collaborative editing
• Text input modes (vi mode)
• Minor topics: Search & replace, text completion
• Interface review
• Simplifying KWrite

In short, scripting support will allow us to extend Kate with little helper and indentation scripts. We rethought Kate's session workflow to better meet the user's needs. There are plans to allow combined highlighting, which means mixing e.g. HTML and php syntax highlighting will be even more powerful. Collaborative features was also a point which is especially interesting with regard to Decibel. Another hot topic is the support of additional input modes (vi mode) for power users. Other work includes interfaces for e.g. line annotations, which can be used by KDevelop to show svn annotations inside the editor. Besides that, KWrite - the simple version of Kate - was stripped down to not confuse the users. Experts still can turn on the advanced mode to have a full featured KWrite application. For detailed results please read the developer meeting protocol.

Apart from the discussions there were other highlights like Kate running smoothly on Windows or basysKom's coffee machine. We are really pleased with the results of the meeting and plan to repeat it on a yearly basis.

Thanks to basysKom GmbH, the KDE e.V. and Joseph Wenninger for making this event happen.

Original link: https://www.chineselinuxuniversi...

GNU and FSF tell WBUR.org Boston: PlayOgg!

----------------------------------------------------------
Take Action with PlayOgg.org:
    Public broadcasting deserves free audio formats!
----------------------------------------------------------

  Read the blog and the letter to WBUR.org Boston:
  * http://www.fsf.org/blogs/wbur-playogg

Boston-locals: Join the PlayOgg.org campaign to hand-deliver a letter
to "Boston's NPR Station," WBUR, requesting that they provide an Ogg
Vorbis stream on wbur.org. To make sure they understand that our
request stems from a serious ethical concern, and not just a
preference in technology, we are going to be delivering the letter in
person as well as handing out informative fliers to employees and
guests that morning.

Not a Boston-local? No problem, find out how you can help:
  http://www.fsf.org/blogs/wbur-playogg#nonlocals


Media Contacts:
  Joshua Gay, campaigns manager
  Free Software Foundation
  http://PlayOgg.org
  Phone: (617)542-5942 x19


_______________________________________________
FSF And GNU Press mailing list <info-press@gnu.org>
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-press

Original link: http://lwn.net/Articles/277983/

Meet IT industry analyst Dan Kusnetzky (video)

Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/131...

Probe upgraded with Linux kernel analyzer

Semiconductor design firm MIPS Technologies is offering a kernel profiling tool that works with its EJTAG hardware probe. The Eclipse-based Hot Spot Analyzer (HSA) utility works the company's FS2 System Navigator EJTAG probes, and can be used to debug Linux kernels running on MIPS-based SoCs.

(Click for larger view of the MIPS/FS2 System Navigator EJTAG probe)

The HSA utility leverages the "zero overhead" program counter (PC) sampling feature built into the 24K, 34K, and 74K MIPS32 core families, says the company. The utility can profile any code running in the kernel segment space of an embedded MIPS-based system, including "bare iron" programs or classic real-time operating system (RTOS) environments. It addition to kernel support it can profile loadable modules used in device drivers, and is said to enable software engineers to quickly identify program bottlenecks within the Linux kernel that restrict system performance.


MIPS 74K pipeline flow
(Click to enlarge)
Typically, profiling tools require time-consuming post-processing of large trace buffers or depend on tedious sampling tasks, says MIPS. By comparison, says the company, when running HSA, the System Navigator EJTAG probe can sample the processor PC register at high data rates without hindering the real-time operation of the processor, thereby enabling faster profiling.

Developed by a division of MIPS called First Silicon Solutions (FS2), the System Navigator supports all the latest MIPS cores and licensee processors in the MIPS32 and MIPS64 families. The hardware probe supports all the EJTAG features in MIPS cores, says MIPS, as well as PDtrace features in the processor implementation, when available.

The HSA is said to be integrated in the MIPS Navigator Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which offers industry-standard Eclipse-based CDT (C/C Development Toolkit) and plugins, says MIPS. It is also said to provide debugging support for all MIPS32 and MIPS64 cores, as well as on- and off-chip probe trace features.

Stated MIPS VP Rick Leatherman, "As with most issues in software debug, the problem is not fixing the bug but finding it. Because the stock Linux kernel is very complex and configurable, knowing exactly how it interacts with various applications is a challenge."

Availability

The Hot Spot Analyzer is available now for System Navigator customers, says MIPS. It is sold as an Eclipse Plug-in or as part of the Navigator IDE. More information on the System Navigator probe may be found here, and more on the IDE may be found here.

Original link: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news...

PCI Express bus climbs aboard PC/104

An industry group maintaining the PC/104 family of stackable single-board computer standards has adopted a new three-connector interface equipped with an x16 PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The PC/104 Consortium's 156-pin PCI/104 Express interface mounts a challenge to the stackable "SUMIT" interface also announced today at ESC.

(Click for larger view of the PCI/104-Express format )

The PC/104 Consortium is a mature standards body that originated PC/104, its PCI-equipped PC/104-Plus offshoot, and the PCI-only (no ISA bus) PCI-104 standards. It also looks after the EPIC and EBX embedded board form factors. It boasts some 22 members -- roughly twice as many as the fledgling SFF-SIG promoting the SUMIT interface and Express104 form factor.

The PC/104 Consortium says its new PCI/104-Express format is backward compatible to earlier PC/104-based standards, and also ready to support PCI Express 2.0. It can be used immediately on PC/104, EPIC, and EBX form factors.

Compared to the earlier PCI-104 format, PCI/104-Express expands to three connectors and 156 pins. It offers full x16 PCI Express (PCIe) integration, while also offering a legacy PCI bus, except on a "PCIe/104" variant with 104 pins and two connectors instead of three.

By comparison, the rival SUMIT, announced today by the Small Form-Factor Special Interest Group (SFF-SIG) maintains PCI/104's 104-pin count. However, it has only x4 PCI Express, and requires bridge chips to support legacy PCI and ISA peripherals.


Comparison with EPIC and EBX formats
(Click to enlarge)

The making of Wine (how to make Windows apps merrier with Linux)

Jeremy White, co-founder and CEO of CodeWeavers, talked to Microsoft Subnet today about how Wine might make IT professionals a lot merrier. For those wanting to save money on desktops by using Linux, but feel trapped into Windows because of the need to run Windows apps, Wine can help. Ten days ago, the folks at CodeWeavers released the almost official version of this open source project that allows Windows programs to run on Linux and Mac desktops. Wine is on course for official release, its 1.0 version, in the next 60 days.

It's been a long road for Wine and White. He's been working on the project since 1999 when he hired Wine's primary developer, Alexandre Julliard. White then put CodeWeavers, the startup he founded three years earlier, to work bringing Wine to fruition. And Wine had been aging prior to that. The 1.0 version is slated to ship on June 6, which is actually the 15-year anniversary of the project's inception. To be sure, it didn't take that long for CodeWeavers to ship a commercial product, CrossOver. The first was available in 2002. CrossOver, which uses the Wine code at its core, now features three versions, CrossOver Linux, CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Games.

But the goal has always been to send out a fully open source version of Wine, White says. When you think about it, in 1999, such a goal was way ahead of its time. 1999 was the year of hype and IPOs for the industry. True, server Linux had captured Wall Street's attention, but it certainly had not captured a whole lot of market share in the enterprise yet. Still, that year, the young OS starred in two of the most frenzied pre-bubble IPOs to date, Red Hat and VA Linux. (Just for fun - check out this timeline of Linux.) While industry pundits were mouthing off about how Linux would take down Microsoft, hardly anyone was seriously considering desktop Linux.

Flash forward to today. It's been the better part of a decade and Microsoft has not been toppled by anyone's reckoning. However it did release Vista - perhaps the most hated Windows operating system of all time (though it's hard to beat Windows ME on that count). Enterprises badly want alternatives to Windows. Desktop Linux has come a long way since 1999, too. and (who knew?) the Mac has become the ultra chic, must-have PC. The enterprise has its alternatives - if it can only get those mission critical Windows apps to work flawlessly. Wine, in its commercial form, has been doing so for years.

So, in 2008, the 1.0 version will hit the streets and the timing could not be more perfect. White admits that not every Windows application will work flawlessly on Wine, but many a critical one for the enterprise has been specifically optimized. These include Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, and Adobe Photoshop. Several Linux distros ship with Wine, too, White says.

Another upside of the long development cycle is that the Wine community has had a chance to grow exponentially since the first CrossOver edition. White says less than ½ of the major contributors work for CodeWeavers and counting all contributors, some 800 people have been involved.

Besides letting you run actual Windows versions of software on your Linux or Mac PC, Wine is cool because of the enormity of what Julliard and White accomplished. The witty and irreverent White is unabashedly proud as he suggests that Wine be considered "an amazing technological marvel."

"We are completely rewriting the Windows operating system from the ground up," he says. "Basically we took Microsoft's crown jewel, that they've had billions of dollars to develop using tens of thousands of developers, and we, the open source community, have essentially re-implemented that. We are the scrappy underdogs. Here's where the Hollywood music comes up."

Agreed. Click below for the musical accompaniment (the theme song to the Underdog cartoon) and please reread the paragraph above.

Original link: http://www.networkworld.com/comm...