Back
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Release Candidate for Ubuntu
8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) on desktop and server. Codenamed "Hardy
Heron", 8.04 LTS continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the
latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality,
easy-to-use Linux distribution.
We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for
testing by any user.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition features incremental improvements to
familiar applications, with an emphasis on stability for this second Ubuntu
long-term support release, and is easier than ever to try out with the new
Wubi installer.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition follows in the footsteps of Ubuntu 7.10 with
even more virtualization support and security enhancements - enabling
AppArmor for more applications by default, improving protection of kernel
memory against attacks, and supporting KVM and iSCSI technologies out of the
box.
The Ubuntu 8.04 LTS family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and
Mythbuntu, also reach RC status today.
After some minor delays (like all rawhide flights grounded for a few
days of repair...), the Fedora Project is proud to announce the release
of Fedora 9 Preview!
This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product
will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora
community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major
public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we
hope).
For this Preview release, we will be doing a staged offering. The first
stage, available now, will be via bittorrent. The second stage, which
should be available early next week, will be via our world wide
mirroring system, and will include jigdo.
Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available.
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked "F9-Preview".
Please us bugzilla to report any problems you find (after making sure
that somebody else hasn't already reported the issues).
Thanks again for all the great testing work that the greater community
does throughout our development cycle! You make Fedora possible. You
are Fedora!
--
Jesse Keating Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours? -- fedora-announce-list mailing list fedora-announce-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list Original link: http://lwn.net/Articles/278620/ Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.
"Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source," Ozzie said. "As people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and others has increased." That means that from the very start when Microsoft begins developing new products, it considers what components it will want to open up to outside developers, he said. Still, that doesn't mean that Microsoft is changing its approach to business. "We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically will take certain aspects of what we do and open source them where we believe there will be a real benefit to the community," he said. The open sourcing of the .Net framework is an example of that, he said. Ozzie also spoke a bit about Microsoft's vision for using the Web to connect devices and content, in what may foreshadow an announcement the company plans for next week. "The Web really is a hub. It can be viewed conceptually as a hub for a social mesh and device mesh," he said. Using the Internet as a hub for a social mesh means people can connect a wide range of online content like information they tag and rank, content they publish and information they subscribe to, he said. Ozzie's vision could hint at a service, Live Mesh, that Microsoft plans to unveil on Tuesday. The company has not revealed any details about the offering except to say it will be unveiled next week during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Ozzie briefly described a similar mesh vision earlier this year at the Mix 08 conference. Microsoft already offers an online sharing service, SkyDrive, which is still in beta. SkyDrive is an online storage system that users can access from their PCs and from any other device with a browser, like a smartphone. Beyond content, the Internet can also serve as a hub for devices, Ozzie said. "From a device standpoint, the Web can be a hub in terms of bringing devices we have together," he said. While enterprises often connect and manage thousands of computers in a business, individuals have a variety of devices such as phones, PCs, media centers and music players that are mostly unconnected, he said. Microsoft has already done some connecting of devices, including a service that lets Xbox and Zune users share media between the devices via the Web. That model can also be extended to broaden the way that enterprises connect devices, he said. For example, a mobile user could take a photograph and use the picture in a project the user is working on via a PC and the Web, he said. Ozzie also touched on two other principles guiding the work at Microsoft, including getting the mix of software and services right and moving away from "monolithic" programs to fragmented pieces of software that end-users can choose to use as appropriate. Virtualization is another area that Microsoft thinks will be increasingly important. "Within the enterprise, virtualization is the simplest and most straightforward way to make the best use of data center resources," he said. Ozzie also praised the work the MVPs do in providing feedback to Microsoft. The software industry "used to be so supply constrained," he said. "You could build almost anything and there'd be an audience waiting for it." Today, however, there's an abundance of software and services that users can choose from. That means Microsoft's challenge is to better understand what users want in order to best target their needs, he said. About 4,000 technology experts make up Microsoft's MVP program. Nearly 1,800 of them met this week in Seattle at an annual summit. Original link: http://www.pcworld.com/businessc... Back in September 2003, when Red Hat discontinued its home-oriented Red Hat Linux desktop and offloaded that market to the community-driven but Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, many people were left wondering if Red Hat would ever again offer a product aimed at home desktops. We have the answer now.
In an update to Red Hat's plans concerning desktop offerings, which sometimes "find themselves in the shade" due to Red Hat's focus on server offerings, Red Hat's Desktop Team gave a clear-cut answer to the question: "We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future." That leaves little to the imagination. The reasoning given by the Desktop Team is fairly clear to me. Red Hat is a public for-profit company, and as such, it needs to think about its bottom-line. Getting a good bottom-line is much tougher in the home desktop market than it is in the world of servers, due to the fact that the former has one dominant vendor, while the latter is much more diverse, making it easier to successfully market for. They state that building a sustainable business model around the home desktop is tough. "History is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities." So, what will be the focus of Red Hat's desktop product plans? From the blog entry: * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This is our fully supported, commercial product. It is 100 percent compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server products. Its focus is to provide a desktop environment that is secure and easily managed. And it is upgradeable with the Multi-OS option (which provides virtualization support) or the Workstation option (which provides high-end workstation capabilities). * Fedora. This is a Red Hat sponsored, fast-growing, free product. While Red Hat doesn't formally support Fedora, users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it. * Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD). Plans for this product were originally announced at the 2007 Summit Conference. It is designed exclusively for small, reseller supplied, deployments in emerging markets (e.g. primarily the BRIC countries), and will be supplied by a number of Intel channel partners. That should more or less settle the matter for at least the coming years. Original link: http://osnews.com/story/19647/Re... By Kasja Linnarsson, PC World, 04/17/08
Virtual reality is making its move from gaming and social sites into the business world. Project Wonderland, developed by Sun Labs, already allows businesses to improve distance collaboration by building online replicas of their offices or classrooms where colleagues may use 3D representations of themselves to attend meetings, give presentations, and interact. Project Wonderland is an open-source toolkit for building virtual worlds. The toolkit comes with a prebuilt office environment, but developers who want to design their own world can download instructions on how to do so. An Early Adopter One user is Green Phosphor, which sells virtual worlds to enterprises. The company, uses the platform for its business data-mapping application, giving 3D illustrations of data graphs inside virtual worlds. The idea is to help the user visualize the data by creating the feeling of standing in the middle of a spreadsheet. Green Phosphor tried building prototypes of its application on different platforms such as Second Life, Open Croquet, and Open Simulator, but chose to stay with Project Wonderland because of its networking model and Java base. "Since the platform is Java-based, we've been able to add some elements to Wonderland that would have been more difficult to build using other platforms," says Ben Lindquist, CEO of Green Phosphor. "Another aspect that differentiates Wonderland from the competition is its audio features," says Lindquist. At a recent open house-event at Sun Labs' Menlo Park, CA facility, the research team behind the project placed particular emphasis on sound features, showing how people unable to attend a meeting in the virtual world could call in just as they would to a real-life phone conference. |
The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of
openSUSE 11.0! There are many exciting enhancements and features in
the new release. Among these is the incredibly fast package management
(libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new
installer, installable live CDs and much more.
For an overview and links to additional information on the changes, see the announcement over at http://news.opensuse.org/... Some updates ================ The package management stack of openSUSE, libzypp, has seen constant improvements since the last release. We introduced a new SAT solver[0] and repository metadata that means that openSUSE's package management works at a lightning-fast speed.[1] [0] http://files.opensuse.org/... [1] http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/296 Installation in 24 minutes: Due to changes within the installation media itself and the advances in openSUSE's package management, an openSUSE installation is now well over 60% faster, completing in roughly just 24 minutes! (Your mileage may vary, offer not valid for 486s?)
Other:
* Linux kernel 2.6.25-rc9
* updated gcc 4.3 branch
* libzypp 3.12.1
* PackageKit 0.2.0
* AppArmor 2.3
* Xen 3.2.1 RC1
* glibc 2.8 CVS
* PulseAudio 0.9.10
A more detailed list of changes is available via the Factory/News[3] page.SugarCRM Inc. was one of the first application-specific open source companies. It has gone from three employees to over 160 between 2004 and 2008. SugarCRM has taken some heat over its dual-licensing system. Roberts explains why this licensing scheme is a financial necessity for the company, and offers some excellent advice for people who want to start their own open source-based companies. Ogg version (right-click to download) Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/132... Overall objective of this class is to teach attendees on how to develop device drivers for Linux. This three day course provides substantial practice with the key steps in developing Linux device drivers. The course shows attendees how device drivers work with the Linux kernel, how to compile and load drivers, how to debug drivers, as well as other essential topics. This course
acquaints developers with the issues essential for Linux device
driver development. The course progresses through a number
of topics. Each topic is presented along with a supporting
laboratory exercise before moving on to the next topic. Attendees
will spend approximately 50 percent of the class time actually
gaining hands-on experience with these topics. Course Objectives: • To provide an understanding of the essentials of Linux device drivers. • To give you practical experience in developing Linux device drivers. • The steps necessary to add devices to a Linux system • How to determine what hardware is present on a Linux system • The purpose and functionality of device drivers • Compiling and linking device drivers • Trade-offs between loadable modules and drivers compiled into the kernel. Who Should Attend: The course is designed for software engineers who are new to Linux device drivers. Attendees should have experience with C, be able to perform basic Unix commands, and have some experience with the basic Gnu tools of gcc, gdb, and make. Course Materials The class materials for this course have been meticlously designed by leading practioners in this area. The workshop materials include a comprehensive student workbook and CD. The workbook contains all of the slides used in the course as well as hands-on lab exercises. The CD contains the lab exercise code as well as a large amount of Linux software. Course Workshop and Set-up: The workshop makes use of standard PC’s with a desktop Linux distribution for development. The course will make use of PC's and PC devices as examples. (Review) - Most people these days think of Everex as the company that’s looking to bring Linux-powered desktop PCs with their own brand of Linux to the masses. But did you know that in many ways, they are in a position to do what Dell should have done from day one into the Ubuntu deal? If Everex plays their cards right, they could quite literally take any Linux thunder away from Dell and really make a name for themselves in a relatively new market.
Linux is Front Page On Everex.com. Despite also being retailers of Windows machines, Everex has currently dedicated their front page to two Linux distros using their tightly controlled hardware. Being unafraid of the Redmond "boogyman," this is a company that has what it takes to take Linux into the realm of the mainstream marketplace. Besides embracing Linux as a viable option as vendors, Everex also helped to create a distro of their own, based on Ubuntu. Yes, rather than waiting for Google to do it, they helped to bring about the creation of the gOS themselves. It’s very clever on two fronts. Designed to Compete With ASUS Eee. While the Zonbu notebook has been released to the masses as a widescreen, foolproof notebook option using Everex hardware, I recently discovered that there would soon be a direct competitor to the Eee that will better reflect the small form factor. Said to be known as the "Cloudbook," Everex will be more appealing to most people, as it simply provides more from what I can see. Despite Eee and Cloudbook being low-powered computers, it’s clear that Cloudbook will provide a bit more punch for your dollar: - Eee: 900MHz Celeron processor, 4GB SSD (solid-state disk) - Cloudbook: VIA 1.2GHz, 30GB hard disk drive And yet, each will have about the same price point. Seeing some benchmarks on each ought to be interesting, that's for sure. Around Since 1983. What’s truly fascinating is that if it were not for Linspire making the first attempts just a few years ago, in the same marketplace, Everex would not be in this position today with Zonbu and the gOS. Funny, this company has been around since 1983 and it’s only now that they are branching out beyond Windows that people have actually begun to really think of them as a serious contender for a sizable share of the low-cost PC market. Will they be able to get themselves into the likes of Best Buy and other big box stores? If initial sales numbers are any indication, it will only be a matter of time. Original link: http://www.osweekly.com/index.ph...  A Nokia-sponsored project is porting Ubuntu Linux to the ARM architecture. The "Handheld Mojo" team has completed ARM builds of Feisty Fawn (dubbed "Frisky Firedrake") and Gutsy Gibbon ("Grumpy Griffin"), with Hardy Heron compilation starting soon.
With a few exceptions, most Ubuntu software compiles fine for ARM, according to Andrew Christian, the engineering fellow at Nokia who leads the effort. Notable exceptions are Java, Mono, G77 (a Fortran compiler), and the software that depends on them. Speaking at the Embedded Linux Conference in Mountain View this week, Christian showed an N800 tablet running the GIMP, an open source image processing package that he said worked well on the device. Christian told attendees that cross-compiling is much faster than native compilation. However, he said that most Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) packages are not correctly set up for cross-build environments. For that reason, his team found it better to compile natively, because less human intervention is required. In setting up a native build environment, Mojo went to the extent of assembling its own single-board computer around an ARM-based Intel processor. Installed in 1U rackmount cases, and stacked up in a rack, the boards can collectively compile the 25,000 binaries comprising a full Ubuntu distribution (some packages build more than one object file) in about 10 days, Christian said. He commented that cooling fans installed in the cases were "probably overkill." To bootstrap a native ARM development toolchain, Christian used the ARM EABI port contributed to Debian in early 2007 by single-board computer vendor ADS. This saved considerable time, he said. Christian also said he thought Debian should change how it packages source code for ARM's several variations. Instead of treating each as a completely separate architecture, the project should use the Deb package format's directory structure to organize sub-architectures, and the architecture field in the format's meta-data to specify where the package ought to build, with "ARM-all" being one possible option. In an interview with LinuxDevices, Christian said that his team looked forward to creating more powerful native ARM build systems. In particular, he was encouraged to try commodity ARM-based NAS servers that could be modified to accept up to 2GB of RAM, according to reports from hobbyists around the Internet. The current Mojo boards top out at 256MB, and become memory-bound building large packages like KDE, he said. As an alternative to ARM-based machines, Mojo is also testing x86 servers with QEMU-ARM emulation software. QEMU is reportedly faster than real ARM hardware when run on newer x86-based PCs. Besides Christian, other key developers working on the port include Brian Avery, veteran of HP's iPaq Linux port, and George France, former maintainer of the Linux kernel for the Alpha architecture. Analysis
As Intel launches Atom Centrino into the device market, Mojo's ports could help narrow x86's "software advantage." While ARM may always win over x86 on low power and small size, due to legacy functions like instruction set decoding in x86, x86 does benefit from a massive body of well-tested software. And, as x86 pioneer Glenn Henry explained in a recent interview, "software begets more software." Software superiority has arguably enabled x86 to dominate the desktop and server markets over more "elegant" RISC-based architectures in the past. Why will things be any different in the long run in the mobile space? On the other hand, ARM is well-entrenched in devices, handily beating out Intel in embedded project starts for the last several years, according to LinuxDevices.com reader surveys. Hopefully, Mojo will also consider an ARMv7 port, given that Texas Instruments has promised to offer inexpensive developer kits for its OMAP35xx parts. Based on dual-issue Cortex-A8 cores, these parts clock up to 600MHz, and thus could offer the performance of a hypothetical 1.2GHz ARM11 part within the power budget of a 600MHz ARM11. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is gaining better support for devices with small screens and limited input devices, thanks to work by the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded team, and its forebear, EmbeddedUbuntu, as well as Intel's Moblin project. Availability More details about the Mojo project -- including downloads of Ubuntu for ARM -- are available here. Original link: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news... |
||||||||||||
Announcing the Release Candidate for Ubunt...
LinuxDaily.net founded by a Linux enthusiast
Copyright © 2008 Linux Daily, All Rights Reserved
ICP Register Number：Jing ICP xxxxxxxx
