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In many ways, Andrew Morton's keynote set the tone for this year's Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) by describing the ways that embedded companies and developers can work with the kernel community in a way that will be "mutually beneficial". Morton provided reasons, from a purely economic standpoint, why it makes sense for companies to get their code into the mainline kernel. He also provided concrete suggestions on how to make that happen. The theme of the conference seemed to be "working with the community" and Morton's speech provided an excellent example of how and why to do just that. Conference organizer Tim Bird introduced the keynote as "the main event" for ELC, noting that he often thought of Morton as "kind of like the adult in the room" on linux-kernel. Readers of that mailing list tend to get the impression that there's more than one of him around because of all that he does. He also noted that it was surprising to some that Morton has an embedded Linux background—from his work at Digeo. Morton believes that embedded development is underrepresented in kernel.org work relative to its economic importance. This is caused by a number of factors, not least the financial constraints under which much embedded development is done. An exceptional case is the chip and board manufacturers who have a big interest in seeing Linux run well on their hardware so that they can attract more customers. But even those do not contribute as much as he would like to see to kernel development. An effect of this underrepresentation is a risk that it will tilt kernel development more toward the server and desktop. The kernel team is already accused of being server-centric, and there is some truth to that, "but not as much as one might think". Kernel hackers do care about the desktop as well as embedded devices, but without an advocate for embedded concerns, sometimes things get missed. By James Maguire
April 21, 2008 I’m an Apple user. Long time, pure bred, never owned anything else. Oh sure, I’ve used Windows machines, but it’s never crossed my mind to use one daily. I mean, Windows? Like most Apple users, the very idea makes me vaguely anxious. When you’re an Apple user, you’re a snob. You feel – no, you know – that your OS is superior. The machines are fast and secure, and they’re gorgeous, too. The Macintosh is, without a doubt, one of my favorite things. (Of course, we Apple users don’t admit that Macs can crash, too. And that Safari can’t handle certain Web features, including plenty of videos. And that being non-Windows in a Windows world is inconvenient. Still, those burdens are worth bearing for a computer this cool.) I reveal my Apple snobbery because I want you to know where I was coming from when I sat down to try Ubuntu, the Linux distro. I think reviewers should always disclose their preconceptions. Like a movie critic who only likes serious dramas, and he goes to an action flick, and his review says, “Oh, it was just a bunch of explosions.” Yeah, to you it was, but you wouldn't have given it a thumbs up no matter how good the action was. So, if I’m totally honest, here was my prejudice before I sat down to Ubuntu: First, I expected it to look pretty bland by Apple standards. No upstart software could compete with Apple’s 25 years of design inspiration. Also, I assumed the whole thing was held together by glue and rubber bands; after all, Linux dudes are always talking about “recompiling the kernel” – whatever that means – and some even still use the command line. (The command line? Oh, geez…) I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that great, they’d charge for it, right?). I also know I can get under the hood of any of these GNU/Linux apps and change them (unlike Apple apps) but I don’t care about that either. I’m not a software engineer; if I can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it. In short, my expectations for Ubuntu were modest. In fact, they were pretty low. Enough with the Prejudice: What’s the Reality? I sat down with a Toshiba laptop, a hot little box with 2GB of RAM, running Ubuntu, the Gutsy Gibbon release. I used the machine courtesy of Free Culture at Virginia Tech, which provided assistance as a clicked around. First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different desktops. In an expansion of their existing partnership, Microsoft and Novell are taking on China together. The plan is for the two companies to go after companies that are using other Linux distributions and try to convert them to Suse Linux Enterprise.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. As if stepping on the Linux community's toes when they first teamed up wasn't enough, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft and Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) Latest News about Novell have announced a joint push into the China market to attack the Linux installed base there. They have launched what they call "an incremental investment in their relationship" that will focus on "converting unsupported Linux users to supported Suse Linux Enterprise." The effort is the result of increasing customer demand in the region for their business Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here. model solution, which "builds a bridge between open source and proprietary software" and provides "interoperability and intellectual property peace of mind" for organizations operating mixed-source IT environments, the two firms said. The Other Players Currently, the major Linux players in the China market are home-grown Red Flag; Hong Kong-based Sun Wah Linux; Japanese player TurboLinux; and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Latest News about Red Hat. Of the other players, only TurboLinux has joined Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance, which seeks to help vendors insure interoperability between their applications and Microsoft's; the rest remain independent. Red Flag Red Flag Linux was created by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Software and was rolled out in August 1999. A Chinese Linux distribution, its logo is Tux, the Linux penguin, carrying a -- you guessed it -- red flag. It joined the Open Source Development Labs in January 2006, and claims to have more than 80 percent market share for Linux desktops in China as of 2006. Reports say HP (NYSE: HPQ) Save up to $500 off top-selling HP printers. Latest News about Hewlett-Packard and Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) Latest News about Dell have agreed to sell Red Flag Desktop 5.0 in China pre-installed on their desktops and notebooks. The internal structure of Red Flag Linux is similar to Red Hat Linux, but its desktop is similar to that of Windows NT, according to reports. The Web is a great place to network and communicate, all without leaving your bedroom. In an effort to give people a way to actually get together in the same physical location, Meetup.com gives people with common interests and locales a way to meet up -- in person.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. Some people blame the Internet Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here. for a decline in social interaction. They say that even as we use online technology to join groups and communicate with others around the globe, we isolate ourselves and ignore the personal and social rewards derived only from face-to-face interaction. These concerns were raised even before the masses began spending big chunks of their lives alone in front of their computers in virtual worlds such as Second Life and on social networking sites such as MySpace Latest News about MySpace and Facebook Latest News about Facebook. For example, a 1998 study ("Internet paradox. A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?") by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University looked at the effects of Internet use on 169 people in 73 households during their first one to two years online. Medium of Isolation "In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication," according to the authors of the study. "Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness." Recently, I came across a blog post about how to install a LiveCD version of Red Hat's upcoming Fedora 9 release onto a USB stick, leaving space on the stick for data to persist between reboots.
Impressed by the persistent USB LiveCD fun and partition encrypting installer improvements, I chose to throw caution to the wind and load up Fedora 9 Beta on my main notebook, replacing the Hardy Heron Beta install I'd been running--quite stably--for several weeks. Read on for the testing details, but the bottom line for Fedora 9 is more or less the same as with previous Fedora versions: Fedora can indeed be used for anything. Its primary purpose is to serve as a leading-edge development platform for Red Hat's initiatives. As Red Hat confirmed very clearly last week, providing a mainstream desktop/notebook operating system is not one of their product goals. While I've very recently called on Red Hat (and Novell) to address mainstream Linux users more directly, I can certainly respect their decision to focus on their bread-and-butter products. What's more, even if they aren't productizing it, Red Hat's desktop and notebook work does continue, and is definitely evident in other, more end-user focused distributions--such as the Ubuntu release, which I returned after spending two weeks with Fedora 9. Spending Time with Fedora 9 As I mentioned above, it was Fedora 9's support of USB stick-based persistent LiveCD deployments that enticed me to download the in-development distro, and when I tried it out for myself, it worked great. Fedora 9 booted up from the 2GB USB stick I used, and, through the virtue of solid state, did so a lot more quickly than CD-based LiveCD images do. I used my portable Fedora 9 system to browse the Internet. I downloaded some things, and I installed a piece of software, too. I tried rebooting the system, and, sure enough, the changes I'd made did persist. Next, while perusing the Fedora 9 Beta release notes, I saw that Fedora 9 now offers a partition encryption option at install time. It's been possible to set up a Linux system with encrypted partitions for some time now, but only Debian and Ubuntu had implemented it as an install-time option. |
Baker College of Flint, Mich., defeated defending champion Texas A&M University and four other regional winners from across the country to capture the third annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which concluded in San Antonio, Texas, over the weekend. Texas A&M finished a close second, and the University of Louisville took third. Also competing for the championship were the Community College of Baltimore County, Mount San Antonio College of Los Angeles County, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Hosted by the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), the event pits six regional winners, each given a similar small enterprise network to protect, against a team made up of experienced security professionals dubbed the Red Team, a.k.a. Team Hilarious. Teams are scored on how well they protect their identical networks, made up a Cisco router and five servers: Windows 2003 running Internet Information Services, Windows 2000 running DNS, Solaris X86 running Apache and OpenSSL, Gentoo running MySQL and NFS, and BSD running Sendmail. Team workstations can run Vista, Windows, Fedora, or BSD, as the team prefers. Teams are required to provide SMTP, POP3, HTTP, HTTPS,and DNS services throughout the competition, and outages on any of those services result in deductions from their score. At specified times, the teams are also asked to bring up FTP, SSH, RDP, and VNC services, in accordance with the 2008 competition rules.
MySQL, acquired earlier this year by Sun Microsystems, triggered alarm among open source bloggers when it announced it would offer add-on services to paying customers that won't be included in its free version. The man who was its CEO before the acquisition, Marten Mickos, said the move was planned before the sale, and MySQL in no way is planning to abandon open source.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. For the past five years, Finnish-born Marten Mickos has worked in Silicon Valley as CEO of MySQL -- a once-tiny company that started in Sweden and became one of the most popular suppliers of open source database software Blackberry Professional Software from AT&T. Save up to 57% until June 6th. Click to learn more. in the world. MySQL is used by a host of major Web businesses, including Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Latest News about Yahoo, Facebook Latest News about Facebook and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) Latest News about Amazon.com. Under Mickos' leadership, outside analysts estimate, the private company garnered about US$50 million in revenue last year while making its source code available for anyone to use or adapt at no cost. MySQL charges for technical support and collects licensing fees from companies that use the code in their own proprietary software. Staying Open But Mickos recently traded his chief executive title for that of senior vice president at tech giant Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) Latest News about Sun Microsystems, which acquired MySQL for $1 billion this year. And last week, as 2,000 programmers and users gathered for the annual MySQL conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center, some open source enthusiasts blogged with alarm on learning that MySQL may offer "add-on" features to paying subscribers, without including them in the free version. Others said that's not unusual. Mickos posted responses on several blogs, saying the move predates Sun's acquisition and is part of an effort to build revenue while keeping the core product open source. He also said there's no decision on how the add-ons may ultimately be licensed. Mickos' new boss, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, has called the open source model a cornerstone of Sun's business Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here., and describes MySQL as a key element of Sun's drive to supply everything from hardware to software for clients around the world. We asked Mickos how MySQL fits into Sun's efforts; the following was edited for length and clarity. Q: Is Sun's approach to open source any different from what yours has been? A: With open source, you can't find two companies with exactly the same view. But when we discussed acquisition, they said we are acquiring you for what you are, not to change you. Q: Sun said downloads of your products increased from 50,000 a day to 60,000 after the deal was announced. Is that continuing? A: They did increase, but we may have reached saturation levels. (Laughs.) How many developers are there in the world? Another thing we measure is the number of blog postings mentioning MySQL, and they have grown significantly. The Hughes brothers have created the equivalent of gladiator combat for software developers. At TopCoder.com, their company pits developers against each other to develop the best code for whatever purpose a client wishes. The results have ended up as part of the code base for AOL and Eli Lilly, among others. The contests have appeared on ESPN.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. Jack Hughes, cofounder of TopCoder, admits that if he were to compete in one of his company's online computer programming competitions he'd be laughed off the screen. Hughes, a computer programmer, said his inability to write elegant code at cyber-speed doesn't bother him a whit. Since 2001, the privately owned Glastonbury, Conn., company has summoned some of the world's best programmers to its Web site with the lure of online glory -- and cash. Thunderdome for Devs As an online software Blackberry Professional Software from AT&T. Save up to 57% until June 6th. Click to learn more. developers' community, TopCoder.com is a chat room, practice range and gladiatorial arena for more than 145,000 members who compete for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Membership is free, said Hughes' brother and cofounder, Robert Hughes, 38, TopCoder's chief operating officer. Online competition directly contributes to TopCoder's business Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here., which uses contestants' programming skills to build software applications for customers through a competitive process. TopCoder has used the contributed programming to entice major companies such as AOL, Google, Direct Energy, Eli Lilly, British Telecom and Borders to become paying clients. Last year, TopCoder, which employs 75 people in its Glastonbury office Save up to $500 off top-selling HP printers. and another 75 worldwide, had US$18 million in revenue, said Jack Hughes, 46. Jack Hughes was the head of a traditional software company, Glastonbury-based Tallan, until its purchase in March 2001 by CMGI. A few months later, with a "few million dollars from friends and family," the brothers set about creating a company whose structure would allow it to tap into the competitive ranks of young, mostly male, programmers -- the "top guns" of the programming trade. "We came up with this idea to run tournaments online. We wanted it to be fun," said Jack Hughes. "In the beginning it was just play." Competitive Motivation For the first two years, the company worked out the bugs. When the same programmers repeatedly took first place, TopCoder awarded points, redeemable for cash, based on the scoring system used in NASCAR auto racing to keep non-winners motivated to compete. Then they invited potential clients to take a peek. A traditionally structured software company might assign a specific team of programmers to develop an application, said Robert Hughes. But writing software is like solving a story problem: "There are many ways to do it. And some ways are simpler and more efficient than others," he said. "We try to find the most skilled person to work on each piece of the puzzle, no matter where they live in the world," said company spokesperson Michael Schultz. The denizens of Second Life, as a society, are learning the lessons many of us confront as kindergarten students -- such as how to behave and respect for others' property. Tension arises when the freewheeling early adopter types come into contact with business users who are trying to be serious.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. Virtual worlds such as Second Life are like kindergarten playgrounds. That's not because the developers and devotees of those worlds are childish -- far from it -- but because basics of interpersonal relationships are still being worked out there. As businesses expand in those 3-D online environments, the potential for squabbling grows. Culture Shock For starters, serious-minded corporate users of virtual worlds don't fit easily with the free spirits, flashy avatars and fantasy landscapes of many online 3-D environments. "Someone could fly in to where I am now and start dancing erotically," said Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) Latest News about Cisco Systems network architect Christian Renaud, speaking from Silicon Valley to the technology panel in Irvine where his Second Life avatar was projected on the front wall. The solution to that problem is as simple as keeping the big kids on a different playground from the kindergarteners. Basic Social Rules Deeper rifts stem from fundamental uncertainties about roles and rules when people get together online. Yet even those difficulties are much like relationship problems that first crop up in kindergarten. In a panel discussion sponsored by the OCTANe innovation-boosting group last week at UC-Irvine, experts in virtual worlds explored key issues that matter to businesses: * Verifiable identities * Control * Intellectual property * Rules of conduct Those are grown-up variations of the issues that children deal with on the playground when they say: * "What's your name?" * "Keep out." * "It's mine." * "Obey the rules." Speakers on the panel included Renaud from Cisco in San Jose, Calif.; Crista Lopes, a UC-Irvine computer sciences professor who uses a Second Life simulation to test software Blackberry Professional Software from AT&T. Save up to 57% until June 6th. Click to learn more. for a real-world transit system; online market researcher Mary Ellen Gordon from Market Truths in New Zealand; and Denis Browne, a senior vice president of SAP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. The moderator was Linda Zimmer, an Orange, Calif.-based consultant at MarCom:Interactive who advises corporations about virtual worlds. Imagine an application that combines the features of a wiki and a Web-based notebook. It may sound like an unusual mix, but Luminotes wiki notebook is living proof that this combination works rather well. Similar to TiddlyWiki, Luminotes treats notes as separate items which you can manage individually and show and hide as you see it fit. This makes Luminotes a perfect tool for managing notes in a non-linear manner. Although Luminotes shares a few similarities with TiddlyWiki, the wiki notebook adds some useful features that greatly expand its functionality. For starters, Luminotes is a multi-user wiki notebook that uses a database back end to store and manage data. You can access your Luminotes notes from any computer, and you can share them with other users. Luminotes also lets you organize your notes into notebooks, which greatly improves the application's flexibility. By default, Luminotes contains the "my notebook" notebook, and you add notes to it by pressing the Add note button. Luminotes lets you create as many notebooks as you like (limited only by the available storage space) as well as rename and delete them. Unlike TiddlyWiki, or other wikis for that matter, Luminotes doesn't require you to learn a new markup language. Instead, you can use the main toolbar to access the available formatting options, such as numbered and bulleted lists, bold, italic, and underlined. The toolbar also contains buttons that allow you to create links and attach files to notes. While this doesn't sound like much, the provided tools do cover all the basics and are perfectly adequate for note-taking.
Taking notes is Luminotes' raison d'être, and it sports a few nifty features that make the application both simple and efficient in use. When you create a new note, it is automatically added to the All Notes container (click on the All notes link to display it), which acts as a hyperlinked table of contents that you can use to quickly open the note you need. As you would expect, Luminotes includes easy-to-use yet powerful linking capabilities. To create a link to an empty note, just press the Link button. If you select a text fragment and then click the Link button, Luminotes creates a note and uses the selected text as its title. But that's not all. Let's say that you already have a note entitled "Lorem ipsum." If you select the "Lorem ipsum" text in any other note and click on the Link button, it automatically creates a link to the existing note. The ability to add attachments can also come in handy when you're working with notes. Using the Attach file, you can upload virtually any type of file or document and link it to a text segment in the currently viewed note. When you delete a note, Luminotes moves it into the Trash. This gives you the ability to restore notes and avoid frustrating "Oh, no!" moments. Since Luminotes allows you to share notes with other users, you can use the application as a simple collaboration tool. Sharing a notebook is straightforward: press the Share button, enter the email addresses of the users you want to invite, and press the Send invites button. You can also export a notebook as a nicely formatted HTML file, which you can keep as a local backup copy or publish as a static HTML page. Luminotes is available as a hosted service, but you can also download and install the application on your own server. While this requires some technical knowledge, the download package comes with detailed installation instructions. The hosted version is available in several versions. The free edition gives you 30MB storage space, and the ability to share your notebooks with other users in read-only mode. The Basic plan costs $5 a month; it offers 250MB and gives other users the ability to edit your notes. If 250MB is not enough, you can upgrade to the Standard plan that gives you 500MB storage space and all other features for $9 a month. Obviously, Luminotes won't replace your regular wiki. But as a multi-user notebook that allows you to quickly take notes and collaborate on them with other users, Luminotes is unbeatable.
Dmitri Popov is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Russian, British, US, German, and Danish computer magazines.
Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/132... |
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ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the...
In addition to the attackers (the Red Team) and the defenders (the Blue Teams), there is also a White Team. The White Team acts as the overall network operations center, observers, and as communications center. All requests for information, assistance, and problem reporting by the competing teams go through the White Team; teams are not allowed direct communication with the outside world except for publicly available information and software available on the Internet. The White Team also delivers in-competition requests for new services and scores the teams' performance.
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