Reehan's Blog

HP is actively considering licensing its WebOS operating system to other manufacturers, according to industry reports. & It's not correct to believe that [WebOS] should only be on HP devices,& HP CEO Leo Apotheker was said to have told an audience at AllThingsD's D9 conference....

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Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

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Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

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Intel's Larrabee GPU will finally go into commercial production next year, but not as a graphics processor. Instead, the part will make its debut in a 50-core incarnation fabbed on Intel's 22nm and aimed squarely at one of the fastest growing and most important parts of NVIDIA's business: math coprocessors for high-performance computing (HPC).

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Archos announced two Android-based & Home Connect& devices with 3.5-inch touchscreens and front-facing webcams. The Archos 35 Home Connect is a $149 portable Internet radio that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz TI OMAP3630 processor, and the Archos 35 Smart Home Phone is an Android-based DECT landline phone....

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Fabrice Bellard, creator of the multiple architecture emulator QEMU and FFmpeg, amongst other open source projects, has unleashed his Javascript powered PC emulator. In its current state, it boots a stripped down, text mode Linux implementation and runs within a modern browser. Interesting curio or a potentially useful tool?

Fabrice Bellard, creator of the multiple architecture emulator QEMU and FFmpeg, amongst other open source projects, has unleashed his Javascript powered PC emulator. In its current state, it boots a stripped down, text mode Linux implementation and runs within a modern browser. Interesting curio or a potentially useful tool?

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Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice that aims to minimize software development time while applying rigorous quality control from the beginning and at every step of the process. If you’re ready to jump on the CI bandwagon, turn to Jenkins CI.

Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice that aims to minimize software development time while applying rigorous quality control from the beginning and at every step of the process. If you’re ready to jump on the CI bandwagon, turn to Jenkins CI.

The need for faster and better software development methods is nothing new. What’s changed lately is the fact that it’s almost impossible to stay competitive if you don’t use the best new tools. Factors such as globalization, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing have increased the time pressure on software development teams, while adding to the likelihood that team members cannot meet regularly to debug and test their code.

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The GNOME foundation has announced the appointment of Karen Sandler as the new executive director for the organization. Sandler comes to GNOME from the Software Freedom Law Center where she served as a general counsel. "Sandler’s dedication to software freedom, her non-profits experience and her involvement in a wide range of free and open source software communities distinguish her as the logical choice for GNOME. 'I’m very excited that Karen is joining the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director!', says Stormy Peters, former Executive Director who has recently joined the GNOME Board as a new Director, 'Karen brings a wealth of experience in free software projects and nonprofits as well as a passion for free software. That experience will be invaluable as GNOME continues to expand its reach with GNOME 3.0 and GNOME technologies.'" Look for an interview with Sandler about her new role later today here at LWN.

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The KDE camp has two announcements to make today: the monthly KDE SC 4.6 point release (v4.6.4) and that the next-generation Akonadi-based KDE Kontact Suite is ready. "Unsurprisingly, the port of Kontact to Akonadi is finally being released the same day as Duke Nukem Forever, making it relatively timely."..

The KDE camp has two announcements to make today: the monthly KDE SC 4.6 point release (v4.6.4) and that the next-generation Akonadi-based KDE Kontact Suite is ready. "Unsurprisingly, the port of Kontact to Akonadi is finally being released the same day as Duke Nukem Forever, making it relatively timely."..

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In 2007, Linux was heralded as the desktop of the future. However, the history of Linux on the desktop has been a story of strong support from a relatively small group of diehards but little real impact on the market as a whole. And by last year, there was even talk that the dream of the Linux desktop had been shattered. Why is Linux not doing so well on front-end desktops and on laptops? LinuxInsider sat down with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin for an exclusive interview to get to the bottom of things.

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Where is Linux going? For Part 2 of this interview, LinuxInsider continued speaking with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin to discuss Linux in a wider variety of technology, new programs intended to make it easier for businesses to switch to open source computing, and open source's ability to compete in the consumer mobile space. "A third-party provider could set that up as a service and allow a turnkey approach to creating white-label app stores for all kinds of different devices," he said.

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Speaking of The Document Foundation, Italo Vignoli of the steering committee, today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.3. This latest release "fixes several bugs and improves the security of the suite, to specifically address the needs of corporate deployments, where stability is more important than new features."

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The Linux Foundation continues to provide simple, straightforward guidance to organizations setting up their open source compliance programs. Last month, we released a free webinar titled “Six Tips to Getting Started With Open Source Compliance.”  Before that, we published “Keys to Managing a FOSS Compliance Program.”

Now, we’ve released a freely available new white paper, “A Five-Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review” that discusses key aspects of two compliance actions:  identifying open source in a product’s code baseline, and performing architecture and license reviews on the path to approving FOSS inclusion.  The white paper reviews inputs, outputs, and essential process elements involved in five interrelated compliance steps:  scanning source code; positively identifying FOSS, its licensing, and its provenance; reviewing licenses and license compatibility issues; reviewing architectural interactions of proprietary and open source components; and achieving final approval for FOSS use.  So, download the white paper for some useful information.

Upcoming white papers will address steps involved in satisfying license obligations, and ways to work with suppliers on their compliance responsibilities.  Feel free to provide suggestions for future white paper topics to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  For more LF resources on compliance, including white papers, webinars, self-assessment checklist, and open source tools, go to the Linux Foundation’s open compliance program webpage. 

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As we prepared to announce our LinuxCon schedule this week, I talked to one of our keynote speakers, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos. Eucalyptus was one of the first companies on the cloud computing scene and Mickos is among the most respected open source entrepreneurs in the industry (having been CEO of MySQL AB before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems).

Mickos took a few minutes to share his thoughts on cloud computing and Linux, the new Open Virtualization Alliance, and how Linux has shaped our lives over the last 20 years.

I've heard people make the case recently that without Linux, cloud computing would not exist or would still be in the distant future. How has Linux enabled cloud computing, and why is it (Linux) so important for the future of the new enterprise environment?

Mickos: There are many reasons for this. Importantly, Linux became the dominant platform for all things web, so it's natural that Linux continues to be the foundation for the next paradigm: the cloud.

On a more technical note, Linux is an operating system built for scale-out (rather than scale-up). In previous software architectures, scale-up was the dominant design. But in a cloud world, everything has to scale out. That's why Linux is a perfect fit for cloud.

There are other reasons too: the world of software is increasingly flat. Anyone and everyone can participate and contribute. As the leading open source operating system, Linux is the natural magnet for such crowd creativity. That's why Linux evolves faster than other operating system.

Finally, it certainly helps that many of the key technologies needed in a cloud environment are open source products that run well with Linux. To name just a few: KVM, Puppet, Mule, Spring, Hadoop, MySQL and Eucalyptus.

As an early company to the now crowded cloud computing space, what is Eucalyptus doing today to help Linux enterprise and mobile users?

Mickos: You are right that Eucalyptus was among the early pioneers when the project started as an NSF-funded research project in 2007 at UC Santa Barbara. We early on decided to focus on enterprise and mobile users. From a technical standpoint, we chose the GPL license and we wrote the product in Java for highly-scalable, mission-critical use.

The product goes through extensive QA in our own internal cloud, and it's packaged and ready for people to download and put in production. In the past year, we have seen more than 25,000 new Eucalyptus clouds start up all over the world. It's great to know that we are being useful to students, researchers, developers and businesses!

We innovate fast and add new features to the product that our users are requesting. You can see the features of our upcoming release 3.

Because we are fully compatible with the cloud API of Amazon Web Services, you can move any AWS application onto Eucalyptus. Additionally, we make sure we have a strong ecosystem of partners with products that work well with Eucalyptus. This is what enables users of all types to quickly get going with their various cloud projects.

Can you tell us more about the new Open Virtualization Alliance? Why is Eucalyptus investing here, and what do you hope comes from the efforts?

Mickos: KVM is a powerful hypervisor with a great future. The fact that it is embedded in the Linux kernel makes it the obvious choice for Linux-based cloud deployments. Eucalyptus supports all major hypervisors, but we have a natural affinity to the ones under an open source license. In the Open Virtualization Alliance we get to participate in important work on performance enhancements on KVM in general and the KVM-Eucalyptus combination in particular. We share with our users a passion for software that runs fast and scales well.

So, can you give us a sneak peek into what we should expect from your LinuxCon keynote in August?

Mickos: I will talk about the shift of software infrastructure to the cloud paradigm, and about the implications this will have on free and open source software. I happen to believe that the shift to cloud is bigger than the shift to the Internet was fifteen years ago. Nearly all aspects of the software stack are in for a big disruption.

This August also marks the 20th anniversary of Linux. What do you think is the most interesting or important impact Linux has had on the world of technology?

Mickos: You know, I think Linux's most important impact is societal. Linus (Linus Torvalds in Pictures) showed all people on this planet that open collaboration leads to superior results. We need more openness, more transparency and more collaboration in this world. Thanks to Linux, it is happening. We see other areas of society learn from the world of free and open source software. The current big social trend on the mobile web has (perhaps unknowingly) borrowed many characteristic from the Linux project.

That said, Linux has had and continues to have a profound impact on the specific world of technology. There isn't a car or a medical device or a computer that doesn't run some sort of open source software today. Every leading web or mobile service uses open source software. Linux wasn't the first and isn't the only one, but it is the standard bearer of this amazing movement.

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Earlier this week we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the AMD A8-3500M "Llano" Fusion APU. The results for this next-generation, quad-core Fusion chip were impressive with the graphics and compute power being several times faster than the common AMD E-350 Fusion APU. In that article we just had two other systems the A8-3500M performance was being compared to, but here are some more Linux benchmarks comparing Llano to other systems running Ubuntu 11.04.

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While Mozilla's recent release of version 5 of the Firefox browser is being met with much less criticism than the previous version 4, the speed with which both new versions were produced represents a new chapter for Mozilla. For years, Mozilla pursued a slow release cycle with its browser, and Google Chrome, over its life, has had far more significant upgrades than Firefox has had, even though Firefox is much older. Mozilla announced its intent to pursue a new rapid release cycle early this year. Not everyone is happy with the speed of the releases, though, and enterprise IT administrators may be among the most unhappy observers.

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For those that missed it, now that I've been back in the office for a few weeks and caught up on the other benchmarks and articles for May and beginning the work for June, I'm back to looking into the Linux kernel power regressions reported more than a month ago -- i.e. Linux Has Major Power Regression and Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted...

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The second iteration of the Native Linux KVM tool (a QEMU replacement for KVM) has been posted. The tool now has graphics support, SMP support, networking, file I/O said to be faster than QEMU, and more. The developers are now "officially aiming" to get the tool merged in the 3.1...

The second iteration of the Native Linux KVM tool (a QEMU replacement for KVM) has been posted. The tool now has graphics support, SMP support, networking, file I/O said to be faster than QEMU, and more. The developers are now "officially aiming" to get the tool merged in the 3.1 kernel development cycle.

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A delightful book that should be on your summer reading list, or a potential gift for your favorite geek, is a new offering from MIT Press called
Nightwork: A History of Hack and Pranks at MIT. For those of us that went to lesser engineering schools (or perhaps greater, depending on our metrics), it is a joyful experience. The author, school historian TF Peterson, has copiously illustrated some of the more fantastic and amusing things that students have cooked up over the years, including nailing someone's dorm furniture to the underside of the Media Lab archway, putting various objects on top of the two domes at the school, playing Al Gore buzzword bingo at commencement, and more.

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San Francisco will hold its second CityCamp, CityCampSF 2011, this Saturday, June 18, and include municipal employees, journalists, developers and neighborhood leaders “working on solutions for better communities and government.”

San Francisco will hold its second CityCamp, CityCampSF 2011, this Saturday, June 18, and include municipal employees, journalists, developers and neighborhood leaders “working on solutions for better communities and government.” The event is hosted by SF Department of Technology.

We asked CityCampSF founder and organizer (and Gov 2.0 Radio host) Adriel Hampton to discuss its objectives and goals and share his thoughts on the state of San Francisco open government.

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Ever think you'd see Android applications executing natively within iOS? A project called "in-the-box" is working toward this goal, and it's hoping to provide developers an easy path for submitting their software to the App Store. This means Apple users could get a crack at exotic titles from Google's turf, all without jailbreaking their devices. The magic is performed by porting the Dalvik virtual machine and Gingerbread API's to iOS, which developers must bundle inside their applications -- something that's already resulted in a Java-based "Hello world" app (see it in action after the break).

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This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on OpenSUSE 11.4 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

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Yesterday we shared that Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default on new installations. Beyond switching from EXT4 to Btrfs, there are also many other changes planned for this next release of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Yesterday we shared that Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default on new installations. Beyond switching from EXT4 to Btrfs, there are also many other changes planned for this next release of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

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