Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community
Devicescape Software has announced its continued support to the open source community with the contribution of its previously proprietary Advanced Datapath Driver to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Devicescape's Advanced Datapath Driver delivers native Wi-Fi support in the Linux kernel. See LWN coverage of The 2006 Wireless Networking Summit from the April 10th kernel page for more on Devicescape's contributions to the Linux kernel.Haskell Communities and Activities Report CFP
A call for contributions has gone out for the May, 2006 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report. Submissions are due by May 12.Google's Summer of Code Opens with KDE (KDE.News)
KDE.News covers the KDE projects that are part of this year's Google's Summer of Code. "Google's Summer of Code has opened for student applications, and KDE is again seeking students to mentor over the holidays. Our ideas page lists some of the projects you could work on, or you are encouraged to come up with your own. Last year we had 24 students working on KDE projects, one of the highest numbers of any project and gained important projects like Okular."
Summer of Code '06 Student Applications (Samba)
The Samba project has announced the opening of applications for the 2006 Summer of Code project. "Samba is proud to be involved again as a mentor organization, so if you're a student and have some time on your hands this summer, consider signing up."
Google Summer of Code Started (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for the Google Summer of Code. "If you are interested you can find some proposals on the GNOME SoC wiki page, but you are also free to come up with your own ideas. There are also GNOME related projects available through many other organisations like Abisource, Beagle, Mono, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Gimp, handhelds.org, Mozilla, OpenSolaris, Xiph.org, BBC and more."
UN's FAO Selects MySQL as its Open Source DB Standard
MySQL AB has announced the selection of MySQL as the open source server-side database standard by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. ""One of the key requirements for our technical information systems is that they must be very easily available and accessible by the member countries as well as easy to set-up and maintain," said Kurt Vertucci, Senior Officer, IT Governance for FAO. "We cannot dictate to countries what their infrastructure should be. Therefore, in addition to requiring very flexible licensing, these systems need to be portable and based on open standards." After evaluating PostgreSQL and MySQL as possible alternatives, FAO selected MySQL as its open source database standard."
Samba and FSFE: "Microsoft - obstacle to innovation in the digital society!"
The Free Software Foundation Europe has sent out a press release concerning the recent Microsoft case in the European Court. ""Businesses and public authorities have to pay prices that are kept high by Microsoft's refusal to share interoperability information with its competitors, as is common practice in the industry," explains Andrew Tridgell, president and founder of the Samba Team in his presentation on behalf of Free Software Foundation Europe in European Court today. Yesterday, Microsoft stated that it had spent 35 thousand person-hours on documenting that kind of information - and essentially failed. Tridgell continues "Microsoft keeps claiming that it was asked to show its source code to competitors, which is absurd. We are exclusively interested in industry-standard interoperability information, such as Interface Definition Language (IDL) files commonly used for these kind of protocols."
OpenDocument is an ISO standard
The ODF Alliance has send out a press release "congratulating" the International Organization for Standardization for its approval of the OpenDocument format as a recognized standard. "Approval of the OpenDocument Format by ISO marks an important milestone in the effort to help governments solve the very real problem of finding a better way to preserve, access and control their documents now and in the future," said Marino Marcich, Executive Director of the ODF Alliance. "There's no doubt that this broad vote of support will serve as a springboard for adoption and use of ODF around the world."
Commercial announcements
Coverity catches X Window Security Hole
Coverity, Inc. has announced that as a result of their contract with US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the biggest X Window System security vulnerability of the last six years was identified and fixed. "According to Daniel Stone, a release manager for the X.Org Foundation, the vulnerability was one of the most significant vulnerabilities discovered in recent memory, "something that we find once every three to six years and is very close to Xs worst case scenarios in terms of security.""
Cybersource Turns 15
Open Source Solutions Company Cybersource celebrates 15 years of service. "One of the world's oldest open source companies, Cybersource, reached a milestone this week - 15 years in business. In that time, Cybersource has established an international reputation for technology expertise and vision, as the two founding technologies which it focused its business on, the TCP/IP-based Internet and open source software, become ascendant or dominant globally."
NASA Goddard Selects Linux Networx Supercomputers
Linux Networx has announced the selection of one of their systems by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "The new system is designed to dramatically increase throughput for applications ranging from studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysical phenomena. The system will supplement the NCCS architecture with improved price/performance and is designed to scale to as many as 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in its full configuration."
QLogic to Support Next-Generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux
QLogic has announced plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. "QLogic® Corp., the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, today announced its commitment to support the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and the virtualization technologies included in it. QLogic virtualization support will provide Red Hat customers with a means for deploying and managing reliable storage area networks (SANs) in virtual server environments."
FAA saves $15 million by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat has sent out a press release regarding a deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. "Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system. In addition, by switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the FAA realized 50 percent savings and spent less than $10 million on a project initially estimated at $25 million."
TuxMobil Site Now Lists More than 5,000 Linux Laptop Installation Reports
TuxMobil has announced that its knowledge base of user-submitted guides on mobile computing issues, now lists more than 5,000 Linux laptop installation guides. "TuxMobil works a lot like Linux. The site grows with user submissions, which are then available to all subsequent users. Members of the Linux community from all over the world have provided help documents in different languages and covering a variety of topics. These documents address an assortment of issues and are helpful for beginners as well as for experts."
New Books
Linux Annoyances for Geeks - O'Reilly's Latest Release
O'Reilly has published the book Linux Annoyances for Geeks by Michael Jang.Configuring SonicWALL Firewalls--latest from Syngress
Syngress has published the book Configuring SonicWALL Firewalls by Chris Lathem and Benjamin Fortenberry.Prentice Hall Announces "User Mode Linux"
Prentice Hall has published the book User Mode Linux by Jeff Dike.
Resources
Podcasting Legal Guide (creative commons)
creative commons has published a new Podcasting Legal Guide. "The purpose of this Guide is to provide you with a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting. EFF has produced a very practical and helpful guide for issues related to blogging generally. This Guide is not intended to duplicate efforts by EFF, and in many cases refers you to that guide for where crossover issues are addressed. Our goal is to complement EFF's Bloggers FAQ and address some of the standalone issues that are of primary relevance to podcasters, as opposed to bloggers."
Linux Gazette #126
The May 2006 edition of Linux Gazette is out. Articles this month include Preventing DDoS attacks, Away Mission -- SDWest 2006, From Assembler to COBOL with the Aid of Open Source, Plotting time series data with Gnuplot, Digging More Secure Tunnels with IPsec, and more.
Contests and Awards
CL quiz announced
The CL Quiz site has been announced. "CL Quiz is a Common Lisp programming challenge site along the lines of "Perl quiz of the week" or "Ruby Quiz". Each week a new quiz is posted to a mailing list, and users can send their solutions."
EFF announces Pioneer Awards
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the winners of its Pioneer Awards. "Washington, DC - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will honor craigslist and its leaders, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster; Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge; and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at its 15th annual Pioneer Awards ceremony. The presentation is at 7pm on Wednesday, May 3 at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference (CFP). This year's award winners all represent vital, community-building organizations dedicated to spreading knowledge in or about our digital world."
Firefox Flicks Ad Contest Winners Announced (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine has announced the winners of the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest. "Daredevil, by Pete Macomber, won the Grand Prize. Other winners include Wheee! by Jeff Gill, Fox Fever by Andrew N. Green, This is Hot by Danny Robashkin and Give Me the Soap by Chris Wedding."
Upcoming Events
The 2006 DC PHP Conference
The 2006 DC PHP Conference will take place at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C. on October 18-20, 2006.Events: May 4 - June 29, 2006
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| May 4 - 6, 2006 | LinuxTag 2006 | (Rhein-Main-Hallen)Wiesbaden, Germany |
| May 4 - 6, 2006 | DallasCon 2006 | (Richardson Hotel)Dallas, TX |
| May 4, 2006 | openSUSE Day at LinuxTag 2006 | Wiesbaden, Germany |
| May 6 - 7, 2006 | WebTech 2006 | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| May 8 - 18, 2006 | LinuxWorld on Tour Conference and Expo 2006(LOT2006) | Montreal Ottawa Calgary Vancouver |
| May 12 - 13, 2006 | BSDCan 2006 | (University of Ottawa)Ottawa Canada |
| May 13, 2006 | DebianDay | Oaxtepec, Mexico |
| May 14 - 22, 2006 | DebConf 6 | Oaxtepec, Mexico |
| May 26 - 27, 2006 | FreedomHEC | Seattle, WA |
| May 30 - June 3, 2006 | 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference | (Boston Marriott Copley Place)Boston, MA |
| June 13 - 14, 2006 | Where 2.0 Conference | (Fairmont Hotel San Jose)San Jose, CA |
| June 13 - 14, 2006 | Gartner Open Source Summit 2006 | (Palau de Congressos de Catalunya)Barcelona, Spain |
| June 14 - 16, 2006 | New York PHP Conference and Expo 2006 | (New Yorker Hotel)New York, NY |
| June 16 - 18, 2006 | Recon 2006 | (Plaza Hotel Centre-Ville)Montreal, Canada |
| June 18 - 23, 2006 | Ubuntu Developer Summit | Charles de Gaulle, Paris, France |
| June 24 - 25, 2006 | Free and Open Source Conference(FrOSCon) | (St. Augustin)Bonn, Germany |
| June 24 - 30, 2006 | 2006 GNOME Users and Developers European Conference(GUADEC) | Catalonia, Spain |
| June 24 - 25, 2006 | PHP Vikinger | Skien, Norway |
| June 27 - 29, 2006 | Corporate Channel and Computing Expo(C3) | (Jacob K. Javits Convention Center)New York, NY |
| June 28 - 30, 2006 | GCC and GNU Toolchain Developers' Summit | (Ottawa Congress Centre)Ottawa, Canada |
Web sites
European eHealth News Portal (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews mentions the new eHealthNews.eu site. "eHealth News is announcing: 'Welcome on the First European eHealth News Portal designed and developed for reflecting and promoting European eHealth solutions and initiatives! Our main goal is delivering online eHealth news and information services for interested in collaboration European eHealth Research and Industry Healthcare IT communities.'"
Audio and Video programs
GUADEC site presentation video (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org has announced a video presentation on Vilanova i La Geltru, Spain. "Fluendo is hosting a presentation video of Vilanova i La Geltru, the home of this years GUADEC conference. The video gives you a quick overview of Vilanova and what kind of town it is. The video is available on the Fluendo Streaming platform."
Page editor: Forrest Cook