Unixster

Well, it’s been a few weeks since the launch of Apple’s comically named “iPad,” and there’s no doubt the world has much to think over. That’s particularly true for those in the FOSS community, of course, given the decidedly closed nature of Apple’s new device. Fans of Cupertino may be swooning with delight, but the picture is less clear for those of us in the rest of the world. The new device is “a frightening step backward for computing and for media distribution,” according to the Free Software Foundation.

Krusader is one of those must-have computing tools that turns difficult or tedious computing tasks into easy, point-and-click operations. It’s an advanced twin-panel file manager that’s loaded with features. When I made the switch from the Windows to the Linux operating system, I had a short list of program requirements. This list was a match to critical computing procedures I relied upon in Windows. I quickly discovered that Linux offers numerous twin-panel file managers, but very few have the power built into Krusader.

One of the key objections Mozilla and its supporters have had to the use of H.264 codecs for HTML5 video — the built-in decoding system being developed for the next edition of HTML — is that it’s proprietary technology. As such, there are no guarantees against the rights holders to that technology staking claims to it and charging money for it — and there may not be much protection against others who believe they have claims on it to test their theories in a full-scale patent infringement trial.

Google’s Nexus One phone is a winner, according to Linus Torvalds, founder of the operating system it’s based on. “I generally hate phones,” explained Torvalds, who is known as “the father of Linux,” in a blog post on Saturday. “At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I’ve had a number of them over the years,” he wrote. Torvalds has rarely used the phones he has had, including Google’s original G1, he said. However, he’s been a happy camper since he bought the Nexus One last week.

It’s not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category. So, when the news came out last week that that’s just what the Symbian Foundation had done — and four months ahead of schedule, no less! — it was hard not to get excited. Android is no longer the only big kid on the open source mobile block, it seems, and the scales are now tipped considerably more in FOSS’ direction.

This release contains many small improvements like using keysymbols in the configuration file, named workspaces, borderless windows, an IPC interface, etc. (see the release notes for a complete list of changes). Press "read more" to get an introduction to what i3 is.

The following will install and configure DRBD, OpenAIS, Pacemaker and Xen on OpenSUSE 11.1 to provide highly-available virtual machines. This setup does not utilize Xen’s live migration capabilities. Instead, VMs will be started on the secondary node as soon as failure of the primary is detected. Xen virtual disk images are replicated between nodes using DRBD and all services on the cluster will be managed by OpenAIS and Pacemaker. The following setup utilizes DRBD 8.3.2 and Pacemaker 1.0.4. It is important to note that DRBD 8.3.2 has come a long way since previous versions in terms of compatibility with Pacemaker. In particular, a new DRBD OCF resource agent script and new DRBD-level resource fencing features. This configuration will not work with older releases of DRBD.

Last week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSourceWorld, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Like many others, having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightsee

The Linux Foundation has released the first update to the popular "Who Writes Linux" study originally published in April 2008. The study is written by kernel developers Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman and surfaces the people who are writing the code, the companies that are sponsoring the work, and the pace of development.

For those that don’t know, East Austin isn’t exactly Beverly Hills…Not by anyone’s stretch of the imagination. Through it’s reputation for violence, gang activity and drug trade, East Austin is populated with some of the nicest people there are. I now know many of them. Hard-working and loving people that just haven’t yet found their way out of that place. We decided to do what we could to give them a hand…a guiding hand out of there.