TimburyDotOrg is owned and operated by Timbury Computer Services. For over ten years, Timbury Computer Services has shown home, small business and corporate clients how to use Linux and Open Source software to maximize efficiency and lower costs.
Most of us default to wget, curl, netcat and
others when in need of network data from the commandline,
not knowing, or perhaps forgetting, that bash often provides
the support that we need using redirection from
/dev/proto/host/port.
Three days after Google told an independent developer to stop bundling proprietary applications with his alternative Android operating system, fans of the popular package have shot back with plans to work around the move. The developer, who goes by the name Cyanogen, said here that he plans to overhaul his CyanogenMod platform so it no longer includes GTalk, YouTube, and other Google-supplied apps that are widely regarded as essential to any Android OS. But in a clever work-around, he will include software with his bare-bones offering that will allow users to install those closed-source programs without molesting Google’s copyrights.
Here’s a a list of the 10 most important developments for Linux. The Linux technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks’ first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.
It’s been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though — on the same day as NVIDIA’s OpenCL driver launch for Windows — they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.
This is a plea to all hardware manufacturers: Please create Linux drivers for your hardware. OK, so Linux isn’t the Stormin’ Norman of the Desktop arena but that doesn’t mean its users don’t want or need drivers for hardware. I don’t blame the kind volunteers that donate their time to program bits and pieces of the Linux kernel and associated programs but I do blame the hardware manufacturers for not supporting a huge user base of Linux users. I’m tired of it and it’s time for action.
Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining. Tornado is designed to suit specific types of web applications and is reportedly very fast, while Grand Central Dispatch may cause some developers to re-think task-parallelism.
With the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.32, last night, Linus Torvalds completed the main development phase of the next version of Linux on the main development branch. As the kernel hackers already integrate most of a new kernel version’s major changes into the source code management system during this phase, called the merge window, 2.6.32-rc1 is already a good indicator of the most important new features due for release with Linux 2.6.32 in early December.
Hewlett-Packard is rolling out Update 5 for the HP-UX Unix operating system that runs its Itanium and PA-RISC lines of Integrity and HP 9000 servers, keeping to its pattern of two updates per year for its flagship operating system. As has been the case with the prior HP-UX updates, the changes are important to existing HP-UX shops, but they’re probably not going to cause a stampede of buyers for HP-UX systems. It’s no different with the updates to IBM’s AIX or Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Unixes do.
The code analysis specialists Coverity attest to a quality improvement in the open source software they tested. Coverity investigates code from diverse open source applications in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The agency sees the investigation and the resulting improvement in quality as important because more and more state agencies are relying on free and open software.
