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Uncategorized engadget, geek, linux, Linux sites, linux-mag, linuxplanet, linuxpromagazine

Why is FREE! the world’s best-selling noun, verb, adjective and adverb, yet so hard to credit as a foundation for business in the Internet Age? And what will happen when business folk finally grok the abundant opportunities that FREE! provides?

Dictionary.com lists 49 meanings for the word free. Here in the World of Linux, there are two main ones: 1) the presence of liberty, 2) the absence of price. Or, as Richard M. Stallman drew the distinction, free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer. Both kinds contributed enormously to the development not only of free and open source code, but to the Internet —  the place where most of that code was written and on which most of it runs.

Within the Net’s vast environment is an abundance of free and open building materials, all growing in number and quality. There is plenty of infrastructure you can pay for here, of course (with most of the money going to your cable or phone company), but the Net’s nature is essentially one of abundant liberty and minimal cost.

Still, a decade and a half have passed since the first graphical browsers appeared, and most of us still barely understand what all this freedom and abundance does — and can do — for our economy.

The Internet itself could hardly be more widely used yet less well-understood. Here we have a form of infrastructure that embodies both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer, that has much in common with the purely public goods we call gravity, sunlight and atmosphere, and is still seen by those who bill us for it as a valved “service”, on par with call waiting and premium TV channels.

Way back in the Web’s Paleozoic, I wrote my first piece for Linux Journal (actually for its short-lived sister/insert, WEBsmith). It was titled “A Bulldozer Through The Intersection“. The title played off a Newt Gingrich line: “The key to a monopoly is to get in the middle of an intersection and charge rent.” Today no sentiment could hardly be more Old Skool. Yet the New Skool is barely in session. Urges to valve abundance and package it as scarcities still run strong. In some cases this makes sense. It really does cost money, for example, to connect homes and businesses to the Net’s backbones, and ways must be found to pay for that. (Not saying the carriers have found the right ways, just that they have capex and opex, both of which need to be covered, somehow.) In other cases, such as with free and open source software, no “business model” is required. Yet the absence of one is still hard for many to grok.

For example, all of us encounter folks in business who understand the warm and fuzzy reasons why developers write free and open code — for the esteem of peers, for example — while missing the plain practical purposes, and their cumulative effects.

This is why a mountain of free and open code has grown in our midst, and people can still say they don’t understand how you can make money with it. They miss the central point: that you make money because of it. Your business is not selling software. Your business is something else that is made possible by software produced in liberty and free for the taking. (And for you to improve, if you like.)

Several years ago Steve Larsen of Krugle (a code search engine) told me there were already more than half a million open source code bases in the world. I asked Steve recently what the number is today. He said he had no idea. The sum is beyond estimation.

So we have an ecosystem of abundant code and scarce imagination about how to make money on top of it. If that imagination were not scarce, we wouldn’t need Nicholas Carr to explain utilities in clouds with The Big Switch, or Jeff Jarvis to explain how big companies get clues, in What Would Google Do?

So, to help close that same gap, we here at Linux Journal came up with an idea for a panel at SXSW in Austin, which starts tomorrow. The title is Rebuilding the World with Free Everything, and it’ll happen at 3:30 next Tuesday, following a keynote conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, and author of both The Long Tail and (most significantly for our purposes) Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I first met Chris many years ago when he was an editor for The Economist. Since then I’ve come to know him as an economist who gets tech, a techie who gets economics, and an original thinker who breaks both molds.

Chris will be joining our panel, along with Katherine Druckman (webmistress here at LinuxJournal), William Hurley of Invisisoft (and much more), Dave Taylor (of FilmBuzz, Linux Journal and intuitive.com), and yours truly, who will serve as the moderator. Also joining us will be everybody in the group we used to call “the audience”. And you: Readers here who can get a jump on the conversation.

Here are a few questions to help get us started…

• Why is it that people find “free” so hard to understand?
• What are the connections between free code and free beer?
• What are the advantages, in a crashing economy, to free?
• Yes, it’s not “free everything”, but it’s still free lots-of-stuff. How do we decide which forms of free we take advantage of?
• How is the abundance of both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer changing the field of economics?
• What, if any, investors out there understand the opportunities with free?
• What does all this do both to the concept of “intellectual property” and what wisely can be done with it?
• Where are the engineers (besides Google’s founders) who have leveraged understanding both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer into big-as-in-business?
• What are some of the Big Business opportunities that are yet to be exploited by those who know the real value of free?

More fodder:

• Chris’s The Economics of Abundance
• Mike Masnick’s The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free, which also includes a long list of other posts on the subject.
• Chris and Mike’s The FREE! Summit.
• Dave Winer’s How I made over $2 million with this blog
• JP Rangaswami’s Random musings on open source and The Economics of the Customer, plus this interview.
• In Linux Journal:
• • Building a Relationship Economy
  • Greater Goods
  • Is free and open code a form of infrastructure? How about the humans who write it?
  • Disrupting the VC Business and Exploring the Because Effect
  • Starring in Your Own Constellation

Look forward to seeing you there — in spirit if not in the flesh.

source: linuxjournal.com

Uncategorized beer economy, free, linux, linuxjournal

Open source solutions Red Hat announced that Ecuador’s Internal Revenue Service, SRI Ecuador, has developed a stable and secure platform for its Internet-based tax return project using a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

SRI said it supplies economic activity to individual and government taxpayers throughout the country’s 24 provinces. It services over one million customers, maintains a workforce of 2,400 and recorded an annual income of over USD 5 billion in 2007. SRI services include registered tax services, reception of tax returns, authorization of sales receipts, and claim handling for taxpayers. It also conducts tax collection and information supply for the federal government.

SRI said it first began using Red Hat solutions in 1999 when it implemented Red Hat Linux 6 for a variety of internal projects. It required a reliable solution, and turned to Red Hat solutions for freedom from licensing costs. In 2002, SRI decided to pilot an Internet-based tax return project aimed to encourage taxpayers to submit their tax returns online instead in-person at an SRI office.

To develop the project, SRI needed a technology solution that could offer a stable and secure platform. After experiencing success with its initial implementation of Red Hat Linux, SRI investigated Red Hat solutions for its tax return project.

With the combination of Red Hat Linux and JBoss Application Server, SRI’s Internet tax return system was implemented as a pilot project by the end of 2002. The project introduced the Internet as an interaction platform with SRI taxpayers for the first time, and also marked the first open source project to be implemented by the Ecuadorian government.

Since the start of the project, Red Hat has been used as the operating system of choice for the internal application servers and has been updated with the availability of each new version of the solution. Currently, SRI utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is used on 90 percent of SRI’s HP Blade servers with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture. It supports over 60 Intranet applications and 16 Internet applications, and approximately 95 percent of SRI’s employees rely on Red Hat solutions daily to execute their job. Utilizing only two administrators, the organization runs 30 applications on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with over 80 percent of the applications leveraging the solution’s high-availability features. In comparison to competitive alternatives, the JBoss solution allows for reduced memory footprint and CPU workload, the groups noted in a release.

Uncategorized news, Red Hat

We present similarities between Linux and Obama on one side and Bush and Microsoft on the other.

1. Obama Vs Linux/FLOSS (or FLOSS in general)
   1. Obama was a community organiser. Linux was built by a community led by the FLOSS “community organisers”!
   2. Obama managed to build one of the biggest grassroots support. Linux/FLOSS has build one of the biggest grassroots support ever known in technology!
   3. Linux/FLOSS does not perceive anyone as an enermy hence it has tried to build compatibility with any platform. Obama said US is a friend of every nation.
   4. Linux/FLOSS owes its success to the internet. Obama heavily used the internet to allow anyone who cared to participate.
   5. Linux/FLOSS has been accused of being socialistic. Obama has been accused of being a socialist.
   6. Obama has showed an unprecedented level of passion for the task before him. Linux / FLOSS community is one of the most passionate ever.
   7. During his campaign, Obama refused to be influenced by a few lobbyists. His campaign was influenced by the ordinary man/woman on the street, judging by the millions who paid for the massive campaign. FLOSS community is influenced by the community! The ordinary man/woman who use or develop software.
   8. Bush Vs Microsoft
      1. Bush never believed in community driven decisions. He went to war even though more Americans were openly against it. Microsoft used to mock the FLOSS community projects as a cancer. They only started making overtures to FLOSS after they realised the “cancer” is now creating tumors in their market share!
      2. Microsoft is an expert in FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) tactics. Bush is probably fit to be a nominee in the “American President with Best FUD tactics” category. He went to war after an unprecedented FUD compaign. He won elections using FUD tactics.
      3. A few clique of people determine the future of Microsoft by virtue of it being a company owned by a few people. This is actually normal and expected. Bush, like Microsoft, allowed a few lobbyists to determine the future of America. However, while his behavior on this is at par with Microsoft, its not expected of a president.
      4. Microsoft has sickening double standards. They sue people for breaking the law by infringing on their dubious patents, while on the other hand, they break others’ patents and anti-trust and anti-competition laws. Bush, during his tenure as president, had sickening double standards. He accused Iraq of WMDs, but ended up contributing to mass killings as well. He accused other countries in Africa, Asia, e.g, Iraq, Sudan, Zimbabwe of human rights violations but on the other hand, he authorised torture at Guantanamo bay, even in the face of strong resistence from his own people!
      5. Microsoft tries dirty tactics on any competitor eating into their market share. Such competitors are enemies of Microsoft hence the dirty tricks. They even call competitors names, like “you are a cancer”, implying you should be eradicated by any means possible to save “life”, MS life I presume. Bush believed in pre-emptive attacks on any perceived enemy. “Guilty until proven innocent!”

Uncategorized linux, obama

Virtualizing operating systems with VMware Workstation

Virtualization permits to run different systems on the same machine. Recently, I had to install on the same machine Windows 2003 SP2 and Ubuntu. I decided to use VMware Workstation that supports different operating systems: from Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), to Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 8.04. Moreover, it has 64 bit operating system support and 64-bit guest operating systems on 64-bit hardware enable more scalable computing solutions. In addition, it runs natively on 64-bit Linux host operating systems.

My installation

I already had a 32-Bit Windows Server 2003 SP2 installed on a machine with CPU 64 bit Intel Xeon E5335 2.00GHz Quad Core. I had to virtualize inside Windows another operating system, Kubuntu 8.04 64 bit. I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 and initially I wasn’t able to set up the new operating system inside VMware. I found ouy that the CPU should have VT support. I found that E5335 is support VT, but I still wasn’t able to set up the 64 bit guest. Then searching on WMware forums I found that Intel VT option should be enabled in the BIOS. Without that enabled it is not possible to install 64 bit guests.I changed that in BIOS and everything is going smooth. I’m running more guest operating systems, of 32 and 64 bit on the same machine with host 32 bit. That sounds great!

Uncategorized 32-bit, 64-bit, Hosts, VMware

The DragonFly 2.2 release is here! The HAMMER filesystem is considered production-ready in this release; It was first released in July 2008. The 2.2 release represents major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration, and a brand new release infrastructure with multiple target options.

Three release options are now available: Our bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO which includes a fully operational X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image (less than 512M).

Availability

The release ISO images should be available on most of the mirrors. If the ISO is not available on a certain mirror, please try another one or download it from the DragonFly FTP server.

MD5 sums

• MD5 (dfly-2.2.0_REL.iso) = 3b8c2bba722db02eac76776fe40f3632
• MD5 (dfly-gui-2.2.0_REL.iso) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
• MD5 (dfly-img-2.2.0_REL.img) = 06c5850ab4c9ca3c19e6b993b7ac32b4
• MD5 (dfly-2.2.0_REL.iso.gz) = 159765a8fd685b6104455dd0a167bc2b
• MD5 (dfly-gui-2.2.0_REL.iso.gz) = 08699d909e41b7b1e9184ef8242e0615
• MD5 (dfly-img-2.2.0_REL.img.gz) = 390068595ed08fb9021c123915d66d79

pkgsrc packages

We offer over 7300 pre-built pkgsrc packages for this release. The pkg_radd(1) utility may be used to download pre-built binary packages. By default this script will query the main package site for a random redirect to one of our mirrors. The path can be overridden by setting BINPKG_SITES in /etc/settings.conf.

To get a list of all packages, let pkg_search(1) download the summary file for that release:

# pkg_search -d

DragonFly 2.2.0 Release Notes

Release Improvements

• A new DVD ISO release image is now available, in addition to the CD release.
• The new DVD release has a full X environment ready-to-go and many packages pre-installed.
• A full pkgsrc tar is now available on the CD/DVD in /usr.
• Full sources tar now available on the DVD (kernel sources only on the CD), in /usr.
• The nrelease build now trivializes package selection for people creating customized releases.
• The installer is now able to create a HAMMER filesystem setup.

Kernel changes

• First step towards AMD64 support (done by Jordan Gordeev during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• The system control intr_mpsafe is enabled by default.
• Move /kernel to /boot/kernel and /modules to /boot/modules.
• Add RFC3542 support (done by Dashu Huang during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Add HW checksum support to the loopback interface, which doubles performance.
• acpi_cpu(4) update. It’s now possible to use higher (lower power usage) C states than C1 in modern (multicore) CPUs.
• First steps to use network threads without the Big Giant Lock (this feature is considered experimental).
• Fixed CVE-2008-2476 IPv6 security issue with modified patches from NetBSD.
• bridge_input works now in parallel.
• Fix bugs in dealing with low-memory situations when the system has run out of swap or has no swap.
• Major rewrite of usched_bsd4 and related support logic, plus additional improvements to the LWKT scheduler.
• Major revamping of the pageout and low-memory handling code.
• suser_* replaced with priv_* implementation from FreeBSD.

HAMMER changes

• HAMMER is now considered production-capable. Many bug fixes and other improvements have been made.
• It is now possible to boot from a HAMMER-only disk. No need for a single UFS partition for /boot. However, for production systems we still recommend a small UFS /boot followed by swap followed by one large HAMMER partition.
• Add HAMMER read support to the boot loader.
• Now uses per-mount kmalloc pools for bulk data structures, particularly for inodes and records.

Hardware changes

• Add ACPI support module for IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptops (from FreeBSD).
• Add ACPI support module Asus laptops (from FreeBSD).
• Add acpi_video(4) - a driver for ACPI video extensions (from FreeBSD).
• It is possible to power down PCI devices during detach. This should save some power when using mobile devices (from FreeBSD).
• Update acpi_battery(4) related code to the latest one from FreeBSD HEAD.
• Correctly handle Intel G33 chips and add support for G45 chips to the agp(4) driver (from FreeBSD).
• Fixed CVE-2008-3831. Affects the Intel G33 series and newer only.
• Sync ciss(4) with FreeBSD’s RELENG_4 branch.
• Sync iir(4) with FreeBSD. This fixes disk recognition with the Intel RAID Controller SRCU42L.

Networking

• Add support for cards with “RealTek 8102EL PCIe 10/100baseTX” chipset.
• Add poling support for jme(4).
• Add driver for Attansic PHYs (from FreeBSD).
• Add ale(4) for Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller (from FreeBSD).
• Add age(4) for Attansic/Atheros L1 gigabit ethernet controller (from FreeBSD).

Userland changes

• The DragonFly source repositories are now maintained with git instead of CVS. See development(7) for instructions how to clone the repository.
• A lot of man pages were updated due to the switch to git.
• Add LiveDVD support to our nrelease framework. (done by Louisa Luciani during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Enhance the DragonFly Mail Agent (done by Max Lindner during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Add a new multi-player terminal game: hunt.
• Bring in the devinfo(3) library and devinfo(8) utility from FreeBSD. The utility and library can be used to view the internal device hierarchy.
• Add devctl(4) and devd(8) from FreeBSD and enable related support in acpi_thinkpad(4).
• Update sensorsd(8) to the latest version from OpenBSD (October 2008).
• Sync libc/stdtime and zdump(8)/zic(8) with tzcode2008h from elsie.
• Symlink /dev/dsp to /dev/audio to preserve compatibility with older programs (all pkgsrc apps by default up to 2008Q3).
• A new daily periodic script cleans up all HAMMER volumes at night.
• Sync libusbhid with other BSDs. Sync usbhidctl with FreeBSD.
• Add ftw(), nftw(), associated header files and documentation.
• Fixed hundreds of warnings in various userland tools.
• i486 is now the default architecture for gcc(1).
• dntpd: Can now connect to NTP servers with IPv6 addresses.
• dntpd: Fix hang in dntpd startup when network down.
• Use BIND’s resolver in libc.
• Add nsswitch.conf(5) support and add the Name Service Cache Daemon nscd(8) from FreeBSD.
• Import several pam_* modules from FreeBSD.
• Several bugs in the installer were fixed.
• nrelease: Additional to the ISO generation, nrelease can now generate an USB stick image.
• nrelease: It is now possible to build chosen pkgsrc packages in a chroot.
• telnetd: filter potentially dangerous environment variables passed from telnet client.

Removals

• Removed the ISC DHCP server and client. NOTE: If you install DragonFly 2.2 from the live CD, you already have a pkgsrc version of the DHCP server installed. If you update from a previous version, you have to install the pkgsrc version manually.
• Remove rexecd(8).
• Remove libskey(3), it is replaced by libopie.
• Remove ISA part of sr(4).
• Remove ISA network device cx(4).

Contributed Software

• Bring in the privilege separation ready DHCP client from OpenBSD.
• Bring in pam_passwdqc from the Openwall project.
• Update OpenPAM to Hydrangea.
• Update OpenSSH to version 5.1p1.
• Update OpenSSL to version 0.9.8j.
• Sync zoneinfo database with tzdata2009b.

source: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release22/

Uncategorized bsd, DragonFly, Released