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LWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from
and about the Linux community.
URL: http://lwn.net
Updated: 22 hours 45 min ago
An Introduction To OSC (Linux Journal)
Dave Phillips
introduces OpenSound Control (OSC) in a Linux Journal article.
"The history of OSC begins with the history of MIDI. When the major hardware synthesizer manufacturers adopted MIDI as a standard for interdevice communications it was widely and justly hailed as a breakthrough in music technology. Armed with a computer, the appropriate software, and a few synthesizers a single musician could write, record, and produce an entire piece with no other assistance. MIDI revolutionized the music industry, and its continued use is a good measure of the success of the standard. However, MIDI is far from perfect, and many musical purposes are not served well or at all by MIDI software and hardware. As a result, alternative protocols have been advanced."
Thursday Security Updates
CentOS has updated
seamonkey (multiple vulnerabilities).
Debian has updated libcdaudio (arbitrary code execution).
Fedora 8 has updated optipng (buffer overflow) and libpng (denial of service).
Fedora 9 has updated optipng (buffer overflow) and libpng (denial of service).
Mandriva has updated gnutls (certificate spoofing).
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has updated seamonkey (multiple vulnerabilities) and firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).
rPath has updated initscripts (multiple vulnerabilities), kernel (multiple vulnerabilities) and net-snmp (denial of service).
Things that go Clang in the night: LLVM 2.4 released (ars technica)
Here's a
look at the LLVM 2.4 release on ars technica. "One very
significant part of the LLVM effort is the Clang project, which aims to
build a completely new LLVM front-end - one that can be used in place of the
current GCC-based front-ends - for C-like languages. Clang is progressing
rapidly and is already capable of compiling some C applications. Clang
offers a lot of really compelling advantages over GCC. Some early
benchmarks show that it delivers insanely fast compilation and much lower
memory overhead. In some real-world tests, Clang is 2.5 times faster than
GCC and uses five times less memory. It also uses less disk space during
the compilation process."
Photos from the 2008 Kernel Summit
The Linux Foundation has posted a set of photos from
the 2008 Kernel Summit. If these pictures are to be believed, the
Summit involved a lot of time spent consuming alcoholic beverages. But it
was a more serious event than that, honest.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 13, 2008
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 13, 2008 is available.
NLUUG/ELCE: Embedded devices and free software
At the recent co-located NLUUG and Embedded Linux conferences, Harald Welte
gave a keynote presentation regarding how companies could do better in
supporting Linux and free software. His talk, entitled "How chipmakers
should (not) support free software" looked at many reasons why chip vendors
should provide better support for free software, as well as how they should
go about
doing that. Click below, subscribers only, for a report on Welte's keynote.
Wednesday's security updates
CentOS has updated httpd (denial of
service) and gnutls (identity spoofing).
Fedora has updated blender (F8, F9: local code execution), gnutls (F8, F9: identity spoofing), and kvm (F8: heap overflow).
Red Hat has updated two proprietary packages: acroread (multiple vulnerabilities) and flash-plugin (ten different CVEs addressed).
Ubuntu has updated gnome-screensaver (information disclosure and authentication bypass).
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation
Timothy Lee has posted a lengthy paper on
the network neutrality debate. One can guess its conclusions simply by
noting that it is hosted at the Cato Institute, but those conclusions are
backed up by substantial research and reasoning. "Yet many
deregulationists underestimate the importance of the Internet's end-to-end
architecture and are too cavalier about abandoning the neutral network
for a tiered, filtered, more centrally managed one. The decentralization
made possible by the Internet's open architecture is the key to
its astonishing growth, and there is little reason to think that it would
be improvement for the Internet's decentralized 'dumb' architecture to be
replaced by a more centralized 'smart' one." Worth a read for those
who are interested in this subject.
Test Center review: Specialty Linuxes to the rescue (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld reviews
several small Linux distributions. "SliTaz Linux is a unique
Linux breed created from scratch by Christophe Lincoln. Heavy application
of gzip and lzma compression, plus removal of everything but 'the minimum
necessary to make it work' (in the estimation of SliTaz's creator) have
reduced its boot image to a remarkable 30MB."
Fixstars Acquires Terra Soft Solutions
Terra Soft Solutions, home of Yellow Dog Linux, has been acquired by
Fixstars Corporation. "The new subsidiary "Fixstars Solutions,
Inc.", of San Jose, California, maintains the entire Terra Soft staff,
product line, and regional offices in Loveland, Colorado." Former
Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats is now COO of Fixstars Solutions.
The sad story of the em28xx driver
The three-year-long story of the em28xx video acquisition driver is, in
some ways, a classic tale of a developer's inability to work with the
kernel community. But it also has the potential to become a lost
opportunity for Linux developers and users. This article (from this week's Kernel Page, subscribers
only) looks at the history of this driver and the decision which must now
be made on its inclusion.
Novell's transition program
Novell has announced
a transition program to help companies move to SUSE Linux. "The new
program is in response to growing customer demand for help as they make the
strategic decision to transition their data center Linux infrastructure
from existing third-party distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and CentOS, to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server." Once upon a time,
distributors competed mostly against Unix and Windows; now they are
starting to compete more strongly against each other.
KOffice Sprint 2008 (KDE.News)
KDE.News covers the KOffice
Sprint, held in Berlin. "Talking to developers revealed the
status of several of the applications. The many changes in the core of
KOfficelibs but also further down the stack, like KDELibs and Qt 4 forced
Kexi to rewrite large parts of the application. This means despite the fact
the KDE 3 version was very mature and stable, Kexi won't be joining the 2.0
release. Nonetheless, the developers stress that version 1.6.x is still
ahead of the competition, at least in the Free Software world."
Bilski - What It Means, Part 3 - The Mayer Dissent and Some Intangibility Questions (Groklaw)
Groklaw continues
an analysis of the Bilski case, which is about the patentability of
business methods. "I know. It takes us into OMG territory. It's what
Bilski was trying to address. The AT&T decision built on and depended on
State Street, and Judge Mayer is saying that State Street came out of the
blue, contradicting prior common law and the patent statutes, and it really
needs to be clearly killed off and buried, along with any of its children,
because it was a mistake, one that launched what he calls "a legal tsunami"
of regrettable patents on what ought to be the unpatentable."
Booting Debian in 14 seconds (Debian-administration)
Debian-Administration.org has made an attempt to reproduce the five-second Linux boot experiment using Debian. "Inspired by this work, and because I have the same laptop, I decided to try to reproduce their results. So far I have not come very close to their 5 seconds, but I have made some significant improvements compared to the default boot time for Debian on that machine; this article describes what I've done."
Monday's security updates
Debian has updated net-snmp (multiple vulnerabilities).
Fedora has updated moodle (F8, F9: remote command execution).
Gentoo has updated Gallery (multiple vulnerabilities), faad2 (buffer overflow), and graphviz (buffer overflow).
Slackware has updated cups (multiple vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated dovecot (denial of service).
LLVM 2.4 released
Version 2.4 of the LLVM compiler is out. "LLVM 2.4 includes many bug fixes, much faster compile times at -O0,
substantially better code generation in various cases, a new PIC16 target,
new IR features, and numerous other improvements and features."
Lots of details can be found in the release notes.
Debian Pure Blends
The Debian Project has announced "Debian Pure Blends" - essentially a
rebranding of the concept formerly known as "custom Debian distributions."
"We realised that the old name Custom Debian Distributions just sended
the wrong message to outsiders: The conclusion that CDDs are something
else than Debian was too 'obvious' if people did not read the relevant
documentation." It looks a lot like Fedora's "Spins," but without
the worry about what deserves to be called a "Pure Blend" and what does
not. More information can be found on the wiki and in this detailed paper.