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The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.
These efforts are largely made possible by the inherent portability of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit, the underlying framework used by KDE software. Qt is designed for cross-platform portability and even uses native widgets on both Windows and Mac OS X. Trolltech uses a multi-licensing model that makes Qt available under the GPL for open-source software development and requires programmers to buy a commercial license for proprietary development. Previously, only Mac OS X and Linux/X11 versions were available under the GPL, but Trolltech decided to make the Windows version available under the GPL too with the introduction of Qt 4. This finally opened the door for porting open-source KDE applications to the Windows operating system.
There are also several key technologies in the KDE 4 stack that make the desktop environment more conducive to porting. The most notable of these technologies are the Phonon multimedia abstraction layer and the Solid hardware wrapper library, which are both described in my recent review of KDE 4.0.
The KDE development community's adoption of CMake is another major factor that has contributed to the increased portability of the desktop environment. KDE's build system was previously based on Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous. The migration to CMake instantly simplified portability issues because CMake has very robust built-in support for generating makefiles for widely-used compilers on all three major operating systems. CMake can even automatically generate project files for commonly-used IDEs like KDevelop, Visual Studio, and XCode.

More...

The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry.

http://www.happypenguin.org/newsitem?id=7912 
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Main_Page
http://www.blender.org/
http://apricot.blender.org/

Perl is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications.
Just in time for Christmas, there's a new version of perl, the first in over five years. The first update since 2002 to the "practical extraction and report language," perl 5.10 adds both new language features and an improved perl interpreter, according to community site Perl Buzz.
Perl is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications.
During its 20-year history, it gained massive popularity by assimilating the syntax from many predecessors, making it really easy to use for anyone already versed in sed, awk, grep, csh, C/C++, Lisp, and so on.
Perl's syntactical flexibility sometimes makes perl scripts challenging to read, however, and languages like python with rigid syntax structure have arguably gained ground in recent times over perl, for applications that are developed collaboratively.
Additionally, scripting languages specially-made for use on the Web, like PHP and Ruby, have eroded some of perl's once formidable share of the dynamic Web server scripting scene.

Read the full story on LinuxDevices.com: First Release of Perl in Five Years Arrives 
 

Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction.

http://www.linux-gamers.net/smartsection.item.81/comparison-of-free-software-shooters.html

Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.

The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.

Over the same time period, Windows has continued to report positive annual growth, outpacing the total growth rate in the x86 market by more than 4 percent in 2006, indicating that Linux has actually lost market share to Windows Server over this time.

The same holds true for worldwide Linux x86 server shipments, which dropped from the huge annual growth rate of about 45 percent is 2003 to growth of less than 10 percent in 2006, the IDC figures show.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that the migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down markedly.

Is open source dying? Click here to read more.

"We have seen the rate of migration from Unix slow over the past few quarters," IDC analyst Matt Eastwood told eWEEK. "In my view this is because much of the low-hanging fruit has been moved and the applications that remain on Unix are stickier because they are seen as business critical and more political candidates for migration overall."

IDC analyst Al Gillen pointed out that the number of servers shipped does not perfectly equal the number of operating systems in the market. This is particularly the case with Linux where a substantial portion of the overall market opportunity comes from deployments aboard recycled servers, PCs and workstations deployed as servers, and Linux deployed as a guest operating system.

"This does not contradict any trending taking place on server hardware," Gillen said.

He added: "But we do need to remember that the Linux software ecosystem does not track exactly the same as does x86 hardware shipments."

Click here to read more about how Windows Server is wooing away Linux customers.

Margaret Lewis, the director of commercial solutions for AMD in Austin, Texas, has also noticed the slowdown in Linux growth over the past few quarters.

In 2000, Windows comprised about half of the server operating system market, followed by Unix and Netware at about 17 percent each and Linux reaching towards 10 percent, she said, noting that today Windows owns about 70 percent, Linux about 20 percent, with Unix below 10 percent and Netware barely registering.

"Looking at these large operating system market swings, you could draw the conclusion that Linux has gotten the 'low-hanging fruit' in terms of migration," Lewis said.

"Without the larger pool of Unix and NetWare users who are ripe for migration, there is not quite the level of fuel. You could assume that Linux is now ready to settle down to a more regular growth curve representative of a more mature technology."

The fact that Windows has maintained a steady growth rate over this same time frame could be the result of companies expanding their Windows-based IT infrastructure to meet the demands of users who always want to be online, she said.

"Windows-based Web hosting sites are experiencing strong growth, the Exchange infrastructure is expanding to offer unified messaging and many small businesses are moving to a real server infrastructure for basic infrastructure instead of a network of desktops," Lewis said.

Read more here about how some Windows Server 2008 features address the Linux challenge.

Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., has also noticed these trends, and says that increased customer adoption of Windows Server 2003 in a broad range of enterprise scenarios is driving significant growth of that business.

"I spend a lot of time talking with both Linux and Windows customers and partners, and the feedback that I hear is that, in volume, Linux is primarily deployed in two workloads—high-performance computing and as Web servers," Hilf told eWEEK.

"It appears that Linux server growth is moderating considerably and, while it's certainly still a player, it's not being considered across the broad range of workloads that Windows Server is, from ERP to CRM to messaging and collaboration to core infrastructure like file and print," he said.

After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool.

http://www.gimp.org/

Brief Description

Standard distributions

• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• SuSE Linux 9.3
• SuSE Linux 10.0
• SuSE Linux 10.1
• SuSE Linux 10.2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bf12642f-77dc-4d45-ae4e-e1b05e0a2674&DisplayLang=en

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research. Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star. As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place. It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.
"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."
He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.
"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's http://folding.stanford.edu/) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.
According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.
This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."
However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s.
"Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna says of his optimized code.
Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.
"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."
"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."
The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna's sees his work as complementary to such endeavors.

Microsoft has just announced the final release of the IIS FastCGI module for IIS 5.1 (XP), 6 (2003), and 7 (2008). This FastCGI module was built with collaboration from Zend, the creators of PHP, and is intended to solve the CGI on Windows problem.

Since early 2006, Microsoft and Zend have been working together on a technical collaboration with the PHP community to significantly enhance the reliability and performance of PHP on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. As part of this collaboration, the IIS product group has been working on a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension which will enable IIS to much more effectively host PHP applications.

Today Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents the highest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

http://www.iis.net/php

 

ASUSTek has introduced the P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, which in addition to using Intel's new X38 Chipset also features a soon-to-be-announced technology by DeviceVM. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop environment that is embedded onto this motherboard. Within seconds of turning on the P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, you can boot into this Linux environment that currently features a Mozilla-based web browser and the Skype VoIP client. Browser and VoIP settings can be saved and there are plans for the device to provide new features and support via updates. At Phoronix is a review of this $360 motherboard embedded with Linux and a web browser.

http://www.michaellarabel.com/
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=572&l4=0&model=1872&modelmenu=1
http://www.devicevm.com/home.html
http://www.splashtop.com/
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11186

Online auction house eBay recently did a threat assessment to better understand the forces ranging against them. The company is keeping the fine details under wraps, but the biggest source of danger for the company is apparently botnets. You're never going to guess who was running them. '[Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer] noticed an unusual trend when taking down phishing sites. 'The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes,' he said. Rootkit software covers the tracks of the attackers and can be extremely difficult to detect. According to Cullinane, none of the Linux operators whose machines had been compromised were even aware they'd been infected. Because Linux is highly reliable and a great platform for running server software, Linux machines are desired by phishers, who set up fake websites, hoping to lure victims into disclosing their passwords.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/scrt/CD0B9D97EE6FE411CC25736A000E4723

Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on?
There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites to serve as examples to others.

Underlying technology breakdown

We used some of the data from High Scalability to create a table with the OS, web server, scripting language and database used by nine of the largest websites in the world.
The ones we selected were Flickr, YouTube, PlentyOfFish, Digg, TypePad, LiveJournal, Friendster, MySpace, Wikipedia.

Quick Overview

OS: Linux 7 - Windows 2
Web server: Apache 7 - IIS 2 - Lighttpd 2
Scripting: PHP 4 - Perl 4 - ASP.NET 2 - Python 1 - Java 1
Database: MySQL 7 - SQL Server 1 (possibly 2)
Five of the sites use Memcached, a memory caching system originally developed by LiveJournal that has become a popular way to ease the load on for example databases.
Note that not all information at the High Scalability website is complete (but it’s still a great resource).

Looking at these architectures some observations come to mind: Most of these sites are using LAMP as the core runtime stack. Some have gone so far as to develop their own file system (Google, GFS). Some are using caching to solve the database bottleneck (memcached and the like). Many of them were forced to develop these solutions themselves, as at the time there was no ready-made alternative that could meet their requirements.
The application stack of these Web applications is very different from the stack that mission-critical applications in the financial world are built with. In the financial world, Java -- and to a lesser degree J2EE -- is used extensively. In recent years scalability requirements in capital markets led to a rapid shift in the middleware stack, introducing Compute Grid solutions for virtualization of CPU resources, enabling parallelization of batch applications. Data Grids were also introduced, enabling the virtualization of memory resources. Spring is becoming the common development framework in this world. At GigaSpaces, we're seeing more and more cases where Spring acts as a complete alternative to J2EE.
If we examine both worlds, we can see that both are facing similar challenges related to scalability. Not surprisingly, both ended up introducing similar solutions for addressing the scalability challenges:

On the Data Tier we see the following:
1. Adding a caching layer to take advantage of memory resources availability and reduce I/O overhead
2. Moving from a database-centric approach to partitioning, aka shards  

On the Business Logic Tier:
3. Adding parallelization semantics to the application tier (e.g., MapReduce)
4. Moving to scale-out application models to achieve linear scalability
5. Moving away from the classic two-phase commit and XA for transaction processing  (See: Lessons from Pat Helland: Life Beyond Distributed Transactions)

While there are many similar challenges, and to a certain degree, similar architectures, it seems that both worlds (Web and Financial) took different routes as it relates to the application stack.

Over at the High-Scalability site, someone posted the question: Why doesn't anyone use j2ee?
The answer given in that post can be summarized as follows:

1. LAMP provides a cost-effective solution (most of it relies on *free* open source stack).
2. Java is still used, but not as the primary language, i.e., it is used as one component either in the back-end or the front-end (e.g., servlets).

Finding out more

If you want to read more about these websites, we highly recommend that you head on over to High Scalability. They have a thorough breakdown of the architecture and design choices for each one.

MonoDevelop 1.0 Beta 1 (0.16) has been released. MonoDevelop is a GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages.

This release contains lots of improvements, new features and bug fixes.

http://www.monodevelop.com/Release_notes_for_MonoDevelop_1.0_Beta_1

GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next
month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes.

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.20/notes/C/

http://www.foresightlinux.org/

Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.3! From the website: 'Available for download now, OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities. It is a major release and all users should download it. Plus: It is only with 2.3 that users can make full use of our growing extensions library.' You can download it but be kind and use a P2P client instead, such as bittorrent.

http://www.openoffice.org/

Blumer is a software company oriented to web based solutions. Based on Argentina, we serve many customers around the world. You can find a brief explanation about our services here (spanish version, english will be ready soon):

Solutions.pdf (51.04 kb)

After a long process of review and polishing, the win32 loader from goodbye-microsoft.com has finally made its way to official Debian CDs. Latest daily builds of lenny (the development version) are including it, making starting Debian Installer as simple as just a few clicks (OGG). The win32-loader version, now based on GRUB 2, includes new features such as detection and pre-seeding of Windows settings, and is translated to 20 languages.

 

Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake
already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution.

This article has been originally published on the old phpBB.cc site on April 10, 2006. As of today, the phpBB 2.0.x visual confirmation remains the same.

The recently released phpBB version 2.0.20 comes with the “Visual Confirmation” enabled by default. Too little, too late. The phpBB CAPTCHA has been successfully broken. Moreover, it is unbearably easy to break. A small desktop application which demonstrates this vulnerability is presented below.

This article is not intended at encouraging spambot development. The described application or the underlying algorithm will not be offered for sale. The author merely hopes to raise the phpBB users’ and developers’ awareness of the need to replace the CAPTCHA with a better one ASAP. He has already been contacted by a member of the phpBB development team after the first draft has been published. The developer refused to identify him/herself, but promised that efforts of solving the problem are being made.

The author provides phpBB customization services. If you want to make your board more secure, you may send him an email.

First, the path to the CAPTCHA image has to be specified. It typically looks like:

http://<domain><script_path>profile.php?mode=confirm&id=<id>

Depending on the cookie settings, it may be succeeded by an additional sid parameter.

The phpBB script produces a Portable Network Graphics image. It performs no check whatsoever for repeated requests, so unlimited number of variations may be produced, allowing for elimination of ambiguous OCR results.

The first step of the algorithm eliminates the background noise, leaving distinct character shapes. This step is trivial due to the critically simple noise nature.

The second step allows for cleaner character images by running a 3×3 convolution on the intermideate image matrix.

If performance is critical, this step should be preceded by border detection. The particular order in which the steps are presented in this article has been chosen for better clarity.

In this step, a bounding box for each character is detected.

As it has been noted already, border detection prior to foreground enhancement would be more efficient.

Each of the sub-images extracted in the previous step is compared to well-known font images. A character corresponding to the best match is selected for each.

The algorithm successfully recognizes most characters. One variation may occasionally mistake S for B, another 3 for 8. Combining the two variations, however, eliminates this problem.

As noted previously, unlimited queries with the same id may be made, producing different images for the same string. In addition, two retries are allowed. Repeated queries combined with retries make recognition mistakes negligible.

The goal of the Google Linux Client Team is to develop Linux desktop applications, such as the official Linux versions of Google Earth and Google Picasa. This team made an interesting splash during a presentation at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus. The Google presenters claimed some 'significant accomplishments' and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform.

http://techrythm.com/index.php/new-google-linux-apps-coming-soon/

Ubuntu Xorg BulletProof-X feature, coming soon to a 7.10 (Gutsy) build near you. "It provides a failsafe mode that will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line. If Xorg fails to start,the failsafe mode will initiate with minimalistic settings, low resolution, and a limited number of colors. The failsafe mode also automatically runs Ubuntu's new GTK-based display configuration utility so that users can easily test various display settings and choose a configuration that will work properly with their
hardware.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

 

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