FreeSoftNews

The Apache Tomcat team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.2.24 of the Apache Tomcat Connectors.

It contains connectors, which allow a web server such as Apache HTTPD, Microsoft IIS and Sun Web Server to act as a front end to the Tomcat web application server.

This version contains several enhancements and fixes a number of minor bugs of the previous version 1.2.23.

See http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/miscellaneous/changelog.html for a complete list of changes.

Source distribtions can be downloaded from an Apache Software Foundation mirror at:

Read more at Apache News

What is it about Ubuntu Linux that makes otherwise competent technical writers switch to Moron Mode? Everywhere I turn, I see articles on how to do obvious things in Ubuntu. Books on Ubuntu concentrate on listing every insignificant detail of every obvious procedure; things that are inherently self-explanatory are explained in depth. Subjects that have any inkling of technical complexity are skipped because, “Whoa — those are way too hard for you stupid Ubuntu users to grasp, so let’s just skip them and pretend everything’s peachy.” The best I can guess is that article writers and book authors assume that if you were capable of something more technical, you would be using Slackware or Debian, not Ubuntu.

I don’t know what specifically pushed me over the edge about Ubuntu articles. Maybe it was the daily “How to do something obvious in Ubuntu” blog post on the front page of Digg; maybe it was the umpteenth “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” book that I’ve been offered for review; maybe it was the fact that I was writing a Linux migration book for moderately technical people until the publisher decided that it, too, needed to be the umpteenth-and-first “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” iteration; maybe it’s all of the above.

Read more at The Jem Report

Being released ten days after Firefox 2.0.0.5 is now Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6. This latest browser update, once again, is to address security vulnerabilities. The two issues fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.6 is unescaped URIs being passed to external programs and privilege escalation through chrome-loaded about:blank windows. Additional information is available from the Firefox release notes.

Read more at Phoronix

Since publishing our Avivo versus fglrx driver GtkPerf benchmarks that compared the GTK performance between the community open-source driver and ATI’s official driver, we have received a number of requests for more of these 2D benchmarks with different graphics cards and different drivers. While this is not one of our formal articles, we have completed a few more GtkPerf tests with NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards to see how the GTK performance stacks up.

Read more at Phoronix

Local software company Once:technologies has released what it claims is the first browser-based Web 2.0 development platform as an open source project.

The environment, dubbed once:radix, is a rapid application development system for intranet and extranets which allows developers with “basic programming skills” to create enterprise-grade applications.

Once:technologies CEO Rob Napier said the decision to release the software under an open source licence will allow SMEs to access Web 2.0 technology, which has only been available to large firms that could afford to employ specialist programmers.

• Read more: Web-based development platform goes open source

Acer will not release Linux-based laptops in the UK due to a lack of demand, despite launching an Ubuntu-based machine in Asia.

The Acer Aspire 5710Z has gone on sale in Singapore pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Ubuntu is currently one of the world’s most popular and easiest-to-use Linux distributions.

But a spokesperson for Acer told ZDNet.co.uk on Tuesday that the company — one of the world’s top laptop manufacturers — had “no plans” to sell any Linux-based systems in the UK. “[Acer models] with Ubuntu pre-loaded are available at the factory level. However, there is no demand for it in the UK. Therefore, those configurations are not an option [for UK customers] at the moment,” said the spokesperson.

“If the demand was there, then Acer would sell it,” the spokesperson said, adding that such a demand would have to be reported to Acer by its UK resellers.

Read more at ZDNet

SimplyMEPIS, a very popular desktop Linux, is going to change back to using Debian Linux for its core from Ubuntu. In March of 2006, MEPIS founder Warren Woodford, decided to switch to Ubuntu from Debian for the next version of SimplyMEPIS, version 6.0.

The plan was to use Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Service), aka Dapper Drake, as MEPIS’ foundation.

• Read more: MEPIS to switch from Ubuntu to Debian

Like many of you, I feel confused in regards to the advantage of using Google Desktop on my Linux PC. After all, if I needed such a thing, Beagle has been readily available for a long time now. And of course, there are also other alternatives to Beagle as well should the need to index your desktop be something that you are interested in.

Is Google Faster Than Beagle? In complete fairness, I have not bothered with Beagle since Ubuntu Edgy was hot off the presses. At the time, Beagle was slow, really slow. Because of the method of indexing apparently meant bringing a 1.5GHz system and 1GB of RAM to a crawl, I was forced to abandon it a long time ago. Besides, it was being run on a notebook computer that really did not have enough data stored on it that justified dealing with Beagle.

• Read more: Google Desktop for Linux: Why Do We Need It?

Red Hat has announced a beta release of its first minor update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5: “Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the beta release of 5.1 (kernel 2.6.18-36.el5) for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family of products. This beta release….

Read more at DistroWatch

Open Source methodology has gained some ground in one of the last places you and I might expect: In the development area of corporations. Consultants are calling environments like Sourceforge Enterprise Edition a Digital Development Environment.

What about CVS and Subversion? They call that a code collaborative. Well, what about the developer’s itch? That’s now the sponsor’s charter.

How long will it take for the new moniker of Digital Development Environment (DDE) to replace the term Open Source? I might assert that your guess isn’t as good as mine. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I just happen to live in that part of the consulting world where CIOs and Directors want to reposition OSS terms that scare their subordinates.

Read more at Linux Journal

Predictably, it seems that Dell is dropping Ubuntu PC prices which at first pass would seem like fantastic news. But then you have to couple this fact with the realization that they are not exactly promoting their provided Ubuntu PCs. Actually, they are downright difficult to locate without using the “Find” feature in your browser.

• Read more: What’s Wrong With Dell Selling Linux PCs

The sheer ignorance regarding casual Linux users astounds me to no end. While I’m not interested in pointing fingers, there is a lot of misinformation about the Linux community, and we will help to dispel some of these myths, once and for all.

1. Linux Users Are Cheap. Ah, this is one of my favorites. It seems that Linux users have long since been seen as cheap, despite the fact that so many of them in the States earn up to six figures. First, define cheap? Are we cheap because we choose not to buy brand new everything with every release of our selected OS? It certainly shines some light on why hardware manufactures have been less than excited to provide better driver support, doesn’t it?

• Read more: Top 5 Linux Myths

The current edition of Novell Open Audio podcast features an interview with KDE core developer Will Stephenson. He discusses what is coming in KDE 4, Novell’s commitment to KDE and the changes he has been working on recently. The first forty minutes of the podcast are a review of some of the projects from Novell Hack Week, with Will’s segment starting at 39:50 minutes in.

Here’s an event you might like to know about. 4Linux in Brazil has a live podcast show and the next theme is “Microsoft, Open source e Interoperabilidade com OpenXML“. I bet you can figure it out even if, like me, you don’t know Portuguese. Yes, a show about Microsoft, Open Source and “interoperability” with OpenXML. A Microsoft representative will be there. You can presend the show questions to ask Microsoft’s representative. Some of the questions will be read and answered in English. And after the live feed, there will be an English translation available for download here.

• Read more: MS to answer questions about OOXML on 4Linux’s podcast Aug. 2

I guess you saw the news about Microsoft submitting some licenses to OSI hoping for approval as “open source” licenses. You can watch Bill Hilf of Microsoft giving his talk at OSCON, which is where the stories emanated from. That, to me, wasn’t the news, since a Microsoft license was submitted once before, although I gather not by the company. But what I’m noticing is reactions. ComputerWorld collected some truly astonishing responses, and if you follow their links, it gets worse. First, though, the reaction that matters, from Michael Tiemann:

• Read more: Uh Oh. Another Smooth Move from Microsoft: Watch out, Ruby. Watch out OSI.

Some of the concerns expressed about the Completely Fair Scheduler were reports that it might not handle 3D games as well as the SD scheduler. In a recent thread, Ingo Molnar noted, “people are regularly testing 3D smoothness, and they find CFS good enough and that matches my experience as well (as limited as it may be). In general my impression is that CFS and SD are roughly on par when it comes to 3D smoothness.” He noted that all known regressions were reported against earlier versions of CFS that had long since been fixed, and that he was very interested in any new reports of regressions against the current version of the code, “what is more interesting (to me) is not the positive CFS feedback but negative CFS feedback (although positive feedback certain _feels_ good so don’t hold it back intentionally ;-),” adding, “there are no open 3D related regressions for CFS at the moment.” Ingo then offered benchmarks illustrating the improved 3D performance of CFS, with numbers showing it to perform as well and in some cases considerably better than the SD scheduler.

Read more at KernelTrap

During the recent debates about the Completely Fair Scheduler, Ingo Molnar explained why he rewrote the scheduler, “CFS started out as an experiment to simplify the scheduler, to clean up the after-effects of a better-desktop-scheduling patch Mike Galbraith sent me. Had anyone told me at that time that I’d end up writing a new scheduler I’d have laughed at the suggestion and I’d have pointed to the large number of pending patches of mine in forms of the -rt tree, the syslet/threadlet code and other stuff that needs fixing a lot more urgent than the task scheduler.” Regarding the recent debate he added, “there was simply no code in existence before CFS which has proven the code simplicity/design virtues of ‘fair scheduling’ - SD was more of an argument _against_ it than for it. I think maybe even Con might have been surprised by that simplicity: in his first lkml reaction to CFS he also wrote that he finds the CFS code ‘beautiful’, and my reply to Con’s mail still addresses a good number of points raised in this thread i think.” Ingo also described his development style:

Read more at KernelTrap

Discussion continues regarding the choice to merge the CFS scheduler into the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel. A recent thread looked at the possibility of having merged the plugsched code to allow for both the CFS and SD schedulers to coexist in the mainline kernel at the same time, thereby avoiding the recent flamewars. Linus Torvalds pointed to the ManagementStyle documentation and acknowledged that while it’s better to avoid flamefests when possible, “at the same time, I don’t like playing politics with technology. The kernel is a technical project, and I make technical decisions. So I absolutely detest adding code for ‘political’ reasons.”

Read more at KernelTrap

LinuxWorld San Francisco is fast approaching. Every year it is an opportunity for the community to reflect on recent achievements and challenges for the future. Last year, Novell used LinuxWorld as our launch vehicle for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and our campaign emphasizing “Your Linux is Ready.” All of Novell’s recent success in terms of market growth and ecosystem growth is anchored on the great distribution that we announced last year.

With LinuxWorld only one week away, I wanted to reflect on our most recent Linux announcement – SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1) – released last month.

• Read more: Looking ahead to LinuxWorld

Spain standardization body says NO do Microsoft OOXML, according to this story. The country will abstein their vote in the ISO/IEC in September 2. This is excellent for Spain, good for ODF, bad for MooX.

Read more at Avi Alkalay blog