Bruce Knox, openMosix Project writes: “Tel Aviv, Israel (August 4, 2002 6am) – The openMosix Project has announced the port of openMosix to version 2.4.19 has been released.

Other changes include:
Adding Robert Love’s memory-overcommit protection patch, making openMosix much more stable because now a single node can no longer over-commit memory. Significantly improved balancer to yield much higher throughput.
Reduced kernel latencies further.
Fixed several bugs in oMFS and load balancer.
DFSA is now turned on when oMFS is selected.
RPMs made more universal.
Auto-discovery added,/etc/openmosix.map no longer needed (user-space tools v.0.2.4). New implementation of tune (user-space tools v.0.2.4).

RPMs and Source can be downloaded from the SF files section.

http://www.openmosix.org/“

“A New Zealand Linux consultant is sceptical of a British survey which suggests hacks of Linux-based web servers are on the rise and those on Microsoft IIS-based servers are declining,” says idg.net.nz

Today’s ntry in Jeremy Zawodny’s blog begins, “I spent a fair amount of time of Friday trying figure out why our FreeBSD servers running MySQL 4.0.2 were doing so much better than our Linux servers running MySQL 4.0.2. They’re all slaves of the same 3.23.51 master and get roughly equal query loads, thanks to our Alteon load-balancers (yes, the ones that occasionally stop working right)…

What I noticed while watching each of them with mytop is that the Linux boxes seem to have far more slow queries than the FreeBSD boxes. Now the FreeBSD boxes in question are newer. They’re Compaq DL-380s with dual 1.2 GHz CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 6 36GB SCSI disks. The Linux boxes are a bit older and slower. But the difference was still surprising. Over the last 24 hours, the FreeBSD boxes had each logged 3 slow queries, while the Linux boxes had logged a few thousand of them. Clearly something was up.” (Zawodny’s blog is featured at the Linux Magazine Web site and is well worth checking now and then.)

ANAHEIM, Calif. (August 3, 2002 8:12 p.m. EDT) – The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is putting up $1 million to see if robotics experts can create a machine capable of traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas without human intervention, agency officials said Friday. Story at Nando Times.

Jussi Kallioniemi writes: Openchallenge.org calls programmers to publish their “spare-time codeâ€
for everyones pleasure, and challenges organisations to seek an answer to their information technology related problems by using open source methods.
Openchallenge.org is a continual, quarterly challenge for programmers, founded in July 2002.

An open market place for opensource problems and solutions

“I know that many programmers code programs to help their daily life, or write them just for fun. Often these creations are left hanging in the corner of harddrives, even when they could be useful to other people. With my contest I try to make it more fun and interesting to publish also this kind of software”, Jussi Kallioniemi, founder of OpenChallenge says.

All the entries submitted to OpenChallenge are published under open source
principles and licenses. Therefore they can be utilised and further developed by anyone without expensive and cumbersome licensing issues.

“The other and equally interesting part of OpenChallenge is, that individuals and organisations can use the site to seek an answer to their information technology related problems. Imagine company X that has interest in providing an open interface to device Y. If they publish this need and its specifications through OpenChallenge, they get exactly what they want: the solution, publicity and goodwill. I believe that we are constantly moving to this direction, just have a look at the Open Mobile Alliance for example”, Kallioniemi adds.

Kallioniemi’s work is backed up by the ThinkGeek.com “nerd” shop, selling “Stuff for Smart Masses”. In addition to Kallioniemi, the advisory board of OpenChallenge.org selecting the winning solutions, includes also the founder of distributed.net – a pioneer in massively parallel distributed computing – David “Nugget” McNett and Mikko Hyppönen – the head of research at the information security company F-Secure Corporation.

The winner of the first challenge was published in July. James Yonan won the prize with OpenVPN – an opensource based virtual private network (VPN) daemon. The next winner will be announced in October.

Contact:

Jussi Kallioniemi
http://www.openchallenge.org/
jukal@openchallenge.org

sundaytimes.co.za says, “A couple of years ago, Linux was little more than a fledgling operating system. Its advocates predicted world domination and its critics unflinchingly honed in on its failings. Today it is a radically different picture. Linux has matured in the last few years, not only in kernel code but also in its breadth of applications. Instead of the catch-up game it played in past years, Linux is now taking up a role as a major innovative force and a leader in a new generation of connected computing.”

–By Benjamin Lewis –

A couple nights ago while attempting to install a program on
a Windows ME Sony VAIO laptop, it fritzed out on me and wouldn’t
re-boot. It was something about a “missing or corrupt vmm32.vxd file.” The
lonely little c> prompt didn’t give much hope.
Knowing how Windows handles “recovery,” I was well aware that if I were to “recover”
Windows, it would not only wipe out the partition it wanted to be
in, but possibly the other one, too (maybe that’s not true now that I think
about it). Because I hadn’t backed up in a while, I really wanted
to recover the data on the drive. I happened to have a Windows 98
boot disk that, oddly enough, booted enough of this Sony computer
that I could see the two partitions in DOS. I copied everything
of value from the C: partition to the D: partition manually through DOS.

Having moved my valuable data into the D: partition, I installed
Mandrake 8.2. I had installed 8.1 on a desktop before, and found
it relatively easy, but thought the laptop thing might be a bit of
trouble. Installation was absolutely trouble free. The only thing
I can say that may not have worked just right was locating the modem, but
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about that, because I was happy the network card was found!

I configured the network connection
to my home network. Thankfully the D: partition was automatically
mounted, and very easy to find. I moved everything of value from
the laptop’s D: partition to my file server. Now I could allow Windows
ME to wipe out what it needed to.

Had it not been for the grace of Sony partitioning the drive
ahead of time, things may not have worked out so well. I must admit
as well that I was surprised at the ease with which I managed to
install Linux. Unfortunately, the laptop isn’t mine or it would run
nothing but Linux. Perhaps I can convince the owner to at least
dual boot.

“Commentary” articles are contributed by Linux.com and NewsForge.com readers. The opinions they contain are strictly those held by their authors, and may not be the same as those held by OSDN management. We welcome “Commentary” contributions from anyone who deals with Linux and Open Source at any level, whether as a corporate officer; as a programmer or sysadmin; or as a home/office desktop user. If you would like to write one, please email editors@newsforge.com with “Commentary” in the subject line.

Anonymous Reader writes: “DesktopLinux.com contributing editor Malcolm Dean interviews Xandros president Michael Bego and Dr. Frederick Berenstein, co-chairman of Linux Global Partners (the financial backer of Xandros), regarding the current state of Xandros as a company and on their plans to roll out the first release of Xandros Linux this Fall. Bego gives details about the distribution that includes ‘a spectacular office suite’ and discusses Xandros’ corporate goal ‘to be among the first crop of profitable Linux companies.’ Read more here.”

ZDNet has the story: ” Scrappy software maker Corel hopes business customers frustrated by Microsoft’s controversial new licensing programs will be ready for a change.”

Dan writes: “Mojolin, The Linux, Unix and Embedded Job Site is pleased to announce detailed support for foreign listings, including specific listings for Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom. If you are interested in sponsoring a country site, one listed or one you would like to see listed, please contact dan@mojolin.com. I specifically need help in determining the correct listings… which cities, states or regions need to be included, as well as help in translating the site later on down the road. Links to all sites are available at http://mojolin.com, just follow your flag.”