Open Source Pixels

Last week I was in San Francisco for MeeGoConf SF, the second large-scale MeeGo event. A lot has changed since the Dublin get-together last November — or at least that’s how it looks from the outside. Nokia (one of the co-founders of the project) hired on a new CEO from Microsoft, who announced in February that the Finnish phone maker would start using Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 instead of its own smartphone operating systems. To a lot of mobile-phone-industry watchers, that looked like bad news for MeeGo, and it certainly disappointed a huge portion of Nokia’s MeeGo and Qt engineers, not to mention Maemo fans. But there is more to the MeeGo picture, which frames those events in a different light — as last week’s event showed.

The Morevna Project seeks to
create a full-length anime movie using open source software. The Morevna
project blog has a status
report after three years of development. “First of all, we
weren’t sure if the software we have chose is able to handle the tasks that
we need. For Blender (for 3D works) everything was quite clear — that
tool is stable enough and already proven with a series of Blender
Foundation’s open movie projects… But 3D in Morevna Project handles just
a helper function — Morevna is mostly about 2D animation! And the all
burden here comes to Synfig Studio, which is completely different case!
Without any usage cases of such scale, questional stability, totally
undeveloped character animation techniques… There were few examples of
characters animation, but we wanted the complex motion. This most powerful
open-source animation tool still had a lots of issues. We just weren’t
sure if this tool will be able to handle all the tasks (OK, well… in terms
of faith we were sure, but have no idea how).” (Thanks to Paul
Wise) LWN looked at the project in March 2010.

Matthew Garrett appears to be having some “fun” looking into how to reboot x86 hardware. He lists five different mechanisms to reboot 64-bit x86 hardware including: “kbd – reboot via the keyboard controller. The original IBM PC had the CPU reset line tied to the keyboard controller. Writing the appropriate magic value pulses the line and the machine resets. This is all very straightforward, except for the fact that modern machines don’t have keyboard controllers (they’re actually part of the embedded controller) and even more modern machines don’t even pretend to have a keyboard controller. Now, embedded controllers run software. And, as we all know, software is dreadful. But, worse, the software on the embedded controller has been written by BIOS authors. So clearly any pretence that this ever works is some kind of elaborate fiction. Some machines are very picky about hardware being in the exact state that Windows would program. Some machines work 9 times out of 10 and then lock up due to some odd timing issue. And others simply don’t work at all. Hurrah!“

Over on his blog, Dave Neary investigates mentoring programs, like Google Summer of Code and others, to see what works and what doesn’t. In particular, he looks at why so few of those who are mentored end up as project contributors, and what can be done to change that. “Mentored tasks should be small, bite-sized, and allow the apprentice to succeed or fail fast. This has a number of advantages: The apprentice who won’t stick around, or who will accomplish nothing, has not wasted a lot of your mentor’s time. The apprentice who will stay around gets a quick win, gets his name in the ChangeLog, and gains assurance in his ability to contribute. And the quick feedback loop is incredibly rewarding for the mentor, who sees his apprentice attack new tasks and increase his productivity in short order.“

Last week it looked like we were, finally, going to get a version bump from 2.6 to 2.8. Instead, Linus Torvalds has bitten the bullet and tagged the first release candidate of the next kernel to 3.0.

Well, I have to say this: Lodsys got some balls. After Apple threatening them with legal action, Lodsys has gone on the offensive, and has proceeded to sue third party iOS application developers. While Lodsys had first given developers 21 days to negotiate an agreement, due to Apple’s legal threats, the company has now moved its litigation timing to an earlier date.

pf-kernel is a fork of the Linux kernel. It provides useful features that are not merged into the mainline, such as the bfs scheduler and tuxonice.

Changes: The kernel has been updated to version 2.6.39. The latest BFS CPU scheduler patch has been applied.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: Linux, kernel, fork

Licenses: GPLv2

Opendedup is a project that develops a deduplication based filesystem for Windows and Linux called SDFS. SDFS is designed to support the unique needs of virtual environments and supports enhanced functionality for VMWare, Xen, and KVM. It can deduplicate a petabyte or more of data. It supports over 3TB per gigabyte of memory at a 128k chunk size. It can perform deduplication/reduplication at a line speed of 250 MB/s or more. VMware support: it works with vms, and can deduplicate at 4k block sizes. This is required to deduplicate Virtual Machines effectively Deduplicated data can be stored locally, on the network across multiple nodes, or in the cloud. The filesystem can deduplicate inline or periodically based on needs. This can be changed on the fly. There is support for file or folder level snapshots.

Changes: This release focuses on fixes and better VMWare support.

Release Tags: Major

Tags: Linux, Compression, volume management, network attached storage, storage, Windows port, Windows support

Licenses: GPLv2

CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser "Web Desktop Environment", "Web Operating System", or "Web Office" that comes with a set of cool applications. It includes a Content Management System (CMS) so that you can easily set up and manage your own website as well as a Database Management System that allows you to rapidly build any kind of database application.

Changes: This release offers CorneliOS Web Publisher API prototype enhancements, various CIOS Edu API enhancements, CIOS Community Dashboard and Admin Screen enhancements, new CIOS Community status and user award features, two important CIOS Community Layer bugfixes, updated system images, language kits, and style sheets, as well as improved Javascript compatibility for Firefox and MSIE.

Tags: Internet, Information Management

Licenses: GPL

phpMyFAQ is a multilingual, completely
database-driven FAQ system. It support various
database systems and it also offers a content
management system with a WYSIWYG editor, an image manager, flexible multi-group and multi-user support, a news system, user tracking, language modules, templates, PDF support, a backup system, Active Directory support, and an easy to use installation script.

Changes: This release updates the Dutch and French translations. It fixes some minor bugs.

Tags: Information Management

Licenses: MPL