[wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 25
Vance Kochenderfer
vkochend at nyx.net
Fri Jun 30 02:18:55 EDT 2006
PDF version: <http://www.wplug.org/top/wplug-top025.pdf>
THE OPEN PITT
What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania
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Issue 25 June 2006 www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
From the Editors: The Long Haul
May Roundup
Links of the Month
Call for Speakers: Ohio LinuxFest
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Coming Events
Jul. 8: Installfest. 10am to 5pm, Newell-Simon Hall 3rd floor atrium
(Perlis Atrium), CMU
Jul. 15: Special Event: Site Visit at Sungard's Data Center. 2202 Liberty
Ave., Strip District (RSVP required)
Aug. 5: General User Meeting. 10am to 2pm, 3002 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Aug. 12: 5th Annual WPLUG Open Source Picnic. 1pm to 6pm, Snyder Park,
Whitehall
The public is welcome at all events
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From the Editors: The Long Haul
As _The Open Pitt_ begins its third year of publication, it seems
appropriate to be a bit retrospective. You may have heard the proverb: all
it takes are years and years of hard work to become an overnight success.
It's pretty well-suited to Open Source and Free Software as sayings go.
After all, the "upstart" Linux kernel has been in public development for 15
years. And the GNU project, whose tools are included in each distribution
of Linux, was formed 24 years ago. The original release of BSD, the
forerunner of today's FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD projects, took place
fully 28 years ago.
Maybe system software isn't what excites you. One year ago, PC World named
the Firefox web browser its "Product of the Year" for 2005. Two years ago,
as the first issue of _The Open Pitt_ was published, Firefox stood at
version 0.9. This may seem like an extremely short timeframe, but the true
genesis of Firefox was Netscape's code release in 1998, which gave rise to
the Mozilla project. Today, estimates of market share for Mozilla and
Firefox combined range from 9% to 12%, depending on which source you
consult.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Those endeavors which achieve great success
do so largely through the years, if not decades, of effort put forward by
the people involved. As any parent knows, the work doesn't end at
childbirth--that's just the beginning of a twenty-year project.
So let's take a look at some recently-born projects. A year ago, Sun
Microsystems released OpenSolaris, an Open-Source version of its popular
UNIX system. So far, three derivative distributions (BeleniX, SchilliX,
and Nexenta OS) have been based on it. Although the project has enticed a
number of developers to sign on, to date we haven't seen announcements of
significant OpenSolaris deployments.
One highly-hyped area in recent times has been virtualization, which allows
running multiple independent environments on a single physical machine. A
hot player in this arena is Xen, which a year ago was included with the
Fedora Core and SUSE Linux distributions. On the surface, the situation
today is not much different, as none of the other major distributions have
decided to ship it. But it stands to reason that the Fedora experience
will eventually result in Xen's inclusion in Red Hat's enterprise software,
and significant work is being done to have Xen included in the main Linux
kernel tree. It would not be surprising if a year from now this has
already taken place.
In the arena of office software, one year ago the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced the
approval of the OpenDocument format as an official standard.
Traditionally, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software has
saved data in numerous incompatible formats with varying levels of
documentation and compatibility. OpenDocument is a fully-open
specification that anyone is free to implement, and is designed to
facilitate information exchange between applications. Just recently, the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ratified it as an ISO
standard, giving it great credibility and status across the globe. So far,
government bodies in Massachusetts and Belgium are looking to it as a
standard format for storing data. Although several applications which read
and write it exist, whether OpenDocument succeeds in gaining widespread use
may ultimately depend on the ability of its proponents to convince users of
the need for an open format. The availability of a plugin for Microsoft
Word wouldn't hurt, either, and reportedly there are programmers in the
Open Source community working on exactly that.
If you take some time to reflect on these examples, you should see that the
greatest indicator of success is the determination and persistence of the
people and organizations involved. Raw brilliance is fine, but SourceForge
is littered with projects based on a great idea but later abandoned for
lack of interest or motivation. Take a look at the examples in this column
over the coming months and years, and see for yourself if this thesis is
proven out: that those projects which succeed tend to do so by having
people work on the thousands of small, unglamorous tasks that translate an
idea into reality.
Any project, whether it's a piece of software or an organization like
WPLUG, needs people like you to take on these tasks. We'll continue to
hammer away here at _The Open Pitt_, and you're encouraged to contribute to
that as well. If you have an article to submit, a comment, or even just a
question, you can contact us at <top at wplug.org>. We look forward to
hearing from you!
Since this column opened with a saying, we'll close with one, this time
from Thomas Edison: "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per
cent perspiration." Are you up to the challenge of providing some of that
sweat equity?
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May Roundup
May 17 General User Meeting: Patrick Wagstrom reviewed the complex yet
increasingly relevant subject of encryption. Starting from the definition
of cryptography as writing a message so that it is difficult--or
impossible--for outsiders to understand its meaning, he described the two
major forms of encryption. These are symmetric encryption, where the
sender and recipient share the key to the message, and public-key
encryption, where the sender uses one key to scramble the message and the
recipient uses another to unscramble it. After reviewing the basic
concepts of each, he showed that an interesting feature of public-key
encryption is that it allows you to securely communicate with people you've
never met. But this introduces a new wrinkle: how do you know that a key
*really* belongs to the person whose name is on it? One answer is the web
of trust, where individuals vouch for the identity of one another, and by
so doing they build a chain between sender and recipient. After his
presentation, Patrick put this concept into action by signing keys for
those who brought them to the meeting along with appropriate forms of
identification.
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Links of the Month
by Michael P. O'Connor
After taking an issue off, this month we'll be looking at Linux and
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
For those of you that just want to sync your PalmOS-based PDA to your Linux
system, you can use J-Pilot <http://jpilot.org/>. I know that the mail
client Evolution does have Palm syncing features also, but I think that
J-Pilot is a bit more stable. Evolution can be found at
<http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/>, and there's a good chance it's
already included with your Linux distribution.
For an article on Linux on PDAs check out the LinuxDevices article on it at
<http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077.html>. This shows off
some of the hand-held devices that are designed to run Linux on them.
For those of you that are brave and want to put Linux on a non-Linux PDA
(such as the Palm), check out <http://palm-linux.sourceforge.net> for how
to install Linux. It will have you download a copy of Linux
<http://uclinux.org/> and give you instructions on how to get it going on
your Palm. The stuff on this page is a bit dated, but it should be a good
place to start.
As always, if you have any links to suggest, send them in to me at
<wplug at mikeoconnor.net>.
Till next month, enjoy these links!
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Call for Speakers: Ohio LinuxFest
The fourth annual Ohio LinuxFest will again be held in Columbus, Ohio, and
presenters are needed to deliver talks about Free and Open Source Software
topics.
The event will take place on September 30, 2006, and proposals should be
submitted by *July 10* using the on-line form available from
<http://www.ohiolinux.org/speak.html>.
Once again, the LinuxFest will be held at the Greater Columbus Convention
Center. Over 700 people attended last year, and a larger turnout is
anticipated for 2006.
Sponsorship opportunities are also available for companies and projects
interested in having a booth on the exhibit floor.
Registration for attendees begins on July 1, and, as always, will be free.
A conference pass may be purchased which will get you a t-shirt, lunch, and
other goodies.
For further details and updates, refer to the LinuxFest web site at
<http://www.ohiolinux.org/>.
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The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>
Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer
Copyright 2006 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group. Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.
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