Just three months after the Linux kernel pushed the odometer past the 3.0 milestone, Linus Torvalds has pushed out another stable kernel. The 3.1 Linux kernel has several new features, additional hardware support, and a little help for programs that were hard-wired for the 2.6.x numbering scheme.
An animation that Microsoft made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel was shown this morning during Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin’s opening keynote at LinuxCon. The video comically depicts the rivalry between Linux and Windows, but concludes with the suggestion that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Today is a big day for the Linux community. Users, SysAdmins, developers and business executives have gathered for the third annual LinuxCon and the official celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux.
This week is about celebrating as a community the accomplishments of the last 20 years and to collaborate on how we advance Linux for another 20 years. We’re lucky to have the foremost experts on these topics on hand at LinuxCon: Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, legal authority Eben Moglen, IBM Linux leader Dan Frye and others. Renowned Internet and society author Clay Shirky will share how Linux and collaborative development have spread into other areas of culture and what that means for the future of technology. These are just a few examples of the speakers and content we’re looking forward to today through Friday.
The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 18th anniversary of Ian Murdoch’s founding announcement. Quoting from the official project history: “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.”
Earlier this year, Mozilla decided to take a new and interesting approach to developing its Firefox web browser. Instead of waiting several months or even a year between versions, we are now seeing major new versions of the Firefox browser being released within weeks of each other. Indeed, Final version of Firefox 6 has been already released in their FTP servers. But Mozilla’s creators are already working on the following version, Firefox 7.
Mozilla officially confirms that Firefox 6 final is finalized and will be released this Tuesday on August 16. (A month ago, Firefox 6 was moved to beta channel on July 8th, 2011.)
The world wide web, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee is 20 years old today. The worldwide web isn’t to be confused with the Internet, even though they’re commonly considered the same thing. The Internet, which is the physical infrastructure of servers and the protocols that enable them to interconnect has been around for much longer. The worldwide web (commonly known as WWW or W3) is a set of protocols for displaying and sharing documents across the Internet.
Linux 3.0 has been released. Technically, the release of version 3.0 of the Linux kernel shouldn’t be too eventful, since the jump in version number doesn’t actually signify any huge change or whatever; the only reason behind the bump to 3.0 is to come to saner version numbering. Still, man, it’s like, totally version 3 of the Linux kernel.
So yeah, the year of Linux on the desktop never came, but in its place came a lot of other, possibly far more impressive stuff. The year of Linux on the server – dominating. The year of Linux on smartphones – Linux is godlike here. The year of Linux on high-performance computing – Linux aced this market. And a whole load of other things, like embedded uses for Torvalds’ baby.
It has been more than half a year since Visa and MasterCard faced DDoS attacks from Anonymous and WikiLeaks supporters for holding back financial donations to the whistleblower organization. In an announcement made earlier today, WikiLeaks and its credit card processing partner, DataCell, plan to take legal action against Visa and MasterCard via a complaint to be lodged with the EU Commission.
The press release accuses the two credit card companies of “engaging in an unlawful, U.S. influenced, financial blockade” that began in December and continues to this day. Wikileaks and DataCell are represented by two law firms, a Danish firm by the name of Bender von Haller Dragested and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland.
