nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Women in Linux, BSD and Open Source Projects

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 07:57 PM CDT

Pingdom blog has posted a list of woman open source project contributors around the world. From the blog post:

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don't see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it. However, when we started to actually look around we were happily surprised. There are lots of women involved in Open Source! For some reason men just seem to stick their nose out more and put themselves in positions where they are seen (and of course there are more of them).

=> Women in Open Source

Firefox 3 Was Download 8 Million Times In 24 Hour Period

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 07:47 PM CDT

Awesome job!

(Fig.01: The Mozilla team at Download Day [Photo courtesy of Clare Bayley])

Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,349,074 times between 2:16 p.m. ET Tuesday and 2:16 p.m. ET Wednesday.

=> Over 8 million â€" way to go!

From Redmond With Love - IE Team Sends A Cake TO Mozilla

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 06:44 PM CDT

(Fig.01: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer [click to enlarge image]).

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent a cake for the release of Firefox 2 in 2006 and now they did it again. Thanks Ryan Paul for posting image and information (via Digg).

PS: Mozilla will be eating cake as well as Internet Explorer's marketshare

Windows Vista Failure: Pay Extra $50 To Get Aging Windows XP

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 04:39 PM CDT

From the computerworld:

Dell Inc. will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday, according to the company's Web site. Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are the only generally-available editions that allow downgrades, and they can be downgraded only to Windows XP Professional. Under Microsoft's licensing terms, the less-expensive XP Home cannot be installed as a downgrade.

This is really funny, Microsoft spent over 6-8 years developing MS-Vista and now users are willing to pay not to use it. This clearly indicate that end users only pay when you have a better product, which is free from DRM crap, faster and less buggy as compare to Vista. As usual, I suggest you get Dell with Ubuntu Linux loaded for 100% peace of mind.

Reddit Web 2.0 Social News Website Releases Source Code

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 04:21 PM CDT

Reddit is a social news website (just like digg) on which users can post links to content on the web. Today (June 18, 2008), became an open source project. All of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available. Here's a quick list of the open source products that reddit is built and runs upon:

Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached

Today we're excited to announce that we're open sourcing reddit.

All reddit code is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, which is basically the Mozilla license with a handful of changes. Specifically, the CPAL stipulates that when running reddit's code publicly, any changes to the code must be made available publicly and the site must make clear that it is running reddit code.

View Reddit code online here.

Firefox 3 World Record

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 04:09 PM CDT

FANS of the Mozilla Firefox web browser were attempting to set a world record for the most downloads of a software program in 24 hours. And guess what - we almost did it! It just took five hours to download over 1.6 million copies to get rid of old download record set by Firefox 2.

The offical body of Guinness World Records is yet to approve and announce the record attempt. However, you can go ahead and flaunt it by downloading and printing your very own personalized Firefox 3 Download Day certificate.

From the official blog:

We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability. To put some more color behind what's been happening on this historic day:

We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.

Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.

Well done everyone and soon there will be a new World Record

Firefox 3 Install Firebug Addon Software

Posted: 19 Jun 2008 05:52 AM CDT

My current version is disabled after upgrade. How do I install Firebug under Firefox 3 web browser?

Answer to "Firefox 3 Install Firebug Addon Software"

Debian / Ubuntu Linux: Send Automatic Email Notification When Security Upgrades Available

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 07:39 PM CDT

How do I force apt-get to send me email when upgrades or security updates available under Debian or Ubuntu Linux? Do I need to write a shell script which generates a mail with a list of all packages currently pending an upgrade?

Answer to "Debian / Ubuntu Linux: Send Automatic Email Notification When Security Upgrades Available"