With the quiet release of Ignalum Linux 9.2, we are pleased to announce the availability of our Automatic Update Service via Yum/Up2date. This service is currently offered free-of-charge and allows users to easily manage and update a single system, and to ensure timely access to updates from Ignalum.

• Get updates directly and immediately from Ignalum, avoiding the wait and cost of other solutions.
• Quickly, efficiently, and automatically update your systems from our intuitive GUI.
• Ensure your systems are always updated with the latest security and functionality patches.

You can easily configure your system to automatically retrieve and install system and security updates, as well as other packages from Ignalum by following the 3 simple steps below.

Step 1: Register for an Ignalum online account. To access the Ignalum Yum repository, you must have first registered for a free Ignalum web account here.

Step 2: Download and Install the latest Ignalum Update Agent onto your system. The Ignalum Update Agent (now with HTTP Authentication support) is available for download in the following Up2date and RHN-Applet RPM packages. You will need to install the RPMs manually, either from the command line or by simply opening the downloaded files:

Note: Use your Ignalum online account to access the download. To install these packages, you must be logged into your system as root!
http://download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/updates/9.2/i686/rhn-applet-2.1.16-2.i686.rpm
http://download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/updates/9.2/i686/up2date-4.3.47-6.i686.rpm
http://download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/updates/9.2/i686/up2date-gnome-4.3.47-6.i686.rpm

Step 3: Edit the "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources" file on your local hard drive (filesystem). To enable the Ignalum Update Agent on your system to access the Ignalum Yum repository, your web account username/password pair must be supplied as part of the URLs specified in "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources". The "sources" file is a plain text file and can be edited by an editor of your choice (i.e. vim, emacs, nano, joe, gedit, kedit).

For example, given an Ignalum web account created with the username: 'foo' and password: 'bar', the following two (2) lines in "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources" will need to be changed from:

yum ignalum-linux-9.2 http://download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/9.2/$ARCH/os/
yum updates-released-ilp9.2 http://download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/updates/9.2/$ARCH/

to:

yum ignalum-linux-9.2 http://foo:bar@download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/9.2/$ARCH/os/
yum updates-released-ilp9.2 http://foo:bar@download.ignalum.com/pub/ignalum/linux/updates/9.2/$ARCH/

Note: After you have finished editing the file, you will need to logout of your system and log back in for the change to take effect. To update your system, simply launch the Ignalum Update Agent by clicking on the Red Alert Notification panel applet located at the top right portion of your Desktop.

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Ignalum is pleased to make available a new whitepaper about Self-Registering Plug-ins which was accepted for publication at the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering 2005. The paper is published in the Conference proceedings (ISBN: 0-7803-8885-2) and made available worldwide from the IEEE through IEEE Xplore.

"Extensibility and flexibility are essential characteristics of today's software. A common technique that offers these vital features is the idea of plug-ins, in which additional components are able to easily plug into the application on-demand to provide extra features or functionality. Plug-ins are indispensable in software as they offer tremendous advantages in terms of giving the application simplified means to keep pace with today s rapidly changing technology. This paper describes an advanced, flexible, and platform-independent plug-in architecture, which builds upon an improved version of the Pluggable Factories design pattern.

Although typical uses of the original Pluggable Factories design pattern roughly achieve the purpose of pluggability, the pattern is limited by the fact that the base class must have prior knowledge of all inherited classes. This limitation forces the developer to modify the base code whenever the class is extended, which to some extent, defeats the goals of object-oriented design. While there has been a solution to this drawback, the implementation hasn t been very elegant and required double the number of classes necessary. The pattern described in this paper will elegantly solve these issues and at the same time allow the base class to be completely independent of all inherited classes.

Powered with this modified pattern, the framework for the plug-in architecture in this paper consists of a registry implemented via a map that would contain a reference to each plugin, which is used to load plug-ins upon request. The plug-in is automatically self-registered at start-up before any code is executed by using static instantiation.

An application employing the pluggability model considered in this paper could adapt readily to different standards and technology without modifying common code or even exposing the source code. These overall improvements to the application structure are manifested in terms of modularity, reusability, and extensibility. The plug-in model examined in this article provides the structure and architecture necessary for developing such a powerful approach to software."

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A torrent for Ignalum Linux 9.0b is now available on The Linux Mirror Project's (TLMP) web site.

For more information about how to download software using BitTorrent, please see the Bittorrent FAQs at http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/FAQ.html.

You can download BitTorrent for a variety of operating systems at http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html. Once you have BitTorrent installed, Ignalum Linux 9 ISOs can be downloaded from TLMP's torrent page.

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Ignalum Linux 9.0/9.0a have now been replaced by version 9.0b. The only difference between all three versions is Disc1. Fixes include changes to the installer code in which a Workstation/Server installation now dispatches the Authentication Configuration interface as with a Custom install. This forces the installer to create a Samba-LDAP Directory unless the user either specifies an LDAP server running on a different host machine or disables LDAP authentication altogether. The GRUB splash screen has also been fixed as well.

Ignalum Linux 9.0b can now be downloaded from ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ignalum. This update will likely take a couple of days to propagate across other download mirror sites.

For file details, cllick here.

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The official release of Ignalum Linux 9, code-named Yarrow, is now available on ibiblio at ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ignalum.

We're exceptionally pleased with the advancements made in this release and hope our users will feel the same.

Currently, we are in the process of updating the site with new screenshots and documents relating to Ignalum Linux 9. In addition, we're looking forward to starting our own servers to host the ISO images including errata updates. But in the meantime, a Bittorrent server has been set up which we plan to make available over the weekend.

On another matter, UWO's Dept. of Industry Liaison will be recruiting several student programmers for Ignalum development starting this fall. Job descriptions of positions available will be posted online at http://www.registrar.uwo.ca/WorkStudy/Layout-WorkStudy-JobLogin.cfm. If you are a Western student on workstudy, you may access the work study positions by selecting the "Browse Jobs" link in the Financial Services section.

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Ignalum Linux 9 will hit download servers beginning next week.

On July 6th, an unnamed Linux vendor has contacted us regarding their interest in the Ignalum Linux Project. We're currently in discussions with this company and are exploring potential business opportunities that could be beneficial to both parties. For now, we will provide this unnamed company with a copy of Ignalum Linux for evaluation and with some feedback, we will make version 9 a little more polished for official release. Therefore, the version that will be made available next week will only be a Release Candidate and the official version will be released later in August.

As for discussions with Industry Liaison of UWO, the department is very supportive of hiring workstudy students as programmers for the Ignalum Linux Project. This will surely be a big boost as it will help in our efforts to bridge the gap between the corporate IT world and young people in academia. For more information on the Work Study Program at UWO, click here. Also the Ignalum Linux Project page can be found here.

We apologize for all the delays, but as the saying goes "all good things are worth waiting for"...

The Ignalum Linux Team

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The impending Ignalum Linux 9 release has been delayed until July 30 due to a shift in priorities relating to our efforts in establishing a strategic alliance with the Department of Industry Liaison at the University of Western Ontario. Industry Liaison (IL) is the interface for university and industry interactions regarding research activities and intellectual property management at The University of Western Ontario (UWO). For more information, please visit http://www.uwo.ca/industry. Also, for those interested, the publicly available version of the Report of Invention (ROI) can be found here. This document provides an overview of how WIndows domain authentication works in Ignalum and how Samba, Winbind, LDAP and Kerberos can be configured in Ignalum Linux as an integrated service.

We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience...we're looking forward to having a good release!

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Ignalum is a young, dynamic Canadian open source company that will soon provide much needed incentive for the world's leading computer design manufacturers to develop and offer device driver support for the Linux Operating System.

The development of a Multi-Platform 3D Graphics Rendering Engine and the creation of a hardware accelerated Ignalum Linux OS based on OpenGL allows applications/games developed for the engine to run using OpenGL or DirectX, running on Linux or Windows, without having to change a single line of code. This technology gives the Gaming industry a real opportunity to move to Linux on the desktop as well as the server. Ignalum believes the computer hardware manufacturing industry will eventually follow suit, providing proper Linux drivers for their hardware and in time Microsoft will no longer dominate the desktop software market.

The Multi-Platform 3D Graphics Rendering Engine is only one of several key Ignalum project initiatives which include: developing a hardware accelerated Linux OS based on OpenGL; developing an enhanced version of Samba with Active Directory PDC support as well as adding further enhancements to Ignalum's existing single sign-on authentication capabilities; and developing a revolutionary graphical, modular control panel that will become Ignalum's core system administration and setup tool.

Ignalum plans to bundle its flagship operating system with commercial Linux products from the likes of CodeWeavers and TransGaming for retail distribution and is seeking strategic investors – typically companies that stand to benefit from the prosperity of the companies in which they invest. Ignalum is also searching for a new CEO/partner to inject capital and run the executive team and the company as a whole. The company is committed to building strategic alliances with both open source and proprietary software vendors as well as Linux consulting firms across Canada.

Ignalum operates as two distinct organizations – one as a company focused on providing Ignalum products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses and another as a project designed to give opportunities to faculty and students at the University of Western Ontario to participate in promoting the Linux Open Source concept. Western students may join the Ignalum Linux Project (ILP) beginning in their first year of study, allowing them to gain experience in programming, project development and integration. Since all donations to Ignalum will go to directly fund the Ignalum Linux Project, much of it will be used to pay students for their work. However, the strength of the project lies in its ability to bridge the gap between the corporate IT world and young people in academia. Because Ignalum is committed to growing its partnerships with industry-leading hardware and software technology companies, Western Engineering and Computer Science students will have better opportunities towards securing lucrative, challenging and rewarding careers in a wide variety of industries. Moreover, the University of Western Ontario will be able to more effectively recruit Canada's most academically gifted students.

Ignalum would like to thank Dr. Berruti, Dr. Samarabandu and a few members of the Engineering IT staff at Western for showing keen interest in the Ignalum Project and for their willingness to help provide computers as well as a room within the Engineering Science Building for project development.

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