07.11.08
Links 11/07/2008: LT’s Brian Stepping Up, Latest Mandriva and Ubuntu @ Alpha 2
GNU/Linux
- From the Middle English Phrase ‘God Be With Ye’
- Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 Brings You a Beautiful KDE 4 Desktop
Mandriva announced last night the second alpha release of Mandriva 2009, which brings KDE4 (default desktop), GNOME 2.23.4, and support for the newest NVIDIA and ATI/AMD video cards.
- Ubuntu Intrepid alpha 2 out today
- Wubi: The Easy Way To Test-Drive Linux On A Windows PC
There must be a catch, right? Not really: If you’re looking for a realistic, fully functional Linux desktop experience, Wubi comes awfully close. While you will see a slight performance penalty running Ubuntu on a Windows file system rather than on a native Linux partition, keeping your Windows disk defragmented will keep the difference to a minimum.
- Why you want (and need) a Linux Live CD
- Plans for Gtk+/GNOME 3.0 surfaced
- An Update On Generic GPU Video Decoding
One of Google’s Summer of Code projects this year is to bring hardware-based video acceleration to Linux with Gallium3D. The advantage of this design is that the implementation is designed to be universal to any driver using Gallium3D, which for now is largely just the Nouveau driver and an experimental Intel version.
- Motorola Releases Touchscreen Linux Smartphone
F/OSS
- European consortium releases Open Source quality assessment platform
- The Human Genome Goes Wiki
- Open source - a quality perspective
Microsoft
- MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed
- 8 Worthy Alternatives To Microsoft Office
- Bill Gates leaving Microsoft? Good riddance!
- Microsoft confirms active Word attacks
- Microsoft Needs a Little More Fixing
- Yahoo CEO says not likely to meet with Microsoft
- Yahoo sups with key shareholder in Sun Valley
- Obama bloats Vista by 11MB
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.