In early 2008, School District No. 33 trustees voted to replace virtually all 1,200-or-so computers Chilliwack elementary school students were using for a cost about $600,000.
The major challenge, beyond replacing the equipment, has been making sure the students and staff know how to use the new gear–more specifically the new computers’ operating system.
If you fall into the camp that believes that Linux/Free Software is at war with proprietary software for the future, there’s good news…or fairly good news if you are a cynic. Look at what’s being done.
June 22 through June 27th…2009.
The HeliOS Project built transported and placed 16 Linux Computers in and around Austin.
This time on a very special Linux Outlaws, Dan and Fab are actually in one room together and besides being silly and having a lot of fun talk about shitty beer, Moblin, German Internet censorship, Opera Unite, Valve possibly releasing native Linux games, Nvidia prefering Windows CE to Android and much, much more.
Arkeia Software, a worldwide provider of backup and disaster recovery software and Mandriva (EURONEXT: MLMAN) the leading European Linux publisher, today announced the optimized integration of Arkeia Network Backup with Mandriva Enterprise Server and a deepened partnership to bring enterprise backup to Linux environments.
The Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando will be held at the lavish Radisson Resort Orlando-Celebration in Kissimmee/Orlando Florida on October 24th 2009, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Rooms are a mere $82.00 a night which gives guest the run of the hotel. Genral attendance to the show is $20.
Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio Linux community continues its forward march and is gaining momentum every year. Each year brings a new group of speakers and generates more excitement—2009 will be no exception! The seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest will be on September 25-26, 2009 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus, Ohio.
I am on my way back from FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and what a great conference it was. The president of Brazil stopped in on Friday and addressed the crowd saying how important free software was and that “Free software prevailed [in Brazil] and we don’t need to buy anymore only what Microsoft wants to sell”. Hopefully Brazil will become even more of an example of how governments can and should adopt open source software.
The command line is a powerful tool. With a few keystrokes (or by using scripts or shortcuts), you can perform tasks in one or two steps that can take multiple sets in a graphical user interface. For some tasks, the command line is just a faster and more efficient way of doing things. If you want more information, check this out.
The global technological stage received a boost yesterday in Lagos with the launch of Omatek handtop Personal Computer (PC).
Disclosing that it is the world’s smallest PC, the Group Managing Director of Omatek Computers Limited, Engr. Mrs. Florence Seriki, said it was in continuation of the company’s trail blazing efforts on the global technological stage.
On July 1, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu in partnership with Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud infrastructure firm, will be launching Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services.
Earlier this month we reported on Linux support for a new, unreleased Intel IGP after several commits hit the Intel driver’s X.Org DDX driver (xf86-video-intel).
Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don’t need all those whistles and bells.
Using torrents has become quite an everyday routine for most of us. Though eating up all your bandwidth in one bite, they surely can take the load off traffic-heavy servers. How? Each of us becomes a peer that “seeds” tiny bits of the download, leading to exponentially growing speed and availability. Most of the times, people associate the word “torrent” with piracy, which certainly doesn’t come as a surprise, but there are a lot of other legal uses of this great technology.
There are not many burning tools in the Linux world compared to the Windows world, but what is most important that all burning tools for Linux are free of charge, open-source and work very well. Here are 6 burning tools to make your app search less exhausting:
If you’ve been using Twitter through its website, I recommend that you use a desktop client instead to further enhance your tweeting experience. Since Twitter has become immensely popular, there are tons and tons of available desktop applications that support this great micro-blogging service. So I’m here to assist you on narrowing down the choices, and hope to somehow give you an idea on picking the one that suits you best.
JAG, a free software arcade-puzzle 2D game, has been released for Linux. The aim of JAG is to break all of the target pieces on each level before time runs out.
KDE Community Ships Release Candidate of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements
July 1st, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC1, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.
Let’s a play a game of “Spot the New Feature”! Here’s a screenshot, submitted by our own Helio, that shows a new feature in Plasma that will debut in KDE 4.4…
Krusader is a twin-panel file manager for KDE which has been around for around seven years and was always a good alternative to Konqueror since KDE3 days. Its interface resembles the one of the popular file manager Midnight Commander for the console. Codenamed ‘Mars Pathfinder’, 2.0 is the first KDE4 stable release, bringing lots of new features and coming with the entire interface ported to Qt4 libraries.
This release offers an updated kernel v2.6.29 for 64-bit systems, OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.0.6 and IBM Cell SDK v3.1.0.1, as well as the next generation of ps3vram for fast, temporary file storage or swap using PS3 video RAM. With this release, ps3vram is up to 50% faster than in YDL 6.1 and is automatically enabled as swap.
Sabayon 4.2 will catch you: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, GNOME, multimedia applications and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time? We’ve got it. XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Center) 9.04 is what you’ve ever wanted to build up a fantastic HTPC or Internet Multimedia Box, so what’s better than having it ready to use? Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!
We reviewed the June 2009 release v.4.2 of Puppy Linux, which comes in a 110 MB file download from their website, or from accepted mirrors. The iso file is then burnt to CD and runs as a Live CD. After installing the Live CD into RAM, I experienced my HP Laptop (2GB RAM) run faster than I’ve ever seen with any other OS or Linux Distro.
There has been an explosion of activity going on over here at PCLinuxOS. The quarterly ISO updates for PCLinuxOS 2009.2 and PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.2 are now available featuring a fully updated iso with the latest applications from the PCLinuxOS repositories.
It’s not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat’s new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.
The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds.
As the dominant supplier of commercial Linux operating systems, a key player in middleware, and a wannabe with a pretty good shot at being a force in server virtualization, Red Hat would seem to be a shoo-in as a player in cloud computing. But for the moment, Amazon’s EC2 sets the pace in commercial cloud computing, and that means being Amazon’s friend is particularly important to companies like Red Hat that want to make money from clouds.
Evans: Red Hat is firmly positioned to take on CIOs’ core concerns with security and interoperability. With JBoss, RHEL, and our virtualization offerings, Red Hat already provides the trusted low-level infrastructure, or “substrate” as I’ve called it, upon which many CIOs depend. Given that we believe most cloud-computing involvement, at least initially, will be in private clouds, it’s important that CIOs feel they can trust their cloud infrastructure. Red Hat delivers that trust.
Red Hat has launched a cloud partner and certification program, and Amazon is the first to join. The VAR Guy is hardly surprised. This is a sign of things to come from Red Hat — and another indication of Amazon Web Services’ growing influence over next-generation solutions providers. What’s in store for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss open source partners? Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.
In the case of Red Hat’s hosted desktop virtualization solution, this is achieved through the use of Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), sVirt and the KVM hypervisor. This combination of open source technologies provides a level of isolation equivalent to that which exists in physical deployments, and in doing so dramatically increases the security of virtual desktops and the hypervisors on which they reside.
The native Linux virtualisation hypervisor Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has reached milestone 87 and now integrates the qemu emulator into a single package.
Scores of changes have occurred since the 86 release last month, and with the merge of qemu upstream brings better tuning and visibility of the live migration process, the setting of qcow2 (qemu disk image format) cluster size is now allowed, qcow2 optimisations, and networking improvements.
I started using Fedora back in the Fedora 8 days. I’ve always tried to run SELinux in enforcing mode and back in the Fedora 8-9 days that seemed to mean I’d have some SELinux issue every few days. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was annoying and very tempting to turn it off completely.
It seems like these would also make an ideal way to embed a Linux OS on a small form factor board for that carputer or NAS appliance you’ve been thinking about building. Super Talent is currently shipping units but didn’t disclose pricing.
With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo’s was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.
Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn’t carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you’re a little bit lazy…you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.
Blackmagic Design Inc. has released support for software developers who want to use DeckLink, Intensity and Multibridge products on the Linux platform. Support includes the software driver and an SDK for developers, and can be downloaded now from the Blackmagic Design web site, free of charge.
When I joined MySQL back in June of 2005, one of the first “MySQL Truths” I learned and repeated often when discussing MySQL with others was “release early, release often.” If you’ve been using MySQL for any length of time, you know what that statement means – it meant that MySQL was: (1) dedicated to getting new features and enhancements into the hands of its community so the software’s quality could be validated; (2) eager to take early feedback on those features so the input could rapidly be incorporated back into the product allowing everyone to benefit; (3) committed to very frequent releases of the software so helpful new features and/or external contributions that were ready for action could quickly be put into play and not sit idle on the shelf. And if you’ve been around Open Source for a while now, you know this is the spirit in which most providers of Open Source software operate.
Open source for our company is also really huge. We release all the source code that we have to the general public and the communities we work in. We make a concerted effort to do that.
All of what we use is open source. We’re a completely Ruby-on-Rails engineering team. The bigger idea of sharing and collaborating, we push that hard. It’s a distinct quality: are you willing to money into investing money and people’s salaries into something that might not make you money right away?
Because of the fast evolution of Continuous Integration (CI), the first generation of enablement tools proliferated at lightning speed. Open source CI tools became widely used due to the ease in which an engineer could install it and start tackling the initial CI challenges that he faced. Once proven effective, these apps (particularly Cruise Control) spread like wildfire among other build engineers, and in most cases, development shops began ‘sewing’ several instances together.
Beckstrom said he has faith the Internet, which has shown resiliency as an open source of information. “The importance of the Internet as a free-flowing source of information is being underscored right now by the events in Iran,” said Beckstrom in a statement after being named to the psotion. “It shows the power of human expression through a free and open Net.”
Colosa’s open source business process management (BPM) software, ProcessMaker, that enables enterprises and public organizations to automate paper-based workflow processes, has been selected by Daytop-NJ to automate its core workflow processes and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
The world is not enough. Following the recent opening of its U.S. office, the open source ECM vendor Nuxeo (news, site) keeps expanding its global reach with a new partnership announced today.
KnowledgeTree, a leading provider of commercial open source document management software, today announced the company has opened its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained significant worldwide traction and is now focusing on building its US operations.
Tim Spink, a former executive at rPath and Red Hat, will lead North American operations for document manage software firm KnowledgeTree at its new regional headquarters in Raleigh.
Spink is one of two Raleigh-based employees for the South African-based company. KnowledgeTree, which is backed by Hasso Plattner Ventures in Germany, also is in the processing of hiring a sales force.
After thorough testing of the leading Open Source index engines, Mailspect Inc. has selected Sphinx as the search and retrieval engine for MPP, the Message Processing Platform. Sphinx is an Open Source project founded and maintained by Andrew Aksyonoff of Voronezh, Russia.
It’s a big day for us at Acquia. We finally took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and made it available commercially as part of the Acquia Network. Thanks to the 250+ beta testers who helped make our hosted search service fit for use in production environments, including Brightcove, JackBe Developer Community, P-O-P Design, Wide Divots and others.
Germany’s federal Agency for Information Technology (BIT) is increasing its open source support to public administrations, according to representative attending the Linuxtag conference in Berlin last week.
BIT’s now employs a team of consultants and technicians specialised in open source, that will offer assistance to public administrations. The renewal of the competence centre is one of the measures taken by the federal government to prop up the country’s economy.
During the conference BIT’s colleagues from the federal Office for IT security (BSI), part of the ministry of the Interior, presented the most recent version of Kolab, an open source collaboration suite for Unix platforms.
Is there a possibility of rigging electoral outcomes in a general election to the Lok Sabha? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by some parties in the recent contest. It is accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals and in the popular international press, which raise doubts about the integrity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
But moving forward, new certification “paths” recently announced by CCHIT will be a boost for modular software packages, especially those from smaller software vendors and open source developers, as well as their potential customers, including doctor practices that don’t need fancier software tools, as well as health care organizations that have a hybrid mix of health IT systems featuring legacy and best-of-breed applications.
This mail was sent to you, since you are one of copyright holders of software which used in ASUSTeK Computer WMVN25E2+ WiMAX Subscriber Station.
At current (2009-06-30) time ASUSTeK sells the above device through their Russian exclusive partner “Scartel” Ltd. (trade name “Yota”) with next GPL violations:
1) They didn’t give any access for customers to source codes of GPLed software, see (possibly not full) list below, on the ground of their “intellectual property” defense.
2) They sold their product without mentioning Gnu Public License (and without copy of GPL certainly), nor in printed version of “Quick Start Guide”, nor in electronic version of “User Manual”, nor in any other form.
Chaos systems AB presents a new and open source database connection, which connect to a large number of databases. It uses the open source FDO from Open Source GEO, which has been adapted to Topocad. Many customers have expressed a demanded of a freestanding database.
Last week I wrote about David Cameron’s fine words about cancelling ID cards and generally opening up data. It was full of sound and fury, but I reserve judgement on just how much it really signified.
But here’s a hopeful sign that things really might change if the Tories win power at the next general election. It’s a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies
How do we sustain Open Source in a distributed world? We are facing this challenge with several of our chemical software creations/packages. People move, institutions change. Open Source does not, of itself, grow and flourish – it needs nurturing. Many packages require a lot of work before they are in a state to be usefully enhanced by the community - “throw it over the wall and it will flourish” does not work.
Many OS projects have clear governance and (at least implicitly) funded management. Examples are Apache, Eclipse, etc. Many others have the “BDFL” - Benevolent Dictator For Life with characters such as RBS, Linus, Guido Python, Larry Perl, etc. These command worldwide respect and they have income models which are similar to literary giants. These models don’t (yet?) work for chemistry.
UNESCO has released its first openly licensed publication. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community. Access the online edition – or buy the book!
For those of us tracking open access and its wider import, it’s pretty clear that scientific publishing has changed for ever. But for some within the industry, there remains the desperate hope that all this new-fangled open, collaborative stuff will just blow over.
As part of the MilePost (Machine Learning for Embedded Programs Optimisation) project funded by Information Society Technologies (IST) of the European Union, the IBM research lab in Haifa, Israel, has released an open source compiler which automatically learns how to translate source code into machine code suitable for the respective hardware used. The compiler uses suggestions made by an ICI (Interactive Compilation Interface) plug-in.
Called Milepost GCC, the compiler is the result of a collaboration between IBM and partners in the European Union-funded Milepost consortium. The project is an extension of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) effort.
Less than one week after the release of the second beta, Sun Microsystems has announced the release of version 3.0 of its open source VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. VirtualBox 3.0 is a major update that, in addition to a number of bug fixes and performance improvements, introduces several major new features.
Under development since 1998, Wireshark has been lauded as “one of the most important open source apps of all time” for making network and application troubleshooting more accessible to computer users and administrators. Since many businesses and educational institutions rely on Wireshark to optimize and secure their networks, there is even a certification course aimed at IT staffers.
Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system — Android — has become a popular choice for phonemakers worldwide. Now, if Firefox developers are getting what they think they are, we may finally see the combination of Google’s power OS with Mozilla’s groundbreaking browser
Mozilla released a new edition of its popular open-source Web browser, Firefox. The latest edition of the open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, claims to be the fastest version to date.
Two and a half years after the release of PHP 5.2.0 and following a slight delay, the PHP development team have announced the release version 5.3.0 of PHP. Version 5.3.0 of the web programming language includes several fundamental new extensions, as well as a number of other new features and is the one of the biggest revisions in PHP’s history. Many of the functions originally planned for PHP 6 have ended up in the 5.3 development pipeline.
The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.
Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more.
The Sputnik test suite requires python in order to run - and is already available as a free download. Whether or not Sputnik will become a new standard by which browser vendors will measure themselves is a question yet to be answered.
Yet another data point to suggest the predicted “death of journalism” that we keep hearing from the old school newspaper guys is a bit overblown, online news publisher Talking Points Memo has just announced that it’s hiring seven new editorial staff.
A: I believe the recording companies have great skills to offer artists, and there may need to be some reshuffling in the way those skills are passed around and the ways in which revenue is returned.
Q: You want to webcast the proceedings. Why?
A: We see ourselves as representing the public interest. And what a fantastic opportunity, to tune in on a case being litigated by all this high-powered talent.
The UK government has put an anti-filesharing law on its legislative programme commencing this autumn. The law is based on the Digital Britain report, which includes proposals to make the regulator, Ofcom, oversee protocol and website blocking. Will it contravene the Telecoms Package and how should it be seen in light of the French Conseil Constitutionel decision?
The European Commission has quietly released the Final Report on the Content Online Platform. Does it serve the interests of serious policy-making for online film and music?
Full of grammatical errors and lacking in substantial understanding of the issues, the Final Report on the Content Online Platform poses a challenge to anyone seeking a serious policy proposition.
It seems an unfair fight. On the one hand, you have some of the biggest, most powerful multinationals, intent on defending their turf and extending their power and profits. On the other, you have a tiny number of ragtag idealists who believe that knowledge belongs to everyone, and that no one should have disproportionately long monopolies on its supply.
And yet: in the last few years a remarkable series of victories have been one by the latter against the former, to the extent that representatives of the big media industries have warned that they are losing the “battle”.
Against that background of uneven forces - but not quite in the way the media companies mean it - sharing information about past successes so as to drive future ones is crucially important. And yet it is rarely done, probably because the practitioners are too busy fighting the battles to write about it.
German city Munich got itself into the American newspapers a few years ago when the city council decided to start the project LiMux, aimed at gradually banishing Microsoft programs from the town hall computers & introduce Open Source software like Linux & Open Office onto all town hall workstations. This project was so succesful, other local authorities in Germany have now followed suit.
It wasn’t too long ago, I told you the story of my experiences with Acer. Seems that articles I wrote about 3 years ago concerning Trusted Computing and the hardware/software nightmares implemented to enforce it came home to roost.
We couldn’t get to the login prompt due to the Trusted Core sentry. These computers were in essence, doorstops.
Linux Fund is pleased to announce that the BSD Fund Visa is available for application by US residents today at bsdfund.org. A percentage of every purchase made with the BSD Fund Visa card goes to events, software development and other initiatives related to the “Berkeley Software Distribution” family of operating systems. The BSD Fund Visa is offered in partnership with U.S. Bank of Minnesota and is also available as a student card. BSD Fund has provided financial support to BSD-related events around the world and is key supporter of the Portable C Compiler Project.
1. You’re tired of being bossed around by your computer.
Would you tolerate your car refusing to start until you scanned in your pink slip every time to prove you bought it? Would you put up with parts of your house being walled off because only the architect was allowed access? Would you allow your doctor to withhold information in your medical file from you because it’s intellectual property? Then why do you put it with this from a computer you bought and paid for?
As to the “coming cyberwar,” I do have concerns that the future may bring a whole host of new problems from belligerent agencies sponsored by governments or illicit enterprises, though I am not overly freaked out by it as some are. History has demonstrated that as soon as we invent something, we usually find a way to inflict damage or injury with that invention. With that in mind, I do take comfort in running Linux. Nothing’s completely bullet-proof, of course, but added security is always a good thing, at least for peace of mind.
I have had a fair share of experiences with computing conferences and trade shows. Whether as an employee of a company that hired a stand at a popular event or as a neutral visitor ready to be swayed by the exhibitors’ eagerness to demonstrate their products, I have often found these fairs both educational and stimulating. Perhaps the only disappointment on these large shows was the fact that computers running a decent operating system were extremely rare, even non-existent. As a result, I longed for the day when I would attend a “real” computing exhibition, one where free software would be the dominant topic of conversations and where open-source operating systems would power every single computer on the floor.
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Great show, excellent ambiance, and authoritative presentations - that was LinuxTag 2009. Hope you can join us next year!
Contrast this with GNU/Linux and its GUIs and CLI and Freedom and Openness:
You may struggle a bit – and these days its just a little bit at worst – in the beginning, but the more you learn and the more familiar you become, the faster and more efficient you get. This is a world filled with doors instead of Windows, and they swing wide open whenever you approach.
Getting back to the title of this article. Ask yourself. When was the last time you tried Linux? If it is more than a year then maybe it is time for round two. If you have never tried Linux, possibly influenced by the negativity of out of date information, now might be a good time to see just how outdated that information really is. When you do try the latest distribution let me know what you think. I am very interested in learning your thoughts.
Acer ships its Aspire One netbooks in both Windows and Linux versions. Meanwhile, Dell has a new line of netbooks out, which are available with either Windows or Ubuntu. Dell would like to have the same kind of success that Acer has had in the netbook arena, but that may take time, and Dell is suffering from a punishing business hardware buying environment.
Mac4Lin is best Mac like User Interface for Gnome and Xfce desktops like Ubuntu/Xubuntu, Fedora, Debian and others, that will take care of absolutely everything (from icons, themes to usplash – loading window at start) to look just like Mac. With this package comes: dock, the GTK theme, Emerald theme (3d window borders), new icons, new wallpapers, taskbar image, GDM themes, cursors, themes for Pidgin, Firefox, music players and system sounds and you will be amazed of flexibility and customization of Linux system.
By default, Ksplice shows up in your system menu-bar so you can keep an eye on what’s happening with your updates. While Ksplice itself is open-source software, and the service for individual users is free, you’ll need to pay a service fee if you’re a business using Ksplice to keep your servers up-to-date.
Since Ksplice doesn’t require any changes to the Linux kernel I strongly suspect you’ll soon be seeing its technology used with other Linux distributions. After all, as great as Linux is about letting you run for months on end without wasting time or money on a reboot, it will be even better when we can run Linux for years without rebooting.
Great praise to the awesome Philippe Guillaume and his brilliant crew. Pianoteq is simply amazing. Its sound quality is excellent, its user interface is attractive and invites interaction, the add-on instruments are wonderful, et cetera, et cetera. It’s not free and it isn’t open-source software, but its developers are certainly interested in the open-source community of music makers. In this community member’s opinion, Pianoteq for Linux gets four out of four big stars (or Emperor penguins, take your pick).
Need to whip up a quick screencast? You might want to use Krut for the job. This cross-platform screen recording tool has virtually no learning curve, and offers a few useful features that can help you to create high-quality screencasts with consummate ease. Krut is written in Java, so you have to install the Java Runtime Environment on your system before you can run the utility. Krut requires no installation, and you can launch the application by simply running the KRUT.jar file.
Linux is just one of the great things that everyone should know about. If you ever experienced one of your kids saying “Daddy, what should I do next, I’m bored”, then you’ll appreciate the great number of free and wonderful educational programs available on Linux. The apps shown here are KDE based but should work in most if not all Linux distros and desktop environments. My recommendation – You can install Edubuntu and get many of these apps, or if you’re just looking to add a kids ’section’ install Kubuntu or your favorite KDE desktop (Debian, Mandriva are excellent choices, see our reviews in the Linux tools section). Then jump over to your package manager and select these games to install.
Version control systems are indispensable if you’re working on a multi-person project, and they’re pretty damn useful even if you’re just working solo. Keeping a full history of the changes you’ve made gives you a basic backup and enables you to revert back to an earlier version if you screw something up.
But with so many options available, from the rather dated CVS onwards, which one is best? What about distributed versus centralised? Read on as we look at three of the big names - Bazaar, Subversion and Git - to give you an idea of which one might best suit you and your project, whether that’s large-scale software, small-scale coding, keeping track of config files or anything else that might spring to mind.
Welcome to the seventh Linux gaming compilation. Hopefully, you will like this one as much as the others. I have carefully selected today’s titles, and I believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the repertoire. The long-awaited Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is finally here. Then, there’s the masterpiece UFO: Alien Invasion, a remake of the legendary UFO: Enemy Unknown. Fans of board games, including 3D board games, will also like today’s choices. Racing fans won’t be left in the dry, either. We will talk about Liero and Liero clones, two other FPS, a number of arcade games, and more. It should definitely be interesting.
Eschalon is a turn-based RPG (role-playing game), which tries to reproduce the feeling of classic RPG games. It’s closed-source, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and it comes with a demo too. The full version is available as a download for $19.95.
FreeTumble is a free 2D Puzzle game with hardware accelerated graphics from Seby and Suiland.
It is based on Collapse, and features 3 different game modes, nice visuals and music and bonus.
FreeTumble is available for Linux and Windows in English, French and German.
Ho, ho! Finally! The KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast arrives! It’s 10:36 in length and covers some of the nice improvements we’ve in Plasmaland for 4.3, including:
Many KDE 3 users depended on Krun, a simple yet effective application used to execute commands. Executed simply by pressing “Alt-F2″, it was much easier to start applications using it, rather than navigating through a launch menu or opening a terminal window. The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name of the command you intended to launch. With the advent of KDE 4, that has all changed.
A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt. In this article I will talk about Yakuake, a powerful terminal application for Linux, and also the KDE counterpart of Tilda in GNOME.
Just a few months removed from its 1.2 update, the latest version of the GeeXBoX LiveCD has added multi threaded video decoding for MPEG-1/2/4 and h.264, which should finally let all users decode even 1080p video on dual- and quad-core systems running Linux.
Linux advocates like to brag about the number of choices people get with open source software. Windows offers very few choices, beyond dropping to your knees and begging “please, PLEASE let me keep XP! How much is a downgrade from Vista?” And Mac World even locks you into the hardware.
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If you have an old machine that you want to make functional, the leaders are Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. I found Puppy just a little bit easier and have it running on one machine.
And if you have kids, Qimo is very good. It’s also Ubuntu based, but it installs with a kid-friendly interface: large icons and lots of educational games. It also works well with older low-resource machines, a smart move since the kids often get the hand-me-down computer.
The New PCLinuxOS Magazine, which comprises volunteers from the PCLinuxOS community is proud to announce the release of it’s July 2009 edition. This edition brought forth several decisions from the new crew to bring it forth to a monthly release and the selection of a new Chief Editor, Paul Arnote aka parnote.
I HIGHLY recommend that you get PCLinuxOS. Download it, burn it to disk, run the Live CD and then install it. You’ll be saying goodbye to all the Windows headaches of spyare and viruses. You’ll also be saying hello to a stable, secure operating system with thousands of software titles (like AudiKonverter) and a wonderful welcoming community of users.
Qimo needs a minimum of 256MB of memory to run from the CD, or 192MB to install. At least 6 GB of hard drive space is recommended, and a 400MHz or faster CPU. Because of its very minimal system requirements, it’s a fantastic OS to install on that old PC sitting in your closet and put in your childs room.
Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind. Some of the better-known distributions aimed at children include:
* Sugar, the operating system designed for the One Laptop Per Child project. Sugar is a radical departure from traditional desktops, with a strong emphasis on teaching programming skills, but is very strongly geared towards classroom use. Although I’m pretty comfortable using Linux, I’m afraid Sugar might be too different for me to help my nephew and niece make use of it.
* Edubuntu is based on the popular Ubuntu distribution. Designed to be easy to install and very Windows-like in its operation, Edubuntu would be my first choice if I were using newer hardware. With its rich graphical interface, though, I worry that these years-old PCs, neither of which have graphic cards, will lag running Edubuntu. And given kids’ attention spans, I’m afraid that would be a major barrier to getting them to use it.
Saturday was the end-of-year festival at my kids’ school and I hosted a Sugar booth. I had asked if I could set up my XOs and netbooks on a table for kids to interact with Sugar. It was also a way for me to celebrate the Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry Release from Sugar Labs.
Say you don’t like something, then change it! We’ve seen lots of change in Red Hat and Fedora over the years, in terms of visual looks, feature sets, support and more, as the community has spoken and Red Hat has listened.
That is why I believe that Fedora is a great distribution with a great future, and is most certainly a hat with a history.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 148 for the week June 22 - 28, 2009. In this issue we cover: MOTU Council, New Ubuntu Members, First Paper Cut milestone reached, Tracking Ubuntu Community Issues, Kubuntu Tutorials Day, Introducing the Ubuntu NGO team, Extra options when filing bugs, Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #7, and much, much more!
Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.
Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad’s DV9000.
Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.
And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!
I spent June 26 at Dell’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, meeting key members of Dell’s Linux team. We spent an hour discussing the broad Linux market; Dell’s current Ubuntu strategy; and the PC giant’s early reaction to Moblin (Mobile Linux).
Ultimate Edition 2.2 was released on June 17. It’s the latest salvo from TheeMahn, creator of this popular distro of Linux. Ultimate Edition was originally released in late 2007 to be Ubuntu with a “better user experience and with improved usability.” In the releases since, they have broken from Ubuntu and actually have created their own repository .
Like Ubuntu, Ultimate Edition is Gnome based. TheeMahn also built Ubuntu Gamers Edition, and it shows in Ultimate Edition (UE). Ultimate Edition has software pre-installed and ready for use on a live DVD environment.
If God had intended Man to program, we’d be born with serial I/O ports.
I recently decided to check out the newest release of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, and I have to ask the question, is this really the ultimate Ubuntu? To find out, keep reading.To start, I am going to appologize to the person who did the remaster, as I am sure they are no going to be happy with what I have to say about this “distro”.
That was it for my first month ever with Ubuntu only. Did it work? Yes. Did it make a difference? a little. Operating systems are interchangeable nowadays, there are equivalent applications on any of them and the choice boils down to user preference (i.e. Usability with a capital U) and the limited availability of a few killer apps (which again are defined by the users and what they want to accomplish). And what count most for a user on the road is battery life, and after years of average 2-3 hours (with the occasional outlayer) there finally is some good news for the mainstream on that front.
Why do Microsoft and vendors like ASUS continue to push the line that Microsoft Windows is the ultimate operating system for the diminutive ultraportable netbook market? The Windows 7 plan for netbooks is fraught with limitation and burdens. It’s time to bring back the penguin.
Mobile carriers may start giving away netbooks for free, and Linux-based application stores could help them profit by doing it, the head of a Linux advocacy group told Chinese companies on Monday.
You may have noticed that practically ever netbook running Windows has the same specs: 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, probably an Intel Atom processor, and a 9 or 10 inch display. That’s largely because Microsoft is offering low cost Windows XP licenses to PC makers selling netbooks that meet these specifications. It helps keep the costs down while providing netbook makers with an operating system that’s been proven to work well on low power computers.
Last month I wrote about netbooks powered by the MIPS processor, originally developed by SGI. I also pointed out that the price for the Belco Alpha 400 had dropped to $149 last December and January. That is now the regular price for the lowest of low end Linux netbooks at Geeks.com. Last week they had a special and the price dropped to $139.
In recent weeks, the OpenSolaris project has rolled out AMIs for Ruby on Rails 2 for application development, WordPress 2.7 for Web content management, and MediaWiki 1.14 for wikis. In April, Sun put a 64-bit version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 out for EC2, and it seems likely that a 64-bit version of the more recent 2009.06 release is due any day now. The most recent addition to the AMI jukebox for OpenSolaris running on Amazon’s EC2 is an OpenESB v3 stack, all licensed under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
With about 245 stores, three warehouses, 20,000-plus employees, and a trucking fleet as part of a multi-billion-dollar grocery operation, Modesto, Calif.-based Save Mart has discovered that where it made a shift to open-source software for databases, operating systems and network management, it lowered costs by more than half.
“Open source is profoundly less expensive,” says Sims, citing the adoption of SuSe Linux, the Ingres open-source database, MySQL, and Hobbit open-source monitoring as changes that contributed to over 50% in IT savings in comparison to the proprietary software from Oracle, Microsoft Windows or HP OpenView that was replaced.
Open source “is free but we do pay for support and services,” Sim’s points out, noting that Save Mart has established vendor alliances with Novell, Red Hat and Ingres to support open-source software the grocery retailer uses.
Since 1999, SourceForge has the ‘go to place’ for all open source downloads, but in the last couple of years, Google Code has put up a bit of challenge. Remember also for a while there was this constant thread in media about how SourceForge had 100,000 project, though most had been abandoned. SourceForge.net now has 230,000 projects and if downloads are an indication, they seem to be doing just fine.
We’ve discussed in great detail how the current ACTA treaty has been mostly driven by corporate interests as a way to sneak in more draconian copyright laws through international treaty, rather than through legislative means. When consumer groups have requested a seat at the table, they’ve been rejected, even as industry lobbyists have had no problem being active participants in the process.
Except… that’s not true at all. As a recent Harvard study showed, the amount of money going into the “music ecosystem” has grown — tremendously. The only thing that’s dropping is the sale of plastic discs.
In the meantime, considering BPI and others were so incredibly wrong 10 years ago, and they’re only willing to admit it now, why is it that they think everyone should trust them now — and that those of us who were actually right 10 years ago should still be brushed off as wackos who just want stuff for free? Perhaps it’s time to start actually listening to those who have been pointing out new ways to embrace what consumers want to do with music in order to make more money.
The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) (GGF) acquires The Pirate Bay website, http://www.thepiratebay.org, one of the 100 most visited websites in the world and the technology company Peerialism, that has developed next generation file-sharing technology. Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.
Intel has created a new network management and configuration system for Linux called ConnMan—but not everyone is pleased to see it challenge NetworkManager. Ars looks at the pros and “conns” of the decision to create the new software.
Q: The Windows XP system on my notebook computer is near collapse. I was about to scrub the memory clean and reinstall Windows, when someone suggested that now might be the time to switch to Linux. I use a lot of Windows programs including Photoshop. Am I setting myself up for a world of frustration by trying to break the ties to Windows?
A: Perhaps. I’m a big Linux fan. It’s faster than Windows, and free distributions of it such as Ubuntu (ubuntu.com) and Fedora (fedoraproject.org) boast Windows-like interfaces that make them a breeze to use.
Unfortunately, a lot of mainstream Windows programs, including Photoshop and Microsoft Office, are not available for Linux. Fortunately, there are decent substitutes, including Gimp (photo-editing software from gimp.org) and OpenOffice (an office application suite from openoffice.org). Both are free.
The company works mostly with open-source technology. Open-source software is much like other software but its source code - the actual programming - is accessible to anybody and can be customized on the fly. Many of the basic programs are available free online. Online communities have emerged to build on, improve and debug more popular open-source programs such as the Internet browser Firefox, the OpenOffice suite of productivity software and the operating system Linux.
Here in Europe a full version of Windows home premium would cost €199 (about $280). You can actually purchase a cheap Linux netbook for the same price! Yes, a boxed Edition of Windows can actually cost as much as a full netbook, that’s how expensive it is. If you live in the US you will get some relief though, as your license will only cost $199.
Partly due to the activity at LinuxTag there were two issues of the Kernel Log this week. The Tuesday issue covered the end of further IDE development and included coverage of some of the activities at LinuxTag, while the Thursday issue documented the end of the main development phase of version 2.6.31 of the kernel.
Summary:
Editorial: Jolicloud, the new operating system for netbooks!
First Look: Ultimate Edition 2.2
Distributions announced last week:
· Available Now: g:Mini 3.0
· R.I.P. Linux 9.2 Has Linux Kernel 2.6.29.5
· Elive 1.9.31 Offers Support for Acer Aspire One
Oracle’s acquisition streak has given the company an enormous breadth of offerings (say what you will about quality of the software) and the attempt at offering it’s own Linux variant gives it an OS that’s passable if not meaningful. But, I don’t know that owning the operating system is important to the growth of sales in applications or databases.
Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they’re referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a specially-designed database of files, their disk location, definition and attributes. Everything on a Unix or Linux filesystem is a file: Directories, processes, links, programs, and device references. All files.
The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS.
The Wine project has been going for a long time. Users who want to upgrade their OS to Windows 7 and like the idea of XP mode, should note that firstly XP mode is available only in the more expensive versions (apparently) and it allegedly does not offer DirectX support. Wine on the other hand has great support for software (check the home page for your favorite title) it won’t cost you anything, and its worth considering to try if as an unhappy Vista customer you are looking for an upgrade to your OS.
Personal information managers (PIM) are the major influence on most people’s opinion of a desktop. When you launch an application, the desktop is simply something to move past as quickly as possibly.
Similarly, a desktop’s system administration tools are used only occasionally — and many of us still prefer to use the command line. By contrast, a desktop’s PIM tools are used daily, and switching to new tools can be disconcerting.
This basic fact was rammed home for me when I recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my main computer. I had little trouble learning my way around KDE, and I continued to use many of the same programs, such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
Mandriva Linux, one of the most known distributions, it’s preparing the new version and already has an alpha (previous stage for a beta): Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.
Robert Shingledecker, founder of the Tiny Core Linux project, announced yesterday, June 28th, the release of Tiny Core Linux 2.1, a very small Linux distribution that is only 11 MB in size. This version comes with many updates as well as important features: the new modutils will further improve space efficiency and two added modules, hwmon and rfkill, bring better support for laptops.
Software company Red Hat continued its recession-defying performance by posting an 11 percent increase in quarterly revenue that outpaced analysts’ expectations.
MosChip Semiconductor Technology Ltd., a leading provider of high performance connectivity solutions for consumer, industrial and computing applications, today announced it has entered into a technology partnership with IdealBT Technology Corporation to bring to market a complete system solution for network attached storage (NAS) applications. MosChip’s System-on-a-Chip (SoC) devices cover a myriad of NAS design requirements while IdealBT’s embedded Linux-based software has been designed into numerous functional, versatile, high-performance, and reliable NAS solutions.
Google’s move to let software run natively on Android devices opens the door for a version of Firefox that can run on the operating system.
At present, Android applications are written in Java and run on Google’s Dalvik Java virtual machine. Last week, though, Google announced the Android Native Development Kit version 1.0 that lets software run natively on the Linux layer below, though the company sees it as a way not to run full-fledged applications as much as to run components of ordinary Android applications.
“Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++,” said Google’s David Turner in a Native Developer Kit blog post.
Varadarajan Narayanan has a vision, a x86-based SoC netbook that is affortable, efficient and easy to repair. This innovative netbook is aimed for the develping countries. Though it is still in a very early phase of development it already shows much promise.
Under the new agreement, Nokia and Intel will coordinate open source efforts by aligning some of the underlying APIs across these platforms. They will also continue to work on several smaller projects such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio to provide more commonly-used open source standards across these platforms.
Linux distros that run on pen-drives are nothing new but this one’s specially designed for the little ones.
Sugar Labs has now released version 1 of Sugar on a Stick, a bootable Fedora 11-based OS plus a set of applications that are stored on a USB memory stick. Although pen-drive distros of Linux are not new, this one is targeted for kids, with hundreds of fun-filled activities that can be downloaded form the SugarLabs Activity webpage.
The project has been running ever since Microsoft said it would abandon the operating system when it moved to Windows 95. That was the Vole’s claim at the time, anyway. However, it didn’t really abandon DOS in Windows 95, but just hid it under the covers.
Recently, open source CMS solutions have gained traction with publishers and have taken market share from the enterprise players. In fact, this post on The Huffington Post points to Drupal, an open source CMS, as “the platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites.” It even recommends another open source tool, WordPress, for blogging applications.
Topics to be covered include installing the binaries or building the source code, introduction to the FUSE shell, setting up the development environment, working with Eclipse and Maven. Cranton and Britton will also explore how you can write and deploy your own OSGi bundles for FUSE Mediation Router routes (based on Apache Camel), and FUSE Services Framework services (based on Apache CXF).
TelcoBridges recently announced its decision to pool resources and join hands with Halo Kwadrat to tap into the high-capacity open source applications, specifically in central Europe and Russia. TelcoBridges is renowned globally as a hardware and software vendor for telecom system integrators, application developers, and service providers. Halo Kwadrat is a prominent European dealer focused in providing open source telephony products.
When can a company that’s still “close to being a startup” compete on a level playing field against the giants in its field? During a recession, that’s when, says Ned Lilly, CEO of open source ERP provider xTuple. Cash-strapped companies that once were drawn to SAP and Oracle are now giving xTuple second looks, he told CRM Buyer.
Web 2.0 is about mass collaboration and open source is about collaboration also. There absolutely are some synergies there in both directions. The collaborative techniques of web 2.0 and mass collaboration are the same things that have driven open source to be successful. The most successful open source projects are the ones that provide value to people which then encourages those people to become developers, and then they add enhancements and so that same virtual cycle that powers things like wikipedia also powering open source software.
When it comes to IT, there is a multitude of low-cost, creative ways to make resources available. Which ones are worth considering? Is there a more efficient development approach? How can you effectively combine resources with other government districts? The clear need is to evaluate low-cost resources that save money in the short term and provide proven solutions that are advanced and secure enough to avoid long-term pain. This article delves into practical examples you can start using today to save money, speed development and deliver higher-quality solutions.
Yesterday I had a chance to meet the lead singer of O Teatro Magico and then see their show. It was amazing! This creative group of musicians were about to “live the dream” by signing with a record company a number of years ago, but after they recorded the songs for their first album, the recording company said “sorry, but you need to change everything so that it sounds more like pop.”
The creation of licenses for information on the web has been hugely simplified by the great people at Creative Commons, who have developed their CC licenses which are simple and offer the type of control over how information is used that meets most peoples needs online.
[N]etBeans, the open source IDE championed by Sun Microsystems, is being fitted with additional capabilities this week for development teams and scripting languages.
On behalf of the KDevelop team I am happy to announce the Beta 4 release of KDevelop 4. This release includes some major new features, such as working sets (only available when building with KDE 4.3), integration of the quickopen functionality into the toolbar and a new perspective switcher (see the upper right corner of the mainwindow). We have of course also fixed again a lot of bugs, for example non-text files such as images will not crash KDevelop anymore when closing them, Valgrind execution is working again, the debugger’s variable view has been fixed and a lot of crash fixes related to parsing and code-completion popups. Altogether we have managed to fix 30 bugs in just 30 days.
Debugging is the process of finding and reducing the number of bugs in computer software and electronic hardware. When a program crashes, the debugger shows the position in the original code. A good debugger plays an essential role in software development.
Debugging can be more difficult when various subsystems are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to appear in another.
Back in April, Canadian cable operator Cogeco hoisted metered billing on the back of their customers, applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 a month on top of existing tiers. When customers complained, Cogeco insulted customer intelligence by insisting the move wasn’t about making money. Cogeco then decided to raise monthly rates as well, just for good measure.
Canadian Internet watchers may recall a controversy in late 2007 when Rogers began experimenting with adding its own content to webpages that its subscribers visit. The company used the technology to alert customers about their data usage. Google was one of the targets of the experiments and the company reacted angrily…
Two defendants in a scareware scam case have settled with the FTC after showing that they had no means to pay the organization’s previous $1.9 million order. The scammers now only have to fork over their illegally obtained earnings—unless they somehow manage to find that extra money later, that is.
Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner’s permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use.
The Pirate Bay team has continued developing its video streaming site - which will open up to the public within 5 years. On The Video Bay users can share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, true Pirate Bay-style.
Since 2005, a Brazilian senator has been championing new cybercrime legislation which would include tough measures against file-sharing. Yesterday, at the International Free Software Forum, the Brazilian President openly criticized the bill, and then posed for pictures with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde.
The Conference Board of Canada plagiarism and undue influence story - which with the Board’s report and overdue apology to Curtis Cook will now go on hiatus until new reports are issued in the fall - has obviously attracted considerable interest. Looking back, while plagiarism is rare, it is the public airing of the copyright lobby policy laundering effort that is the far more important development.
The head of UK music trade group BPI says that the major labels made a mistake by not doing a deal with Napster a decade ago. Such a deal was never going to happen, but what kind of world might we be living in now if it had?
The year’s second major P2P trial kicks off in one month, and Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson wants to mount some of the same attacks that failed in the first case. Nesson argues that all of the RIAA’s MediaSentry investigative evidence must be banned from trial, as the company violated wiretap law and private detective licensing law.
Sirius and XM promised the Federal Communications Commission they would not raise rates as a condition of the companies’ merger, but the FCC did allow them to issue rate hikes to account for any increase in royalty costs.
The small Connecticut town of New Milford has gotten the attention of ASCAP. They are being told to pay for a license but the town says no…
Several months ago, the town of New Milford decided not to sign a licensing agreement with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
The MPAA has taken Real to court to try to stop the company from selling RealDVD, a software that enables users to copy DVDs to a hard drive, as well as Facet, a DVD player that can also create digital copies of DVDs and store them as well. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel is due soon to decide whether to continue banning sales of RealDVD until a full trial decides whether the technology violates copyright law.
Kira Alvarez is the Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property Enforcement, and the chief US negotiator for ACTA. According to her Linkedin bio, as late as October 2008, right before the election, she was the Time Warner Vice President for Global Public Policy, and before that, she was a lobbyist for Ely Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. Alvarez also worked for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, before her stints for Lilly and Time Warner. Note that she took her current job in December 2008, after the election but before the inauguration. Now she is the lead Obama representative for ACTA, reporting to Stan McCoy and Ambassador Kirk at USTR.
Linux has become mature, open-source has proven it can be a viable solution for businesses, and that the expenses involved in applying their own personal paid developer staff toward efforts which ultimately are given away for free, in the long haul are actually far more cost effective than paying continuously for proprietary access to systems, such as those provided for by Microsoft and Windows-based products.
The future is most assuredly open-source, which means various forms of Linux for mobile devices, from handhelds to netbooks to notebooks, even on to desktops and servers. And prior to this recent announcement by Intel that they’ve signed up with Nokia to deliver Atom-based x86 CPUs for use in their mobile smartphones, I would’ve said that the future was entirely ARM-based.
I still believe the future will be ARM-based ultimately, but I think Intel’s intrusion into those roadmaps may push it out a bit.
The ‘Free’ in FOSS not only provides the freedom discussed above, but also it provides individuals the freedom to learn and expand their experience, education and opportunity to help others to be successful using Free and Open Source Software.
I have been pondering the meaning of “free” in association with Free Open Source Software (FOSS) in general and GNU/Linux in particular. If one asks a FOSS advocate what free means in regard to these one might hear the reply, “Free as in beer!” and/or “Free as in freedom!”. While that means something to the FOSS advocate it may not mean the same thing to whoever asks the question. Frankly, my beer has rarely been free and furthermore what is “freedom”? I think I have answers to the question in the title. Bear with me while I attempt to explain what free means in relation to FOSS and GNU/Linux.
Florian Schiessl, the acting head of the Munich LiMux project, says, “We’d do it again”. Pictures of Tux the penguin, the Linux mascot, adorn the walls of the Munich city council’s IT department. The target is to convert 80 per cent of the city council’s 14,000 computers to Linux by mid-2012 at the latest. Even earlier, by the end of this year in fact, all the town hall staff are to drop Word, Excel and Internet Explorer and use free OpenOffice software and Firefox, the open-source browser, instead.
Doesn’t that ever happen to you? Not particularly with your operating system because you know, that’s geeky as all Hell. But say you always bought from the same brand of shoes. They were great, and did everything you asked them to do for you. But after so many years, damn! Don’t you wanna try something new? See what’s out there?
I’ve been fighting with the want to use Ubuntu for like three years now. Not just use Ubuntu, but make it my primary OS of choice. For the last few years I’ve fiddled with it, put it on a separate partition, or a virtual machine.
These are just a few of the reasons why your law firm may want to make the switch to Linux. There are wide variety of distributions to choose from, and best of all, they’re FREE! If you don’t feel like diving right in without any prior experience, Ubuntu can be downloaded and installed through WUBI. The Windows-based Ubuntu Installer (Wubi) allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu from within Microsoft Windows. It lets a Microsoft Windows user try Ubuntu without risking any data loss due to disk formatting or partitioning.
When anyone mentions blade servers and Big Blue in the same paragraph, it’s fair to assume that only big enterprises need to pay attention. Dell, however, hopes its new “SMB-in-a-box” lineup, which bundles hardware with pre-configured open-source software packages, will prove an attractive proposition for smaller firms concerned about keeping IT costs to a minimum.
Alien, the Linux application that converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats now has a front-end GUI to simplify the already simple process of converting packages from one format to the other with Alien.
With the different audio and video formats available, there is often the need to inter convert amongst them - sometimes for quality and sometimes for compatibility. Here are some of the better software, that you can use to achieve the inter conversions on your Linux box.
Want to make your downloads easier and faster? Then it’s time for a quick lesson in Metalink…
You’re wrong I tell you! BitTorrent is the One True Way of downloading files, and I won’t hear any different!
I see. In that case, why not check out TechRadar’s article on speeding up BitTorrent downloads. But if you’d like to hear why Metalink is designed to sit alongside BitTorrent rather than replace it, hang around and I’ll tell you.
For web browsing, most of us would prefer Firefox or Opera because of their speed, security, stability, and overall features. While a handful of people may like surfing the web with some of those terminal-based browsers.
A few weeks ago I took Opera 10 beta for a test drive to see if the Opera folks had a shot at claiming serious share on the desktop. While Opera 10 is the best Opera release yet, it didn’t seem to have any killer features that would drive adoption. Last week, Opera pulled the other one and released Opera Unite: the killer feature that might put Opera over the top.
Unless someone out there in the community can locate another big bug, Mozilla may finally be ready to lift the curtain on its biggest Web browser release to date.
The only question next is, what’ll happen after IE is defeated? (*laugh*) Who cares? Firefox isn’t competing against anyone, except maybe itself. So the death of a major competitor really means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The new release will include a number of new features, but don’t expect to see many features that were inspired by the new arrival of Google on the Web browser scene with its Chrome browser.
Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.
Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser — and was surprised at how un-beta it was.
Even cooler is how Firefox lets you interact with videos built around the open standards. Dubbed Dynamic Content Injection, other images and videos can be inserted into specific points of a video in a sort of augmented reality fashion. Technically, the same types of tricks can be done in Flash, but it’s a lot more complex and typically requires the entire page be coded in Flash.
Whether you want to speed access to the Web sites you regularly visit, keep better tabs on your tabs, or protect your system from potentially dangerous active content, there’s a Firefox extension ready to help you out. Jack Wallen shares his list of favorite time-saving, browser-enhancing add-ons.
We grabbed the Kubuntu version of the software from official sources and installed it on a fairly standard Dell laptop. We experienced quite a few problems trying to run it under Gnome, but switching to KDE (as you’d expect) made things a lot more stable. KOffice’s launch speed is comparable with that of OpenOffice.org 3.1, and its rendering is beautifully smooth, even when shifting around large blended objects.
Now you might wonder, what has bubbles to do with the forum? Unfortunately I can’t give you an answer, but it seems to be related to this picture that has been floating around…
Having recently upgraded to Jaunty, I thought it might be time to give KDE another try. I have been a little tough on KDE in the past, but I have always maintained it has potential. Time to see if 4.2 can finally deliver!
So where am I going with this? Basically because GNOME is chosen as the primary Desktop Environment, Linux in general looks bad, and this is because GNOME in general looks bad. So how does one fix this? Well I personally think that KDE4 is soon ready to replace GNOME, it attracts a lot more positive attention and is (almost) completely stable. Otherwise the standard will stick with GNOME and there will be constant negative attention due to its poor UI. If GNOME wants to keep Linux in the game they NEED to work on their UI for their upcoming release of 3.0 and it needs to be comparable to KDE4.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.
The Sabayon team always desired to be working closer to upstream with the belief that together we are stronger, and that by having a more desktop and user focused Gentoo it would improve the Gentoo experience for a lot of users, and I think that extends to all of open source in general, if we all worked together in a harmonious way we could do anything, but its open source, so it will never happen, the status quo of its greatest strength and greatest weakness.
For HAR, we’re planning on starting an Event Box for EMEA and debuting it there. Hopefully if we get our hands on a projector and screen, we can do a combination of a Fedora/CentOS/FreeJ barcamp as well as VJing and running demos at night. If you want to participate in the process of putting together the Event Box, we’ll be having a session at FUDCon on Saturday or Sunday to coordinate planning and hammer out a few details.
On the right, an average job demand was looked up for 2008 & 2009 for each of the distribution analyzed. More than 80% of the demand is for RedHat, BSD and Suse. (Aside point: The name Mandriva, what was originally Mandrake has not caught on. There was not a single position that used the new term. Mandrake however was still used and had an average demand of about 10 jobs a month). RedHat at 3000, is more than double that of BSD (800), and Suse (550). centOs(200), Debian(300), Fedora(225), and Ubunt(175) were the center of the pack. Gentoo (60) finished last.
So play DVD movies, listen to MP3s, online audio streams, and other entertainment with no hiccups or glitches. PCLinuxOS handles ‘em all! It’s so easy, you’ll think you’re running an Apple Mac (but with out the hefty price tag) or a Windows system ( but without the viruses and pop-ups!)
The app that helps monitor this is “Update Notifier.” The screen shot above shows it in action. You launch it once and it sits in your system tray. Update Notifier periodically checks to see what new software updates are available. It flags you and allows you to make those updates with a couple of clicks of the mouse.
Really, when I thought about doing this I wondered if I could come up with five reasons but now I’m sure I could go on much longer. Slackware is the oldest existing Linux distribution and it didn’t get to being around this long by being sub par. There’s a general consensus that the post install configuration of Slackware may be a bit too challenging for beginners, but I think anyone who can read a copy of the Slackbook and use a Slackware forum if need be would be able to do it. Believe me, it’s worth the initial effort and like Trent of the Linux Critic says-once you go slack, you never go back.
The full GPG-signed message from our election coordinator, Nigel Jones, is attached. Thank you to the community for their suggestions, Josh Boyer and the Board for their work on additional diligence searches, and Nigel Jones for setting up the voting.
It all started with a failing Student’s Teacher Feedback System, designed by few fourth year students of my college, in oct-nov 2008 the system was not able to scale and everything was reverted back to paper, it was then when i was contacted by a teacher from my Department ( Information and Communication Technology ), regarding if i can improve it.
Wednesday was the beginning of LinuxTag and as always the efficiency of our Ambassador contingent was plain to see. The booth was in fantastic shape, with plenty of “Four Foundations” decorations and also a projector to show off slides that offered excellent Fedora messages and data about the upcoming FUDCon event. There were also new, free-standing, vertical banners using the “Four Foundations” logos that look simply superb.
Lots of great conversations went on for Day 1, as others have written. Security team collaborating with release engineering, wireless hackers collaborating with each other, and lots of new people finding their way around to meet with other contributors as well. The hackfest started a little timidly, which surprised me seeing how many great engineering minds were here from various locations. But ultimately everything came together very well, culminating in an awesome BarCamp/unconference scramble at the end of the day.
Ksplice has started offering Ksplice Uptrack for Ubuntu Jaunty, a free service that delivers rebootless versions of all the latest Ubuntu kernel security updates. It’s currently available for both the 32 and 64-bit generic kernel, and they plan to add support for the virtual and server kernels by the end of the month, according to their FAQ. This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn’t need to be rebooted for security updates. (We covered Ksplice’s underlying technology when it was first announced a year ago.)
I may be missing something here (be great if I am), but it seems to me that the content of the Ubuntu Wiki - which contains some great stuff - is not licensed under one of the common ’shareable’ licenses, like CC, GFDL or OPL
Earlier I wrote about Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala planning to offer a greater and more diverse set of wallpapers. Now that a little more time has passed, here are some of the most promising wallpapers for Ubuntu 9.10…
On paper Ubuntu Karmic koala 9.10 is the more efficient than Windows 7, but most will tend to use Windows 7 due to its glam quotient and marketing strategy.
Blog entries are single shot capsules of feedback, wisdom and opinion ejected onto the Internet and often aggregated in places such as Planet Ubuntu. They are typically highly personalized, lurking in personally-driven locations (such as a homepage or personal blog), have no facilities for applying status, assignment, milestones or priority, provide little or no means to subscribe to specific problems, and lack facilities for communicating when a problem has been solved: if the issue is resolved the blog is sometimes updated and sometimes not.
* Command and Conquer – MOC & IRSSI
* How To: Ubuntu As A Guest, Apt-Cacher, and Inkscape – Part 3.
* My Story – Why I Converted To Linux.
* Review – WebHTTrack
* MOTU Interview – Stefan Ebner.
* Top 5 – Linux-powered Devices.
As I have been very interested in the newly released 2.6.30 Linux Kernel, I was browsing around the ubuntu kernel wiki and I’ve found and interesting tidbit…
After about a week of evaluation, I’d say that if you need a new laptop, you can’t go wrong by teaming up the latest version of Kubuntu and the Asus X83-VM. The fit and finish is great. It’s light and has a bright 14-inch screen. Kubuntu has done a great job with the desktop applications and hardware recognition.
Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC, which has spent the last year or so making Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile less ugly, is now doing the same for Google’s (GOOG) Android. It’s the first look at how gadget manufacturers and carriers will try to differentiate their phones based on Android.
The XO laptop made a considerable splash when it was announced to the world by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organization. Tech enthusiasts were anxious to get their hands on the fabled $100 laptop. Reviews at the time were very enthusiastic and focused mostly on the hardware, ruggedness, battery life, innovative display technology and mesh wireless access. The software however was a custom linux distribution with an entirely new user interface and an entirely new way of doing things. Some tried to compare it to Windows or linux running on similarly inexpensive Netbooks, and those reviews were unfavorable.
Sugar Labs has announced the first official release of Sugar on a Stick, a Linux-based learning environment that can boot from a USB memory stick. The Sugar platform, which originally emerged from the One Laptop Per Child project, could soon arrive in classrooms.
The Drupal content management system is one of the most popular engines for dynamic websites — indeed, it powers the site you’re visiting right now. All this powering doesn’t happen by itself, though, and the developer community that does the dirty work behind the scenes is in need of a bit of Linux labor.
Internet TV is one of the most developing field in the tech market.
The origin of this field can was with the introduction of streaming video. The quality of the video depended on your connection speed. With the advancement of broadband Internet, the quality of the video and ability to access it online increased. The next revolution in this field was YouTube, which gave the idea of social interaction with video. But the problem with YouTube was that movies can only be viewed in a little pop-up windows. After this the idea of high definition video which utilizes fast broadband speeds for streaming the content over the Internet emerged.
Sun doesn’t have a full-blown methodology for this yet, but they are starting to offer a way towards it: use OpenSolaris to get people’s hands dirty with the new features, and even let them run it in a production environment. (Little-known fact: people with Solaris support contracts can substitute OpenSolaris for the regular version and still get Sun support.) Then let them move to the next real version of Solaris, which maintains binary compatibility with previous editions — something Sun sweated blood to make sure of — and continue where you left off.
Seeing as how I haven’t switched OSes or gone on a customization frenzy this week, I’ll talk about a little something I found a few months ago. Rockbox is its name. MP3 players are its business. Awesomeness is its nature.
Open source can be defined as a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process, and the promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in (from The Open Source Initiative). The US Government, including DoD, is taking a new look at open source as a way to achieve cost savings, and improvement in quality. Scott McNealy, in a BBC interview in January of this year, said that he had been asked, by the new administration, to write a paper on open source. OSI President, Micheal Tiemann, also claimed that the US government could save around $400bn dollars through use of open source.
The same is true for politics. The Obama campaign, in computing terms, was a much more top-down affair than the Dean campaign which preceded it. The Obama people bypassed the blogs just as they did media gatekeepers. The online environment they built, in the end, was proprietary.
It’s the ability to harness trends which leads to success, not the trends themselves. This harnessing would seem to contradict the open source ideal. But does it?
Again, I would argue that it does not. Open source is an accelerant of change. The Internet is the rocket fuel of change. Harnessing that power, directing that rocket, these remain tasks for leadership.
Reis’ headaches began at the end of last summer, just after President Bush signed into law the Higher Education Opportunity Act, the first reauthorization of the Higher Education Act since 1998. The act included several new provisions, but the one that has Reis and others on college campuses concerned is a new requirement that schools ensure they are doing all they can to combat illegal file sharing among students.
[...]
Reis estimates he will spend approximately $100,000 implementing new hardware and software in order to be in compliance with the regulation. But figuring out exactly what is needed is not easy. The HEOA is still in the negotiated rulemaking process, so the exact language and interpretation from the Department of Education is still forthcoming.
Almost two years after its initial announcement, the Linux Solution Group (LiSoG) has now presented specifications for its OSDtBench (Open Source based Desktop Benchmark) desktop benchmark suite and demonstrated a prototype at LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin.
In his keynote at the LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich spoke about the future of user interfaces on mobile devices. In the process he presented QML, the newest development from his employer Qt Software.
The facts are clear, Koyshkin said at the outset: every computer has but finite resources such as CPU time, memory, hard disk size and I/O, and network I/O. Administrators are interested in protecting these resources from DoS attacks so that they can continue providing QoS or simple processing.
Earlier on this month a project came to the fore the Linux Unified Kernel or LUK for short. This is a Chinese based project (although I sincerely hope that it expands to become a global effort) at putting Wine code into the Linux kernel. The reaction to this has been mostly mixed with horror by many, stating things like “We should be making vendors support Linux natively” and “oh no, the security issues!” to other things such as the legal issues.
AWN (Avant-Window-Navigator). This is the first dock I tried a couple years back. It looks good, is easily configurable, and has a lot of great plugins (stacks, menu’s, weather etc…). It can pretty much replace the entire gnome-panel in features. However, I only ended up sticking with AWN for a couple months because the auto-hide feature was (and still is) buggy and would crash the dock during normal operation. This should be fixed for the upcoming 0.4 release; so, I might have to give it another try at that time. The original developer works with Canonical on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (which I love) and is definitely capable of great things.
The development team behind the linuX-gamers project proudly announced earlier today that version 0.9.5 of their Linux-based Live DVD was now available for download. Being packed with a lot of games of various types, such as RPG, FPS, RTS, TBS, arcade or puzzle, linuX-gamers 0.9.5 is a ‘boot-and-play’ Linux distribution. This means the linuX-gamers allows users to play the titles directly from the Live DVD without having to install anything at all on their computers!
Kaspersky has released a beta version of its antivirus software for Linux file systems.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Linux File Server 6.0 is designed to address security issues passing through Linux file servers before infiltrating other systems, such as Windows workstations.
Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), provider of LinuxLink, the first commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux based products, today announced LinuxLink 3.0 support for Xilinx Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 FPGAs.
IGEL Technology today launched its new Linux Universal Desktop firmware adding important new power management, multimedia and virtualization functionality to its Linux-based thin client range.
Embedded Linux as an operating system for modern ARM processors? Maybe not such a bad idea? Linux is a multitasking operating system and therefore, each process must be assigned its own process address space. However, this partitioning greatly complicates the debugging of processors and inter-process functionality. So what can be done to tackle this? The following article illustrates some possibilities how you can successfully achieve your goal.
The Android 1.5 NDK, which was announced Thursday on the Android developers blog, doesn’t actually allow developers to run completely native code on devices. Instead, it supports adding native code into apps written to run in Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) instances.
Marking a departure from the world of iPhone, HTC’s new Android-based Hero phone will also come with the ability to handle Flash elements that adorn many Web sites and power YouTube video.
Details of how Intel and Nokia will actually work together to create their brand-new category of not-a-smartphone, not-a-netbook mobile devices remain sketchy, but the first results will be open source software rather than any hardware platform.
Under the arrangement, the companies said they will work together on chip design and open-source software. Intel recently has entered that field with its Linux-based operating system called Moblin, designed to function on portable devices, and Nokia has a Linux-based operating system, dubbed Maemo. In addition, Intel will license some modem technology from Nokia.
LinuxDevices is pro-Linux, anti-Symbian, and now assumes Linux will displace Symbian:
The partnership news further suggests that the rumors that Nokia is moving forward with Linux — and not, it seems, Symbian — devices that combine MID and smartphone characteristics, are true. It also appears that Nokia will likely focus on Linux for its future high-end smartphones, while leaving a soon to be open-sourced Symbian to handle less powerful smartphones and feature phones.
This “reading buddy” activity is being further developed conceptually as our members from Computer Science and Engineering departments commence work on the programming aspect of the work, and it is our hope that this can be done in a variety of languages in the future.
Of course, it’s too early to draw any conclusions, but the current alpha version of Jolicloud does make a good first impression. The fact that Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu means that you can run it on pretty much any netbook and tweak the system to your liking. Jolicloud’s slick graphical interface makes it easy to install desktop and Web-based applications as well as keep your system up-to-date, which can prove to be popular with average users.
Robert Young’s message is about how Red Hat competed with Microsoft by offering something Microsoft was not prepared to offer – free software. Red Hat changed the rules of the game and generates over $600 million a year in revenue.
With the rise of open source in the embedded software industry and the ease that individuals can collaborate using social networking tools, we are standing at a unique point in time. A time where Wind River has lost its ability to control access to software, and where collaborating with a developer in China is as easy as popping your head over the cubicle partition. A time where we can eliminate the pay cheque for middle men like Ken Klein. A time where our future security will depend on ourselves, and the value that we create along with our peers. A time where we can change the rules of the game to favor our strengths, and compete with Wind River, even when it is backed by the resources, the distribution channels, and the R&D resources of Intel.
Hotel Concepts-Brilliant, a leading global provider of technology and software solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced a groundbreaking approach to its software technology development with a new and converged platform called iTesso.
Huntingburg Public Library has gone live with Evergreen, the consortial-quality open-source library automation software. 28 libraries are now live on Evergreen Indiana, a shared-catalog project of the Indiana State Library. Equinox Software, Inc., the support and development company established by the original Evergreen developers, provided bumper-to-bumper support for the migrations and is now providing round-the-clock ongoing technical support. Alpha-G Consulting also provided support for the migration
Though it was only yesterday that Bluenog (news, site) announced the newest iteration of their integrated collaborative environment, better known as Bluenog ICE, the company is already back with more exciting news. Good Samaritans that they are, Bluenog plans to contribute back the enhancements it made to various open source projects during the development phase of Bluenog ICE 4.5.
Research In Motion often fields the question of whether it might follow Symbian’s lead by making the BlackBerry OS open source. While there’s nothing to suggest such a move is in the cards, RIM executives have acknowledged that this could make sense in certain types of scenarios, and BlackBerry developers are intrigued by the options this would afford them.
Companies need the freedom to get at their data, to choose hosted or in-house options and more. All this can be found amongst open source solutions - but choose carefully, says Jason Brooks
Click2try, a community site which enables the easy opening and trying of open source software announced the addition of MoinMoin to its online catalog of virtualized open source applications.
Using cloud storage from Amazon has helped Automattic scale its fast-growing Wordpress.com blog hosting service. But Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg said he’d much prefer to run an optimized open source solution on leased servers. While cloud computing is the hot buzzword, Mullenweg said open source is the key to competing in the new digital economy.
ObjectsOnClouds.org Announces the Launch of the ObjectsOnClouds Open Source Project Initiative. Developer membership is free and is open to anyone worldwide.
Many businesses are seeking ways to reduce cost and improve operational effectiveness to weather the current economic climate. The use of open source software offers the ability to do both while improving the quality of the systems used to operate the businesses.
“The facts, however, prove the opposite. The very openness of the source code actually increases its security. This helps to explain why Windows sites are defaced disproportionately more often than can be attributed to its larger market share and why 80% of all spam is sent by infected Windows PCs.
TelcoBridges™, the preferred hardware and software supplier for telecom system integrators, solution developers and service providers, today announced its partnership with Halo Kwadrat, a leading European reseller specializing in open source telephony solutions. Halo is adding TelcoBridges’ high-capacity platform to its portfolio, to deliver turnkey, carrier-grade solutions to local service providers throughout Central Europe, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Russia.
Vyatta positions itself as the open source networking alternative to Cisco Systems. But what exactly does that mean? And how is Vyatta working with Citrix Systems, which recently invested in Vyatta? To find the answers, I spoke with Kelly Herrell (pictured), CEO of Vyatta.
Experts had declared 2009 as the year of open source ERP. The maturing product lines, rising consumer awareness and the economic slowdown pain were expected to give a boost to open source ERP deployments.
SIPfoundry has released its latest open source enterprise IP PBX (News - Alert) unified communications solution dubbed sipXecs marking the latest significant launch from the Open Source outfit.
Unified MBX is a software-only IP business communication system built for mobile phones. By pre-integrating OnRelay’s Cellular FMC software with a feature-rich open source IP PBX, Unified MBX provides Unified Communications (UC) without the expense of proprietary telephony hardware or IP PBX licenses.
The number of companies in Europe using open source software to manage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is surprising, an IT advisor has claimed.
Companies are increasingly requiring their call centre staff to work using open source customer relationship management (CRM) applications, an expert asserts.
Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD today. Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end, our build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten.
The two parties also inaugurated a technology center called the Center for Open Source Technology Awakening (COSTA) in an effort to push empowerment and development of Regional Information Technology Center (RICE) and Incubator Business Center (IBC).
Ten Open Source Software Centers and related promotion organizations in Asian countries and regions announce the formation of Asian Open Source Software Center (AOSSC) alliance/network to further promote the adoption, and development of open source software (OSS) technology among Asian countries. The participating countries and regions include China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
In case you missed it, history was made last week. The street uprisings in Iran, and the role that technology has been playing in that grass-roots democratic movement, has signaled a very important shift in the socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape of the planet. What is this technology I’m referring to? Actually, I’m referring to two: the open source paradigm and the web-portal, Twitter.
PHP 5.3 could be out as soon as Tuesday June 30th. The new open source language release is a big deal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that by my count this is the first major update to PHP since 2006 and the PHP 5.2 release.
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
The advent of open source software makes engineers particularly efficient. One VP Engineering that I talked to gave me an anecdote about one module where they used open source files with about 500,000 lines of code and then wrote 7,000 lines of code to stitch it all together. Open source software is also free. In the company I was running in 1999, ?software? was a huge budget line item ? we had to buy databases, testing suites, libraries, and more. Today all that stuff is free ? a start-up might spend more money on sodas for the office than it does on software.
Curious about programming, but having trouble getting started because you’re confused about all those languages? This article will give you an overview of the most common desktop languages you’ll see in free software today.
And if you’re wondering why it matters anyway that the South Koreans should be able to use Firefox and other “non-standard” browsers - don’t you just love that description? - it’s because the country’s users have some of the fastest broadband connections in the world; that means that new applications based on such connectivity may well emerge there first, so it’s important that open source be available and viable for all kinds of uses.
Nagios Enterprises, LLC announces the launch of official support contracts for Nagios - the industry standard in Open Source IT infrastructure monitoring. Support plans are competitively priced for budget-conscious organizations and start at just $2,495 per year. Discounts are offered for customers who purchase support plans through June 30, 2009.
Recently, I wanted to learn how to make Facebook applications using Ruby on Rails. For my first project, I decided to build a small application to let people find, share, install and promote Ubuntu software right from within Facebook.
FUD, for those who are unaware, is an acronym for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” Instilling FUD in people has often been a tactic of proprietary vendors, seeking to scare their customer-base away from other vendors or freer, non-proprietary alternatives. It has often been used to describe Microsoft’s tactics of denigrating free and open source solutions, for example. Essentially it is a scare-tactic which operates on people’s fear and ignorance.
Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis are emerging technologies used for compressing video and audio, respectively. The Ogg formats are free and open formats that do not belong to any particular corporation, nor do they require any royalties to use.
While it hasn’t gone that far, a talk given by Reuters’ Editor in Chief, David Schlesinger, to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on rethinking journalism suggests Reuters recognizes the future a lot more clearly than the AP, and is looking to embrace it fully, rather than block it, like the AP.
The debate over Wikipedia offers a fascinating window onto the various ways the Internet is changing how we compile and access information. This is the larger issue at the heart of Anderson’s writing: “The Long Tail” was an exploration of niche culture, the Internet’s tendency to encourage a glorious cacophony of fragmentation, while “Free” looks at what Anderson calls “freeconomics,” an open-source model in which data is the common currency.
Communtu wants to give new installers and Windows converts an easier time with Ubuntu. They will present a webpage with a list of suggested programs to install as a metapackage, including multimedia and proprietary software, and then install it.
Compiz is a really cool application. It uses 3D graphics to create really nice desktop effects. A lot of new users to GNU/Linux like the Wiggly windows effect but that is just the beginning. You can do much more with Compiz. One great feature is to create a 3D cube which you can rotate. This allows you to look through several different desktops that are currently being used. There is a feature to zoom in and out from your screen. Another eyecandy is the water effect, it makes it look like it is raining on your desktop.
Open source software is hardly a new concept, but it has only recently begun to make significant inroads into the world of enterprise data storage, where the big name proprietary vendors have (at least until now) had the advantage.
But as the open source community has grown and code has matured, with Linux taking root in more and more enterprises large and small, storage vendors, including big names like Sun Microsystems, have been developing open source networked storage solutions.
One network storage software vendor, Openfiler, never needed to be convinced of the benefits of offering enterprises an open source network storage operating system.
Corder used the same power supply, hard drive, and operating system - unspecified, but almost certainly Linux - and says that the amount of memory on the machines was different because of the different memory speeds possible with each chip and the different numbers of memory channels that each chip architecture supports: the Xeons have three channels per socket that run faster than the two channels per socket of the Opterons, so Corder reckoned that to even it out the latter should get a little more memory.
Just over two weeks after the release of Linux 2.6.30, Linus Torvalds has released 2.6.31-rc1, the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.31. As usual, “rc1″ completes the merge window during which the kernel hackers incorporate the majority of new features into the respective new version’s main development branch. In the eight to eleven weeks that follow, the programmers tend to integrate only smaller changes to fix bugs in the newly merged code without causing any further problems. If the kernel hackers stick to their usual pace despite the summer and holiday season in the northern hemisphere, Linux 2.6.31 will probably be released in late August or early September.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about a digital and analog circuit simulator called ksimus. One of my readers asked what the difference was between ksimus and ktechlab so I thought I’d take a look at ktechlab. Let me just say that both of these programs are a lot of fun to play with.
The killer features of FriendFeed continue. Today, the service has just added a way to share files on the service. So now it’s just as easy to share a PDF or text file as it is to share a picture.
If you are learning about the stars in school, an amateur sky watcher, or a meteorologist in the making you need to know your stars. To really see the stars you can visit a real planetarium, you can break out your serious telescope, or you can install and fire up a desktop application like Stellarium.
The Sun-sponsored VirtualBox project has released a beta 3.0 version of its free, x86-oriented virtualization software. The Linux-compatible xVM VirtualBox 3.0 adds support for guest Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) with up to 32 virtual CPUs, as well as support for version 2.0 of the OpenGL graphics acceleration standard, among other features.
But Java is also playing an important part of Red Hat’s business. During yesterday’s call, Whitehurst said that Red Hat’s JBoss Java middleware business is a key part of its product mix, while Red Hat CFO Charlie Peters added that during the first quarter, Red Hat had five deals that were worth $1 million or more, two of which were standalone middleware deals.
Here are four ways we plan to compile and examine the survey data:
1. Plot Ubuntu Business Deployments Globally: Using Google Maps, we’ll show readers where Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition are taking hold — country by country, region by region.
2. Explore Server Trends: We’ll explore the key business drivers for deploying Ubuntu Server Edition.
3. Profile Key Ubuntu Evangelists: Who are the IT managers and business managers driving corporate Ubuntu deployments? We’ll be interviewing dozens of business and technology managers who bet their businesses on Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to show off high quality free culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture, and with each development cycle we open the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, this is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere.
Power and space saving computers are in, and Shuttle has a winner with the XS29F. This little gem really skimps on the power consumption to the tune of around 20-25 watts on average. That’s less than half of that 60-watt light bulb shining down on you right now. For the Do It Yourselfer (DIYer) on a budget this box makes a lot of sense.
The G1 is hardly the only Android phone on the market — a number of companies have taken up Android, including G1 manufacturer HTC, which produced the “Magic” or Google Ion. According to reports, the myTouch, announced this week, is “essentially” the same phone as the Magic/Ion, and like the G1 before it, will go up against Apple’s latest iPhone, the 3G S. The T-Mobile myTouch 3G with Google is lighter than its predecessor, a reported six hours of battery life, and will come in a designer “Merlot” color as well as the less chic black and white.
We were in Santa Lucía to give workshops explaining how to use the EduBlog blogging platform developed by a team of Uruguayan and American programmers. The XO laptops have been great at bringing information from the wider world to Uruguayan students, thanks to projects like Wikipedia and Conozco Uruguay, both of which come pre-installed on the machines.
Only one week after the first beta was released, VirtualBox developer Frank Mehnert has announced the availability of the second beta of version 3.0 of the open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. In addition to numerous bug fixes for the previous release, the second beta includes several performance improvements and fixes for SMP guests. Several OpenGL and Direct3D related issues and a high CPU usage issue on certain idle Windows guests, have also been addressed.
Mac users can find a similar one-download solution for putting open source applications on thumb drives at MacLibre. And, for Linux users, see our previous coverage of PenDriveLinux. It gives you downloads and instructions for many portable Linux versions that you can keep with you on your thumb drive. These drives are really inexpensive for lots of capacity now, and they can save you in an on-the-go pinch.
If you’ve got a great Web site and want to give visitors a nudge about which parts they shouldn’t miss, have a look at Amberjack. It’s a handy open source widget that acts as a tour guide for your site.
Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.
A few weeks ago, Mozilla announced Electrolysis, a new project that aims to make Firefox a multi-process application, with separate processes for the user interface (chrome), each tab, and plugins, in order to provide higher stability as a a problem with a plugin or a certain web page wouldn’t bring down the whole session; higher performace, as today’s multi-core processors can handle multiple tasks at a time; and stronger security, as each could run on different security contexts.
The twittersphere is abuzz with the current twitterstorm about Microsoft’s plan to use the “Word HTML engine” in the next version of Outlook. It’s a campaign that’s an organization which represents people whose living depends on their ability to make compelling HTML pages in email, so it’s not surprising that they have a beautiful site which is getting a lot of people to retweet.
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However, for regular folks, life is not rosy yet in the Open Web world. Authoring beautiful HTML is, even with design and graphics talent, still way, way too hard. I’m writing this using Wordpress 2.8, which has probably some of the best user experience for simple HTML authoring. As Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Wordpress) says, it’s still not good enough. As far as I can tell, there are currently no truly modern, easy to use, open source HTML composition tools that we could use in Thunderbird for example to give people who want to design wholly original, designed email messages. That’s a minor problem in the world of email, which is primarily about function, not form, and I think we’ll be able to go pretty far with templates, but it’s a big problem for making design on the web more approachable.
There are some valiant efforts to clean up the old, crufty, scary composer codebase that Mozilla has relied on for years. There are simple blog-style editors like FCKEditor and its successor CKEditor. There are in-the-browser composition tools like Google Pages or Google Docs, but those are only for use by Google apps, and only work well when they limit the scope of the design space substantially (again, a rational choice).
Already Asterisk is being grafted onto real-time communications tools. Google search found Asterisk Radio Networks and Wisconsin Emergency Communications (WeComm) on my first keyword entry. This is GREAT stuff, and I’m sure there are many more small projects out there linking new hardware and new software together with Asterisk as the glue. Radios are great, but they’re a niche - the real target is the mobile device.
As you might have seen yesterday, one of RedMonk’s clients Reductive Labs was funded yesterday to the tune of $2 million. While they work on and are core members of the popular Puppet project (which we’ve had plenty of interviews around in the podcast if you’d like some background), there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of talk about the company, Reductive Labs itself.
Open source “alternatives” from SugarCRM, Openbravo, and Compiere have tapped the power of open source development to make customization easy, but the line between community and commercial is quickly crossed
WebERP is released under the GPL and now averages more than 100 downloads per day from SourceForge.net and has totalled some 250,000 from SourceForge alone.
It’s no secret that certain parts of the world favor open source more than others do. Today, Actuate, which specializes in open source business intelligence applications, is out with its fourth annual open source survey results. The results are based on responses from global business and I.T. professionals from the financial services sector, public sector and the manufacturing industry. This year the survey also included Chinese respondents. Here are some of the highlights from the results.
The pilot projects will take place in the Scuola primaria 154 and the Enrico Fermi Institute of Technology. The pilot should encourage other schools to also increase their use of open source operating systems, office productivity tools and for email. Another goal of the pilot is to increase the use of collaboration tools, especially those developed as open source.
In an emailed statement, Marie Ringler, local Green Party councillor involved in the proposal, said: “If we want to switch to GNU/Linux and other open source applications, we should take the fears and concerns of our users seriously. Future open source users should be better informed.”
The Government supports the principle that, where new software is being developed by the Timely Information to Citizens pilots, this should wherever possible be released under open source licence and available for use by other local authorities.
For many of the Timely Information to Citizens pilots, the focus is not on new software, but on how existing tools and techniques can be used to bring information together and present it in more useful and accessible ways. Several of the projects will utilise existing open source software to create new information sources and channels, and will share their experiences of doing so with other authorities.
Where the pilots will result in new software tools, ownership and intellectual property rights will usually remain with the individual local authorities. However, most of the authorities concerned have already made a commitment to make these tools available as open source software, or for use by their partner organisations, and we are working to secure the commitment of the remaining.
MediaMosa, a video management and distribution platform, which has been developed in the Netherlands to deliver video content to the Dutch educational sector, is now open source
Imagine: a client comes to me and asks to me to build a site for them using WordPress and a paid GPL theme. The ciient also wants a set of customizations made to the theme and site functionality. Some of the custom functionality requested is different visual treatments for each post, based on the post category. This is a fairly common request for larger publishing sites, and one of the reasons we built the Carrington CMS theme framework (which automates this).
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I obviously have a vested interest in the WordPress ecosystem remaining strong. I also want people to be able to make a commercial living in that ecosystem (my team included).
However, I don’t think it’s reasonable to build that ecosystem on the premise that we should ignore certain freedoms of the GPL – and I feel like some folks are asking for that to happen.
No matter where you are, there are more sensors around you than you may realize. Inexpensive, but driven by processors that are maturing at a fast clip, they monitor the brake pads in your car, the sprinkler systems in the office, and can monitor motion, heat, and much more. Sensors are being deployed in security systems and airports all around the world, among many other places. Futurists believe that sensors will increasingly be embedded inside of us to monitor our physical systems and communicate information about them wirelessly to our mobile devices.
There are two kinds of openness: the one embraced willing, and the other that is imposed. The former comes about because, for whatever reason, people or institutions see that it is ultimately in their interests to be more open (or that by resisting transparency they only make things worse). Imposed openness requires people who get digging to find out those things that others don’t want found, and to make them known anyway.
Importantly, by putting their papers into arXiv physicists ensure that they are freely available to anyone who wishes to access them – assuming they have an Internet connection – regardless of whether they or their institution has a subscription to the journal in which the paper is published. Indeed, some papers in arXiv are never published in a journal at all.
The 700,000 pages of scanned images put online in pdf were described by Sir Stuart Bell as a ‘great achievement’ for Parliament. And I suppose it is if you’re used to inscribing your words on animal skins.
The British Library project team, which manages development activities for UKPMC, and is specifically tasked with identifying additional, hard to find content to add to UKPMC, is keen to understand what types of images researchers would find useful for potential inclusion in the repository.
TEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?
Speaking for the coalition, Gary Bass, OMB Watch’s director and CAR’s co-chair, applauded the significant transparency steps OMB has taken in certain key respects. However, much data from the recipients of Recovery Act funds will not be collected or disclosed according the the new guidelines.
One of the advantages of the adversarial aspect of the UK’s two-party politics is that politicians have to compete with each other.
This means that when an important new meme – or fad, depending on your viewpoint – enters political discourse, there is a pell-mell rush to outdo the opposition in adopting it. This can certainly produce bad outcomes – trying to prove you are more dedicated to “fighting terrorism” and other such meaningless slogans, for example. But just occasionally, it can push political parties to move very quickly in the right direction.
Instead, Eclipse flies the flag for the very best in free software; as such, maybe its annual release should be celebrated a little more abeyond the programming community that already knows its value well.
I know, you’re going to tell me that the Ogg formats have been pulled from the HTML 5 specification and that they’re not the answer. Both Apple and Nokia have complained about the codecs stating that they are still patented and could create problems later (though I’m certain there are other reasons behind their public condemnation). But there are very few other possibilities as H.264 and MP4 are not free either. So it’s some murky water that we step into right now and going into all the details would require far more room than I’m allotted here on a daily basis. But I believe that OGG (Theora and Vorbis) could be the answer. Sure they are still within patent lifetimes but they are royalty-free. Yes that could be a problem later, but wouldn’t it be simpler just to get something signed and agreed on than trying to work with a codec that requires a royalty fee or starting from the ground up on a new codec?
Despite the modest name, this is important stuff. As I wrote elsewhere recently, I believe that the arrival of Firefox 3.5, with it support for Ogg’s formats, will mark a turning point in open video and audio. It’s good to have background information on how it all started.
Wendell Potter came to the Center for Media and Democracy in May as an admirer of our work exposing corporate front groups, lobbyists and PR manipulators. He should know, he was one of the best PR executives in the health insurance business, CIGNA’s Vice President of Corporate Communications until he had a major change of heart.
The Kremlin has created a high-level commission to overhaul its image on the world stage as the first anniversary of Russia’s war with Georgia approaches.
The Great Firewall of Iran, as it will undoubtedly be dubbed, involves deep packet inspection, a technique that examines both the header and the data part of internet data packets and can be used for eavesdropping, censorship and data mining.
Aggravation is certainly mounting. After finding Google.com and GMail blocked on Wednesday night Beijing time, Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs Danwei.org wrote a letter to China’s “net nanny,” in which he pointed out: “You are making Chinese people look like children on the world stage. You are bringing shame to the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese Communist Party.”
The public domain is the greatest resource in human history: eventually all knowledge will become part of it. Its riches serve all mankind, but it faces a new threat. Vast libraries of public domain works are being plundered by claims of “copyright”. It’s called copyfraud - and we’ll discover how large corporations like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon have structured their businesses to assist it and profit from it.
Twitter users buy more music than the average Internet-using Joe and, when they buy it, they spend more. They also listen to more streaming music and are more engaged with music-related services online. It’s for these reasons that NPD says that Twitter users are valuable to the recording industry.
After closely watching the way that the Canadian copyright debate has proceeded (from a new copyright bill drafted in secret and off-limits to input by Canadian artists, librarians, ISPs and scholars; to a plagiarized “independent” report that used faked-up research and US lobby-group talking-points to “prove” Canada’s copyright pariah statement), Michael Geist has created this handy chart showing how the copyright lobby in Canada uses a variety of fronts to subvert the legislative process.
We keep talking about artists who are connecting with fans, and giving them a reason to buy, and it seems like every day we hear of more and more new and creative ways that artists are doing this — even as the naysayers stop by daily to insist it’s impossible for such things to scale.
But, really, the idea that some extra protectionism is needed to create news gathering operations suggests an ignorance of what’s actually happening in the marketplace. Yes, it’s messy right now, but more and more news gathering operations are showing up every day — and they’re doing things more efficiently, embracing the power of new technologies to do so, rather than relying on the old inefficient structures. This is a good thing.
Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks are increasingly seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world. With pressure from anti-piracy outfits mounting on ISPs to police their networks and warn those who share copyrighted content, many file-sharers have decided to negate this by going anonymous.
When you hear RIAA defenders insist that an unauthorized download is “just like stealing a CD” or something along those lines, it’s worth noting even they don’t really mean it. After all, if a digital file really was no different than a physical goods purchase, then you’d be able to do other things with it — such as resell it. And yet, as you read through Eliot Van Buskirk’s article about new online services trying to create marketplaces for people to sell their “used” MP3s, you’ll see the scenario is quite different.
The principle publishing houses aligned themselves with trade unions of the music, film and advertising industries at the “International Media Dialogue” in Hamburg earlier this month to discuss to question “No Future for Paid Content? Media Industry Under Pressure”.
Andy Koh, Alvin Lim and Ng Ee Soon of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore used a web survey of 1,224 international bloggers with active, text-based blogs to find out more about the authors, their ethical ideals and how they put these into practice. Of those surveyed, about half were male and 65 percent were under 30. Most were well educated, and the majority were from the US - 65 percent - with no other country accounting for more than eight percent of the participants.
Ramdisks are usually spoken of in hushed tones when sysadmins get together. Some view them with awe because of their performance and some view them with skepticism and say they are only useful for creating benchmarks. Almost all of them agree that using them on a regular basis must be done with care because of the problem of losing power shuts immediately shuts down the ramdisk erasing the contents of the ramdisk. However, there are uses for ramdisks besides running benchmarks. More over there are storage devices that use RAM as the storage media that can reach rarefied levels of performance of millions of IOPS.
Once you have loaded Linux onto your machine, what then? You need software and games. Corel reports more than a million downloads of its Word Perfect 8 for Linux. Loki Software has ported the game Civilization to Linux.
In this episode: Android isn’t as good as Windows CE on smartbooks. Debian bundles Mono. Crossover 8 is released while Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 are nearly here. Is sound a disaster on Linux? And should geeks boycott closed platforms like the XBox 360, Playstation 3 and iPhone?
While going through some old notes, I was reminded that there once existed a website dedicated to explaining the differences between Unix and Windows NT. It began as a research project by one John Kirch. According to the site, after finding almost no information on the subject for his own purposes, Kirch decided to write a paper that compared the two systems critically. The paper covered various topics such as the costs and licensing, functionality, system reliability, management, performance and security issues, common misconceptions about both operating systems, and others. This paper was the beginning for the awareness site that also includes a lengthy article listing, links to FreeBSD and Linux resources, and a litany of companies and which web servers and operating systems host their sites.
The site authors denounced the claim that the UNIX versus NT Organization was “an anti-Microsoft movement”, stating that “this would be a poor description of what we are about.” We share this sentiment — if Windows is the best option for you, then you have the freedom to choose to use it.
When it comes down to the nitty gritties there are many reasons why you should use Linux and very few reasons why not. You can postulate all you like. You can um this and er that but when you look at actual fact and not FUD then Linux does look equal, nay better, positioned to be an alternative to other operating systems.
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So tell me the reason why you think you can’t use Linux. Make sure it is a valid one and well thought out. If it is a legitimate reason then I will gladly agree. If it is an uninformed reason then I will inform you. If it is a stupid reason then I will not respond.
Linux is also “good enough” for the very same reasons that windows uses. In a lot of things Linux is better than windows, in others worse, in general good enough. Oh, its a different operating system and people are not used to it. Crapola! I have had people, who don’t even know what Linux is, come and use my computer to read their email off of the net, download and print them out. Without me opening my mouth. They used it just as competently as their own windows computer.
Berlin’s art colleges are completely switching over to Linux. Most of the productivity software on the workstations has already been swapped for free alternative products as part of a project that started over eighteen months ago. The IT team at ServiceCenter-IT, responsible for the migration at three colleges; the Hanns Eisler music college, the Ernst Busch drama college and the Berlin-Weissensee art college, is hoping for an easy migration, as users will be able to keep on working with their familiar applications. Starting in June, their workstation PCs will switch to Ubuntu Linux and their servers will use Debian.
The System76 Bonobo Professional starts out at $1,769 USD and can go all the way up to $4,754 if factoring in the highest-end hardware available through System76 and backing it with a three-year warranty and three years worth of technical support.
I have chosen Ubuntu almost 3 years ago and I will keep on using it. I use Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu netbook remix. I use Ubuntu more often but I seem to prefer the feel and look of Kubuntu. I prefer the professional look of KDE 4.2.4 over gnome 2.26, that is my opinion and we are all allowed to have opinions.
The good news is that the eBox platform is completely open-source, licensed under the GPL and free to download, with an active community developing it and driving the project forward.
Another is around the work BMC is doing with specialty engines, which are processors designed to run specific tasks—such as Java or Linux workloads. The specialty engines take those workloads off the general-purpose processor, which increases the performance of the processor. BMC is enabling mainframe users to run some BMC software on the specialty engines, freeing up the general-purpose processor to run other workloads.
iTWire: Fedora has started using ext4 as the default filesystem. What are some of the pros and cons of such a decision?
Chris Samuel: ext4 is a much bigger change from ext3 than ext3 was in turn from ext2. Ext3 essentially just added journalling to ext2, whereas ext4 moves to an extent based filesystem with other features such as delayed allocations (like XFS) to allow the allocator to be more intelligent about how it lays things out on disk and much bigger filesystem sizes (though the programs to create ext4 filesystems can’t actually make them for you yet). Another nice feature is the fact that the journal data is checksummed so the filesystem can spot any corruption after a crash.
Load balancing is difficult. We often we need to share file systems via NFS or other mechanisms to provide a central location for the data. While you may be protected against a Web server node failure, you are still sharing fate with the central storage node.
Just over two weeks after the release of Linux 2.6.30, Linus Torvalds has released 2.6.31-rc1, the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.31. As usual, “rc1″ completes the merge window during which the kernel hackers incorporate the majority of new features into the respective new version’s main development branch. In the eight to eleven weeks that follow, the programmers tend to integrate only smaller changes to fix bugs in the newly merged code without causing any further problems. If the kernel hackers stick to their usual pace despite the summer and holiday season in the northern hemisphere, Linux 2.6.31 will probably be released in late August or early September.
Sharing files on a network generally requires some amount of configuration, know-how and time. Things get even geekier when you have different machines running different operating systems. Damien showed you how to use Giver back in March. There is however, a simpler solution if you don’t want to go through all the steps of setting up a share. Enter Meiga.
We’re all pretty much versed in the worlds of GNOME, KDE, and to a lesser degree, Xfce, and while there are lots of alternatives, none of the smaller ones really seem to gain much traction beyond their fans. An exception is LXDE, a small and resource efficient desktop environment.
The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, or LXDE as it’s more commonly known, really takes its “lightweightness” seriously. They claim that LXDE’s minimum hardware specifications are only slightly higher than that of Windows 98, consuming only 45MB of memory after boot. Any Pentium II processor should be capable enough of running LXDE, and thanks to it being ported to ARM an
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It seems like LXDE has the possibility of becoming the desktop environment of choice for resource-constrained machines. I have several Pentium II machines that would perform pretty good with LXDE as their desktops, and I must say, t has become a tempting idea.
Just as a note, since Air is now the default theme for Plasma (and what’s worse, it is even called “default” instead of “air”), you’ll see that the Lancelot themes in 4.3 RC are screwed up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fix this before 4.3 RC tagging today (I was too late to discover the issue in the first place).
The release team has just done something a bit different from past release cycles to test out some modifications to our usual work flow: with the release of the first release candidate, 4.3 has been immediately branched off of the mainline trunk, and trunk is now 4.4. In the past we’ve done this only when the new release is actually made, not during the release candidates.
We are almost one month far away from the kde4.3 release. Yesterday the 4.3 rc1 was tagged and due to excellent work of our colleagues in OBS we have it already.
Personally, I would have liked it to go a little bit further away in terms of usability, we will speak about that later. This release will mark the break with 3.5. I see no real reason for not using kde 4.3. All the functionality that people were crying after from 3.5 is finally up and running (a lot of time better) in KDE 4.3.
The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the release of the new stable g:Mini distribution. The g:Mini 3.0 is released. The g:Mini formerly known as ‘GoblinX Mini Edition‘ is the son of GoblinX and contains only XFCE as the windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is ideal for those users whose want to remaster the distribution.
The Elive team announced today yet another unstable release of their Elive Live CD Linux distribution, now at version 1.9.31. Being powered by Debian, Enlightenment E17 and Linux kernel 2.6.26.8, the new development version of Elive, brings many improvements and bug fixes in various areas. But, the good news is that, among other things, the team introduced full support for the Acer Aspire One netbook. Without further introduction, let’s take a closer look at the changes brought by Elive 1.9.31…
Only twelve days after announcing version 9.1, Kent Robotti released yesterday a new stable version of his popular R.I.P. (Recovery Is Possible) Linux distribution. R.I.P. 9.2 uses the Linux kernel 2.6.29.5, updates the SVN for GRUB 2 1.96 and comes with a development version of QEmacs 0.4.0 and the recently released Mozilla Firefox 3.5 RC2 web browser.
ArtistX is still in the early stages and may not be your workhorse desktop distro just yet (they are still on v.0.70), but there’s a great potential here. If you are interested in using Linux as your multimedia workstation, then you’ll definitely want to give it a try. The only question that I have is, what can they add for the next release, since everything is already included!
Of course you can also use straight Mandriva Linux, and perhaps you should. At one time, Mandriva was a well-regarded and well-known Linux distribution but over the years it’s dropped out of sight. It’s time to check into it again.
In my last blog post an anonymous reader asked a friendly question in the comments area, “What took you so long? PCLinuxOS isn’t exactly a well kept secret…”
How true! I’ve popped that Live CD of PCLinuxOS in and out of my computer for a few years now. I’ve known about it and I’ve played with it, but I’ve never really gone the final step of installing it…until now. This time around, I gave it a good close look. And I’m so happy I did!
I am really keen to see how far the Mandriva 2010.0 KDE 4.3 implementation has come along! Also, Mandriva has some of the best art work and default screen savers of any distribution - only Fedora gives it a run, but Mandriva beats it. Mandriva also runs circles around Fedora on the desktop, so playing with Mandriva Cooker as an experimental system is a no brainer - I do it at least monthly, but often more frequently than that.
The extras bonus in all this was the PCLinuxOS forum and community. A really terrific, friendly bunch of folks who are welcoming and ready to help! I had no problems correcting minor issues because i had the help and support of the PCLinuxOS forum.
“With overall IT spending down on a year-over-year basis, our largest customers continue to renew and spend more with Red Hat,” said Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO, during a conference call late Wednesday.
To my knowledge, Fedora is the only project or distribution that offers the wide variety of live CDs profiling multiple applications and covering multiple versions.
Grab yourself a Spin, take it for a spin and tell me what you think of it.
RED HAT ELIMINATES VIRTUALISATION BARRIERS
With Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualisation, businesses can realise improved operational efficiency without changing the application environment. A server virtualised withRed Hat Linux 5 can run existing Windows or Red Hat operating systems as virtual guests, preserving existing hardware and software, while reducing downtime and deployment costs. For IT administrators, this also means tighter server consolidation, simplified system management and ultimately, enhanced performance.
Overall I’m highly impressed with CentOS 5.3! I really feel it’s an improvement over 5.0 and does just enough to reach that tipping point where I feel it is both corporate IT ready, as well as newbie friendly. So pretty much anyone can use it if they want.
Linux Mint has been one of my favorite distributions and it remains so. I happily recommend to anybody looking for a good desktop Linux distribution. It comes with a good bit of software by default, has an extremely attractive theme and makes multimedia related tasks quite simple for the user.
Finally, a couple of comments about UNR compared to Moblin. The basic desktop appearance is quite different - UNR has everything spread open, and text labels for each item. Moblin has everything on a panel across the top, with a symbol for each item. I have to say honestly that the relevance of the symbol to the item escapes me and pretty much everyone else I’ve asked about it. I find desktop management and window selection to be more natural on UNR, but I suppose that is because it is essentially the same as what I am used to.
Though only four months passed since the previous release, Ultimate Edition 2.2 was a highly anticipated upgrade by fans all over the world, especially for the fact that it would almost certainly use the Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) base.
And so it is. TheeMahn announced the new version a few days ago and we couldn’t miss the chance to give you some feedback on how it looks, feels and performs. Ultimate Edition is available as a 2.0 GB DVD ISO and can be run on both 32- and 64-bit platforms.
Ultimate Edition is an ‘improved’ version of Ubuntu. Unlike Linux Mint, which contains modifications to the source code, Ultimate Edition is simply a lot more packages added to Ubuntu and then made into an ISO using reconstructor.
Texas Instruments unveiled a new new family of multicore DSPs (digital signal processors) enabling residential and enterprise HSPA femtocells. The solutions include a portfolio of complementary analog solutions, support for Linux, and software solutions from third party developers (Continuous Computing and mimoOn).
Instead, the applications, which are written in Java and run on an embedded Linux OS, are customized so that they only display what the user will specifically need.
Marvell has introduced an ARM-based Linux PC in a plug for £63. Called SheevaPlug, the device is a reference design, evaluation kit, and usable home server rolled into one, and is a shrunk version of the US-only SheevaPlug released earlier this year.
Androids may not yet be breathing down RIM’s neck, but the prospect of more competition for a place in the enterprise is definitely growing — and BlackBerry addiction may be on the wane. T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G is just the first of an onslaught of Android-based phones expected in the second half of this year.
Adobe has confirmed that the latest Android handset from HTC, the Hero, will come with a proper Flash client: version 9 with support for ActionScript 2, with version 10 to follow some time next year.
Participants in the Palm Pre-oriented community PreCentral.net have discovered how to add unsigned applications to the smartphone, opening the way for users to experiment with homebrewed applications.
In this second installment of our Palm Pre review, we go in-depth on the software side of the device. Does Palm’s webOS really live up to its promise as a “cloud” messaging mobile? More on this topic, as well as the calendar, browser, contacts, alerts, dialer, and other features, inside.
MilaX 0.4 is released. MilaX is a Solaris based Operating System & is a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a CD or a USB pendrive.
It has been used by more than one million children on the XO laptop and has also been released as part of other operating systems. For example, it was bundled with releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux systems.
The latest release - Sugar on a Stick - allows anyone to run the software from a 1GB USB stick. It includes 40 programs, including a word processor, drawing application and games.
Sugar Labs, the organisation behind the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop software, have released the USB stick version of the Sugar Learning Platform version 1.0.
When it comes to specs, you can expect an 8.9-inch 1,024 x 600 touchscreen, a OMAP3530 processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 8GB of SD storage and 512MB of RAM and NAND memory. It uses Linux and has an accelerometer inside.
The slate is Linux powered and has an 8 GB SSD and 512 MB of memory working with a TI OMAP3530 processor. This sounds anemic, but it should actually run decently and for a very long time on a battery charge. The Touch Book is only $299, while the optional keyboard is $99.
The Aspire one was designed to get you online in no time at all and thanks to the Linpus Linux Lite operating system, start up and shut down times are reduced to the minimum. With the Aspire one running on Linux environment, the simplicity continues with the intuitive and specifically optimized software interface.
This shift is helped by the fact that Microsoft is practically giving XP away for free. There are however a lot of opportunities in the near future for next generation Linux distributions on the netbooks, smartbooks and mini PCs. I’ll cover these in an article next week.
Second Life creators Linden Lab have launched a new Second Life-compatible viewer, which the company developed with the open source community. The company’s goal was to create a “widely-used, openly developed version of the Second Life client.”
Snowglobe will contain new Second Life features before they become available in the official release. That said, not all features will make it there.
Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris 2009.06 offers a sneak peek at what’s coming down the pike in Solaris. One of the most compelling features in OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the Crossbow network virtualization system, which allows OpenSolaris administrators to provide individual network services or virtual machines with their own virtualized network adapter and stack.
This is a cautionary tale. Clearly someone made a mistake, and Hughes’ reputation may end up bearing the brunt of the error. It’s important to remember that in the software business there are always two currencies at play: the typical financial currency that we usually think of (you know, money), and credit for the work that was done. Although there is a lot of open-source software that is licensed to be free to use, that fact amplifies the focus on correctly attributing credit for the work that went into the software.
Non-profit research group Institute for the Future has partnered with Boing Boing and Sun Microsystems to create an online community of young inventors who want to work with open source technology. To sweeten the interest in becoming a part of The Digital Open, community organizers are holding a contest for kids 17 and under to submit their own open source projects for a chance to win a laptop, Flip camera, or one of several other prizes.
Mozilla’s mission is to build choice, innovation, participation and opportunity into the ways people interact with the Internet. The centerpiece is Firefox, because the browser is the lens through which people see and touch the Internet. Over time, people are doing an ever broader set of activities with the Internet. What does this mean for how we think about Firefox? Here’s what I see.
The third Release Candidate build for Firefox 3.5 is on its way. Mozilla repeatedly stressed during the development process of the next iteration of its open source browser that it was aiming to produce a single RC for Firefox 3.5. And fact is that it came extremely close to doing so.
Mozilla recently released the second release candidate of Firefox 3.5 and is due to launch the final version before the end of the month. Here’s your one-stop guide to the key new features in the latest version.
I’ve been following the path of Ingres Corp. ever since Terry Garnett and David Helfrich of Garnett & Helfrich Capital bought it from CA a few years back and made it into an independent company once again. Ingres and MySQL are the main open-source alternatives to Oracle in the database software market. Now that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems, which owns MySQL, you’ve got to figure that Oracle will starve MySQL once it owns it—eliminating what had until now been a potent rival in the Web site market. Ingres is emerging as the last bastion of opposition within the open source world.
Open source continues to move beyond its original confines of infrastructure software. Open-source application adoption is booming, while even the curmudgeonly router market is getting some open-source polish from Vyatta.
Open Source Bridge, a conference held in Portland, OR last week, answered the question, “can the attendees drive the direction of a conference in the same manner open source software is developed, and achieve better results?” By all accounts, the answer is a resounding, ‘yes.’
Karsten Gerloff, FSFE’s new President, spent the past years at the UNU-MERIT, working with people such as Rishab Ghosh to provide the scientific basis for the political change around Free Software. Before that he was an intern at FSFE, working with me at the United Nations, specifically the World Intellectual property Organisation (WIPO), he is familiar with FSFE’s policy work and I have no doubt that he will be able to represent Free Software effectively on all levels.
Vancouver’s city hall recently passed a motion encouraging the selection of open data, standards and source code in future information technology (IT) procurement.
The ScummVM developers have agreed a settlement with Atari over GPL violations in three Nintendo Wii games developed by an Atari subcontractor. An official press release from the ScummVM developers “cyx” and “fingolfin” stated that a case over three games, “Freddie Fish: The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds”, “Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside” and “Spy Fox: Dry Cereal” which used the ScummVM engine to run classic point and click adventure games, had been settled in May, with Misitic Software paying all legal fees and making a donation to the Free Software Foundation.
Milinkovich said “When it was just the IDE, things were simpler”. The first named release train of Eclipse, released in 2006, was Callisto which incorporated ten projects. The Galileo release train incorporates thirty three projects, with ten new projects added since last years Ganymede release, over 24 million lines of code in total.
The Eclipse Foundation is today making its biggest release of the year, highlighting open source projects created using the Eclipse development platform. Its new Galileo release — the latest in the group’s annual “release train” roundup — includes 33 open source projects that were built with contributions from 44 different organizations.
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, today announced that IBM will ship Zend’s solution for PHP in every IBM Smart Business system in order to provide their customers with reliability, performance, and security for PHP-based Web applications. Today’s announcement marks a significant expansion of the IBM and Zend partnership by now including PHP on Linux operating systems and x86 hardware in addition to IBM i OS and Power Systems hardware.
Following the recent controversy over expense claims from UK elected officials, the paper put all the data online and let people dig through it to see what they could find — and they found a lot of interesting stuff that a group of reporters, by themselves almost certainly never would have had the time or skill to dig out (some of it included statistical analysis of the data).
A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of this translated article from Holland, noting a proposal that’s been brought forth to tax internet connections in order to give the money to industries that are having trouble competing, such as newspapers.
Just days after Norway’s data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it’s now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won’t be renewed.
Earlier this month we reported that since Norway’s Personal Data act prohibits the storage of unnecessary data, ISPs in the country must delete all IP address-related personal information they hold on their customers which is more than three weeks old. This makes it very hard in most cases to track down illicit file-sharers.
I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it’s in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. “It’s not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?” I asked. “No, I don’t believe so. You can have to look for it.”
We’re not done- it gets even worse.
“How do I find out how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”
I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”
So, it was no surprise back in February to hear of plans to make agreements between cable companies and content providers that would limit what kind of video you could watch online, requiring you to be a cable company subscriber and “authenticating” what you could watch. Thus, it should be no surprise that Comcast and Time Warner are now announcing exactly that.
Former Republican Congressman Tom Davis, reportedly President Barack Obama’s top candidate for cyber security czar, voted repeatedly to expand the government’s internet wiretapping powers, and helped author the now-troubled national identification law known as REAL ID.
It appears that Norway has decided that it’s sick of passing laws designed to prop up obsolete industry business models at the expense of individual privacy. First, the country started telling ISPs to delete log files after just three weeks (making it pretty hard to identify individual filesharers), and now it’s refused to renew the license given to the one law firm allowed to sniff IP addresses in trying to seek out unauthorized file sharing.
It seems like the recording industry’s grand plan to get ISPs to be their copyright police isn’t getting very far. Consumer and legal backlash around the world seems to have stopped it cold. The latest is in Spain, where the entire concept of a three strikes regime has been taken off the table.
Yesterday from the Palace of Versailles, Nicolas Sarkozy became the first president to address Parliament in 150 years. He took the opportunity to show his determination over the proposed HADOPI legislation, promising that he will “go all the way” to enforce law on the Internet.
Sarkozy’s address yesterday was made possible by the annulment of a law prohibiting a sitting president from addressing lawmakers. The last time an address of this type occurred was 1848, in Napoleon’s day.
The major labels want to see Irish ISPs adopt a “three strikes” policy toward repeat online copyright infringers, and they’ve decided that suing the ISPs is a good way to make it happen.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset was held liable to sharing 24 songs, including one by pop crooner Richard Marx. But the lawsuit wasn’t done in Marx’s name—this week, he called out the recording industry’s “greedy actions.”
The Swedish appeals court charged with looking into whether or not the judge in the original trial against The Pirate Bay was biased, has said they found no bias (for real, this time) with the judge, despite his belonging to two groups that have pushed for stronger copyright laws — and the fact that the prosecutors’ lawyers were involved in that organization as well. Apparently, the court says the judge should have brought this information to light sooner, but otherwise said it was no big deal.
If you would rather shop from a place that is specialized in Linux computers, there are a few online retailers that can provide you with computers designed for Linux. In the US Zareason has an excellent reputation for its Ubuntu computers, they even sell them with special Ubuntu keyboards on which the Windows key has been replaced by an Ubuntu Logo. If you live in Europe you should check out UK based EfficientPC.co.uk : they have a decent selection of computer that can be provided with several flavors of Ubuntu or even dual booting with Windows. They ship in the whole EU and have decent shipping charges. Finally, Dell is selling some models of computers pre-installed with Ubuntu, but only in some countries. Their Linux page is sometimes hard to find though.
IBM offers on-site systems than can run Windows or open-source Linux applications. Big Blue also offers hosted services, such as an Internet-based social network that helps companies link to their clients and partners.
French development group at ENAC have developed native multitouch using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, and can support swipe, flip, rotate and pinch-resize gestures…
Summary:
Editorial: Mandriva Linux 2010
Distributions announced last week:
· SystemRescueCd 1.2.1 Is Powered by Linux Kernel 2.6.29.4
· Available Now: Fedora 11 LXDE Remix
· Parted Magic 4.2 Has Clonezilla and Linux Kernel 2.6.30
· GeeXboX 1.2.2 Is Capable of Multi-Threaded Video Decoding
· First Alpha of Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Out
My plan is to get down to this after I do my monthly backups on July 1st, and if all goes well I can wipe OS X entirely by the end of the year.
[...]
3. Do I need to reformat HFS+ drives?
* I understand that Linux support for Apple’s proprietary disk format is sketchy to non-existant. I’ll obviously have to reformat my boot drive — will I have to do the same with the other three internal drives on my machine?
Personally I found the Linux end user troubleshooting experience to be far more pleasant than with windows troubleshooting. In my mind there are more advantages than disadvantages.
But now, the metaphor is shifting yet again. Servers have grown powerful enough with clustering and processing advances that they have started to take back the heavy workloads from the desktop/laptop clients. Sure, some work is done locally, but more and more we are seeing really big workloads going back to the server environment, which thanks to Internet connectivity, we euphemistically refer to as “the cloud.” For me, I am watching the cycle of the early 90s reverse itself, as the data lives and works out in the cloud, and we access it through more sophisticated browsers and add-ons.
The desktop metaphor, then, is dying. The new metaphor is the window.
The fact that GNU/Linux totally dominates the top 500 supercomputing list is hardly news, but the fact that it has managed to *increase* its market share yet further is.
Here are the results for June 2009:
GNU/Linux 443 (88.6%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 22 (4.4%)
and here are the figures for six months ago:
GNU/Linux 439 (87.8%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 23 (4.6%)
Currently police forces use a patchwork of proprietary and open source systems. The Holmes 2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) police database, which is run on behalf of the police by Unisys, is optimised to run on both Linux and propietary systems. The police communicate using a mixture of propietary systems from companies including Airwave, Blackberry and Orange.
The latest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release is in the 185.xx series, but NVIDIA developers have been hard at work on the forthcoming 190.xx driver series. Among other features, this next major driver update is expected to bring their talked about OpenCL support.
David Miller has stepped in to maintain the IDE subsystem, but plans to make it maintenance only, with no major development work. On Friday, one LinuxTag venue will be dedicated entirely to the Linux kernel. An Intel developer has expressed wide-ranging criticism of various graphics benchmarks for Linux/X.org.
A few days ago, version 4.0 of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification was released, weighing in at a hefty 727 pages. Lead by Intel, PC manufacturers as well as operating system, driver, BIOS, firmware and software developers have, for more than a decade, been working on this specification, which is designed to enhance the configuration management and power saving features of computer hardware. Despite this, there are still flaws in many implementations.
The last time I had a look at Opera 10 it was in alpha state, meaning no new features were introduced, and only the rendering engine was replaced with a newer one compared to 9.x series. This first Opera 10 beta comes with various new features.
It can punch holes through uPnp-aware routers to make the operation automatic. Meiga can even publish an RSS feed of your shared items. The program’s lighter than gnome-user-share since Meiga doesn’t use Apache. Since Meiga uses Gnome technologies, it fits right into the standard Ubuntu desktop. Packages are available for Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty.
So you’ve been reading about Linux on ghacks for a few months now and you’ve noticed plenty of screenshots or images of applications in action. Now it’s time you found out just how those images are taken. No it’s not magic, but in one instance it’s ImageMagick. Actually there are a few ways to take screenshots in Linux, ranging from a simple keypress to a command line tool.
Back in October we reported on the release of Alien Arena 2008, which brought several graphical improvements, such as GLSL enhancements, parallax mapping, and new shaders. The developers behind Alien Arena and its Quake 2 derived engine had not stopped there, but they immediately began work on Alien Arena 2009. Now just a mere six months later, we have Alien Arena 2009 and it brings more graphics improvements along with many other technical improvements and new game content.
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that YPF SA, a leading oil and gas company in Argentina, has migrated from proprietary UNIX operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization technology on Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers for its YPF Gas business unit. With the Red Hat on Intel processor combination, YPF Gas’ IT infrastructure has experienced reduced costs, boosted performance, increased scalability and agility and expanded flexibility.
Linux put Red Hat on the map. But growing sales of JBoss open source middleware should make Red Hat a $1 billion company within the next few years. With that goal in mind, Red Hat is launching “partner-only” JBoss roadmap briefings the week of July 20. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
Today we’ve switched kernel mode-setting on by default for Intel graphics, a change which arrived with the 2.6.30-10.12 kernel.
Many of you already know all about KMS, and can stop reading here.
For those who are wondering what the heck this new acronym is, I’ve attached some background explanation below, and answered some questions I expect to be common.
Thanks go to apw and the kernel team for wrangling all the patches, and to the ubuntu-x team and community members who have been testing out this new stuff the past few months.
This is a collection of great themes for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, these themes are from zgegblog a blog of François Vogelweith, on the blog exist a collection of wonderful gnome themes for Ubuntu (see the total collection)
As an aside to my utter surprise at coming across two Ubuntu users at random. I am starting to note a pattern, of the 5 chance encounters that have needed Ubuntu support in the last year: all have all been women. Now either it’s because women are more willing to try something new when offered by Dell, are less invested in Microsoft’s desktop familiarity, are more willing to go out and find help (and thus find me or the LoCo group) or some unforeseen force, but I’m very happy to see the 50% of people who have been typically excluded from technical areas coming to Ubuntu naturally.
Anyone else found Ubuntu users randomly because you were helping someone else with their Ubuntu machine in a coffee shop? Because I think there is progress in the air.
Stability: 5/5 – No Linux distro could have a PERFECT stability rating. So I’m scaling the score because Ubuntu rocks the socks off of stability.
Simplicity:4/5 – Ubuntu aims at Linux for human beings and that is what they deliver. Setup is a synch and using it is amazingly simple also. However, due to the lack of a centralized configuration feature I did have to drop the point off but a four out of five ain’t bad.
Speed:4/5 – Speed is one of the fundamental features of Linux and that is what Ubuntu does, they deliver speed. Now maybe not lightning here but certainly a good offering on speed.
In the end, it’s a trade-off…ease of use versus control over your system. In any case, my Arch install needed to be updated, because of the whole ext3 thing, and the fact that I just want to clean it after trying to install every possible open source application on it. Installing and configuring Arch still takes me something like an hour though, so I’ll stick with Ubuntu for a while. Knowing me, I’ll get bored of it soon enough.
Until now. Like Nokia, Intel is keen on Linux, initiating the development of Moblin, a distro for netbooks and MIDs. Nokia’s own Linux tablet OS is Maemo, and the two companies today said they will “develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects” which will feed into future mobile computing devices.
The choice of Linux still allows for media sharing and, through USB storage, can share media to any computer or other device that recognizes UPnP. Security is also as advanced as other routers with a single-button Wi-Fi Protected Setup link for those computers that support it. Cisco’s latest hardware should be available today and sells for $120.
At first glance that may not seem that interesting. But, this isn’t just a new Wi-Fi router with Linux. Cisco, via its Linksys subsidiary has long been offering users Linux-powered, hackable Wi-Fi routers like the WRT54GL. But, this one also includes integrated Storage Link functionality that lets you use inexpensive USB storage devices as NAS (Network Attached Storage) and a built-in media-sharing server that Cisco says can handle video, photo, and music sharing.
DeviceVM, the folks behind Splashtop, are expanding their instant-on, Linux solution to new brands today. The company just announced deals with Acer and Sony. The Acer AspireRevo Nettop and the Sony VAIO NW notebook line get the Splashtop treatment, although Acer is calling theirs “RevoBoot.”
By using Splashtop, the devices can boot into a functional work environment complete with Internet access in a browser. It’s similar to the Hyperspace offering from Phoenix, but doesn’t add any additional cost to the consumer. Hyperspace requires a yearly subscription fee, but offers more than a browser, music and photo app: Programs like the ThinkFree Office suite are included, for example.
DeviceVM, the company behind the quickboot mini-linux Splashtop, announces two great deals: Splashtop will now be embedded in Sony Notebooks and Acer Nettops (Aspire Revo).
The ReadyNAS 3200 combines the features of the other ReadyNAS for Business products, including the recently launched ReadyNAS 2100 1U rack-mount and ReadyNAS NVX desktop systems. The 3200 can function as a NAS or iSCSI SAN system and, like its smaller ReadyNAS brethren, runs the Linux-based ReadyNAS RAIDiator operating system.
The underlying technology is HTML and Linux based; the Web kit browser runs on the embedded Linux OS; inside, there’s an IMX 31 processor. The apps don’t take a lot of resources, according to Joshi.
What about the gaggle of PalmOS applications written by those intrepid mobile developers over the past decade? Thankfully Palm has addressed that opportunity in the form of the “Classic” emulator application which may be purchased and run on the Palm Pre. This emulator allows you to use your favorite PalmOS application from yesteryear. That is exciting, and in my not so humble opinion a necessity to draw people back to the brand. Of course Palm has to make sure that new WebOS applications are readily available and begin to woo back their development base. I personally am very excited to learn more about WebOS. I just have to count the cost of sneaking another smartphone into the house.
The software? webOS is a brand new mobile operating system, built by Palm from the ground up using common Web technologies like Javascript, HTML and CSS. That means experienced developers should be able to jump right in to create Pre apps with relatively little new knowledge. And the faster that great applications become available for webOS, the more attractive it will become to potential users. I look forward to seeing what kind of apps spring up for the Pre.
It’s not everyday you see a Windows Mobile smartphone running a Linux-based mobile operating system. But, in the crazy (crazy cool, that is) world of handset hackery, anything is possible.
Designed by HTC, the myTouch 3G will be available for presale to T-Mobile customers on July 8 and will sell for $200 for users who sign a two-year service contract. The phone, which features a 3.2-inch touchscreen, is being released just under a year after T-Mobile launched its first Android-powered smartphone, the HTC G1.
The VAR Guy hears it all the time: VARs and managed service providers generate hefty profits with on-premise and hosted Microsoft SharePoint. In fact, SharePoint has grown to become a $1 billion business for Microsoft. But now, Red Hat and Alfresco are trying to direct some of those SharePoint channel dollars toward open source alternatives. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
Additionally, the new software benefits from a number of different open source power management projects that stand to benefit in return from Opengear’s contributions.
Movable Type did not become open source until 2007, after WordPress had passed it by in many ways, proving the value of the open source model. In a way, Melody is Movable Type’s effort to build community following the release of its software, something most projects do the other way around.
iXsystems has unveiled the iX-Apollo Extreme Series, the first fully qualified PC-BSD workstation. The iX-Apollo Extreme Series ships with PC-BSD 7.x Pre-Installed and Pre-Configured. PC-BSD is a complete desktop operating system with a robust feature set including KDE 4.2.2. PC-BSD is inherently virus-resistant thereby offering stability, security and at the same time provides a comfortable user experience.
Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.
The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story’s excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.
In an article on its security blog, the Mozilla Foundation has presented a new security policy – known as content security policy (CSP) – intended to guard against the epidemic of cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) and other vulnerabilities. This allows web administrators, by sending special headers, to tell the browser which domains it should accept as sources for trusted code. Standard XSS attacks sometimes utilise vulnerabilities in web applications in order to execute JavaScript in the browser with the rights of trusted domains.
Looking at the early 2009 numbers compared to the mid-2009 numbers, it appears the shift has been accelerating on its own — and that’s despite both the lack of any major Mozilla releases and the presence of a high-profile Microsoft release. Given that, and considering the huge surge seen with the previous Firefox release, it seems entirely plausible that Firefox 3.5 could move the market shift into overdrive.
The Associated Press has been going on quite the rampage over the past few months about all those evil online sites that are “stealing” its content, demanding that those who use its content absolutely must pay for it. We joked in response that the AP and other newspapers complaining about people “stealing” their coverage should actually be paying the people who make the news. After all, aren’t they really creating the “content”? That was meant as a joke, but sometimes you have to wonder if people at the Associated Press even realize the double standard they’ve set for themselves.
