Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

paint-mono is a port of Paint.NET. The only way it could be built in the past was using a development version of MonoDevelop and there was no way of generating packages for it. Since then, MonoDevelop has progressed to the point where it can generate standard Unix makefiles and generate the proper scripts, pkg-config files and produce code that conforms to the Mono Application Deployment Guidelines from a Visual Studio solution. It is now easier than ever to try Paint.NET on Linux

The Ubuntu development community has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 2. Ubuntu 8.04—scheduled for release in April 2008—is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will be supported on the desktop for three years and on the server for five years. This second alpha, which is available for download from Ubuntu's mirrors, is a development release that is primarily intended for testers.

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats. The policy aims to stimulate competition between office software vendors and make government documents more accessible to the general public. Under the terms of the policy, HTML will be the standard format for all publicly accessible web content, PDF files will be used when the original appearance of the document needs to be preserved, and use of ODF is mandated in cases where a user needs to be able to modify a document downloaded from the government.

A mediocre e-mail client is one of the major weaknesses of Nokia's Internet Tablet products. Nokia's mail program chokes on my IMAP inbox, hanging and crashing when more than about 200 messages are present. Some relief may be in sight for those who want an e-mail client that is open source and made of sterner stuff. The first beta of the new open source Modest e-mail client for Maemo has officially been released.

Yes, I’m talking about amaroK, the free, open source music player, currently only for Linux and Unix, but soon to be available for Windows and Mac OS X. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use amaroK, and those who don’t. amaroK is the ultimate music management software, and for a casual music buff like me, it’s the best you can get out there. What separates amaroK from the other popular players in the market are its features which are targeted to make music management and playback easy, and a pleasing experience. Here, I’ve highlighted some of the key features of amaroK.

Joomla!, a popular content management system (CMS) for Web portals, is easy to install and maintain, and has thousands of components, modules, and Mambots for almost every thinkable function a Web site could possibly need. All of the extensions are open source, as is the CMS itself. Here are a few extensions that I find indispensable.

GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular. Much like Firefox, GIMP’s strength lies in its plugins, which are developed by the open-source toting community. Since the users themselves develop them, they know all the needs and conceive a plugin for everything.

From on-demand video services that were overly demanding, to underwhelming operating-system updates, 2007 was full of disappointments. We surveyed the landscape and polled some old friends to come up with the 15 products, companies, and industries that left the most sour taste in our mouths. From last to first, here's our list of the year's biggest losers. Read 'em and weep.

[Not Linux-related, but skip ahead to the #1 disappointment for a good laugh :-) - Sander]

What is the relationship between the GNU Project and the GNOME desktop suite? GNOME itself claims to be a part of the GNU Project. But its relationship with the organisation is not the same as that of other software projects which are part of GNU. GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman says, though GNOME is part of the GNU Project, it does not "follow GNU policies the way a normal GNU package does. That's Miguel's doing."

The year 2007 has been the most active year for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). In fact, you would have been hard pressed in past years to enumerate even five important legal developments. However 2007 permits the creation of a traditional “top ten” list. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2007 follows:

Dear Glyn Moody: I found how you trotted out an age old and long since dealt with issue, namely the licensing of Qt1, as a way to discuss what you consider to be "the growing tensions between the KDE and GNOME camps" to be tasteless and ironic. If you want to help mend fences (we need all the hands we can get), the last thing to do is drag long-since dealt with issues that have been irrelevant for years back to the surface.

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux, although there also appears to be a Windows installer available (it could be dated -I haven't tested it-). 'Its main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming', reads their website, and by god, intuitive it is!

Overall, the industry did several things right and wrong this year. But here’s what Network World readers, columnists, bloggers and testers say are the absolute smartest and dumbest moves of 2007 -- and why they matter.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter ended November 30, 2007. Red Hat's current fiscal year will end February 29, 2008. Total revenue for the quarter was $135.4 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $115.7 million, up 30% year-over-year and 6% sequentially.

A common question you hear from proprietary vendors when dismissing open source alternatives is “how many customers actually want access to the code anyway?” It is a question I put to an open source software vendor myself earlier this week while playing devil’s advocate. The response - that the right to modify the source code is more important than actually doing it - is well known, but it is worth repeating in the light of recent events surrounding the Mindquarry open source collaboration project.

The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has just signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Samba and other Free Software projects. No. This isn't a bit like the Novell-Microsoft agreements. This is for access to Microsoft's protocols, as ordered by the EU Commission and agreed to by Microsoft. It's a good thing, in my opinion, and the Samba guys worked really hard to make this as good as it gets.

As other countries embrace free, open source software (like Austrian schools learning how to use OpenOffice), especially GNU/Linux distributions on the desktop as alternatives to Windows/Mac, the burning question is, how long before the USA catches on? That said, consider how 10th and 11th grade Vietnamese and foreign students are learning...

The news that Dell has now released Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on its boxes (and about time too!) has been tempered somewhat by a potential storm of controversy caused by a couple of software packages that come bundled with the Dell Linux PCs. The two bundled packages happen to be proprietary software. Is this going to be a problem?

There probably isn’t a serious hacker around that doesn’t know the name nmap. It’s a security term on it’s own, the opensource portscanner that has been around for as long as I can remember. Since it’s incarnation, nmap has been a command line tool. No point & click, just the power of the shell. A number of different GUI’s have been written, nmapfe, knmap, and so on. But now there is an official nmap GUI, Zenmap.

Amarok Headquarters reports yet again another release of the marvelous Amarok 1.4 'Fast Forward' series. Just like its predecessor, Amarok 1.4.8 fixes a fairly large amount of bugs, and therefore increases stability of Amarok's stable branch of development. Among the major improvements is the resolution of an issue that could, under some circumstances, cause a complete lockup during dynamic playback. Last.fm metadata fetching now also works with xine 1.1.8 and we made sure you can now also use your brand new iPods with your favourite music player.