Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Asus Eee PC challenges many conventional assumptions about mobile computing. The daring, diminutive device combines a svelte subnotebook form factor with a unique Linux software platform and a budget-friendly price—factors that could make this unprecedented product a mainstream marvel. Last week, my colleague Jon described the Eee PC as game-changing: a characterization that we will put to the test in this review.

Is it possible to have training materials that are developed in partnership with the community, available under a CC license, AND make those same materials available through formal training providers? We’re trying to find out at Canonical with our Ubuntu Desktop Course. It’s already a 400 page book which gives a great overview of the Ubuntu desktop experience, a very valuable resource for folks who are new to Linux and Ubuntu.

This is something very interesting I found out not too long ago, while hashing out some work with a colleague. As most administrators (or users) who do a fair amount of shell scripting know, the error status or return code (Generally referred to as "errno" in all the man pages) of a process is a fairly common method to use in determining the process flow of a script. The one thing about the value of "errno" (or, literally, the variable "$?" in most shells) is that it's erased with each consecutive process that gets run. Here's how to work around that.

In San Francisco's Tenderloin district, amid liquor stores and boarded-up buildings, a partnership of nonprofits earlier this month sponsored the first "Tenderloin Tech Day." The half-day workshop was open to anyone in the low-income neighborhood with a tech problem. CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi stopped by and chatted with people about their broken laptops, software-less hard drives, and their first-ever Internet experiences.

Picture this: It's late at night. You've restarted your computer. The optical drive is whirring contentedly, but you have butterflies in your stomach. Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time. You choose your language, and then your keyboard layout. This is pretty easy, so far. A partitioner works its magic on your hard disk, either resizing your Windows partition or wiping it completely. Suddenly you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install?

Intel has released source code for a server software project that lets Fibre Channel communications run on a more ordinary Ethernet network. Fibre Channel is a higher-end network technology used to connect storage systems to servers. Intel and networking giant Cisco Systems are among those working to adapt it for ordinary and ubiquitous Ethernet technology, a technology called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), appropriately enough.

I received this update from Sun Microsystems on Tuesday on the ongoing ZFS patent litigation with NetApp. While colored by its source, the news seems positive for Sun (and, given the importance of ZFS, for the open-source development community). Sun has succeeded in getting the venue changed to California and it appears that its public request for examples of prior art have yielded fruit.

When Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project back in 1983, he launched a movement that would, in time, transform the software industry. The Free Software Foundation, also created by Stallman and now sponsor of the GNU Project, has become a driving force behind the adoption of the widely used GNU GPL software license. We discussed some of the more recent developments with Richard Stallman, whose passion for freedom in computing remains intense. The following Q & A explores the goals of free software, progress that has been made, and ways to maintain or instill freedom in software that we use.

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced an agreement with the Chinese OSS Promotion Union (COPU), to jointly host the Linux Developer Symposium in Beijing, China, February 19 – 20, 2008. The Symposium will address desktop, server and embedded Linux opportunities and will include well-known speakers such as Jonathan Corbet, Coly Li, Matt Mackall, Andrew Morton, Dave Neary and Jim Zemlin.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has selected Red Hat solutions to power the organization's mission-critical applications. The Ministry selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for reliability and heightened performance, and is utilizing the solution as the main platform for many of its critical applications, including its "Service Personale Tesoro" (SPT) application, which runs on one of the most popular Italian government websites.

If you want to make the most out of your Java-enabled handheld device, you can write Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) applications (also called midlets) on Linux and run them on your mobile platform. Here's how easy it is to get started; we'll write a HelloWorld application you can run on your cell phone.

BusyBox has just successfully settled its GPL ligitation against Xterasys. Xterasys has agreed to stop all binary distribution of BusyBox until the Software Freedom Law Center confirms that it has published complete source code on its web site. After that, Xterasys' "full rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL will be reinstated." Xterasys has agreed to appoint an internal Open Source Compliance Officer and will pay an undisclosed amount to the BusyBox plaintiffs.

Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has defended itself against claims from sections of the Linux community that it has ignored Linux in the development of Firefox 3, the next generation of the browser. Mozilla's chief interface designer says Linux is very much included in the development project.

Independent developers collaborating through the EeeUser.com web site have created a Xubuntu derivative—called eeeXubuntu—designed specifically for the Asus Eee PC. EeeXubuntu includes fully-integrated support for Eee PC hardware and has been modified so that it can be used more comfortably on the Eee PC's low-resolution display.

Sun has released a new open-source project as part of SwingLabs: PDF Renderer, "a 100% Java PDF Renderer and Viewer." PDF Renderer can parse the Portable Document Format (PDF) from a file and display it, as an AWT image, in a panel, or using any Graphics2D implementation. It has been released under the LGPL license, the same license used by the rest of SwingLabs.

The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element. The media backend, which uses GStreamer, was implemented by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin of Collabora. Developer Alp Toker integrated the backend with GTk/WebKit's Cairo graphics pipeline, making it possible for the video content to be embedded in SVG and manipulated with CSS and JavaScript.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 70 for the week December 9th - December 15th, 2007. In this issue we cover the countdown to Hardy Alpha 2, new MOTU & community members, Ubuntu Forums interview, Bazaar 1.0 release, and as always, much, much more.

The difficulty and frustration of building GNOME from source is a major impediment for many new contributors. Installing the dependencies, getting the tools working, and compiling major components of the desktop environment is a burden that detracts from time that could be spent making patches. In order to resolve this problem, the developers from rPath have created the GNOME Developer Kit, a complete environment for testing and developing GNOME.

Sometimes, you just need to break through a troublesome gateway. Or perhaps you need to test a connection from a remote location. If you’re like most geeks, though, there’s already ample reason to do any of this — because you can.

I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report. No, I’m not running on 256 ram, it’s 1 GB and this kind of a time wastage is totally unacceptable. You may ask why I put up with Vista in the first place. That’s thanks to HP’s decision to embrace Vista so my laptop was pre-built with Vista and no chance to downgrade because there are no drivers. So where to go now ? Easy….Gutsy.