Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Trolltech, the company behind the Qt widget toolkit used in KDE, released today several new Phonon backends that facilitate cross-platform multimedia support. Phonon is media engine abstraction layer that was originally developed for KDE 4. Phonon simplifies multimedia application development and makes it possible to swap seamlessly between various underlying media libraries without having to reimplement application code.

While Linux is pretty efficient with a computer's resources out of the box, there are still ways you can make it run leaner and meaner on your desktop. Using a little bit of know-how, a willingness to run a few terminal commands and a mind for efficiency, you can get every last bit of power from your Linux box, or get more life from an older system. Read on for a roundup of ways to slim down and speed up Linux that any level of user can implement.

For my recent review of the latest KDE 4 release candidate, I used an OpenSUSE Live CD image. I've gotten a few e-mails this morning from readers who are looking for an equivalent Live CD based on Kubuntu, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to point out that the Kubuntu KDE 4 RC 2 Live CD was released yesterday. A KDE 4 PPA repository is also available for Kubuntu 7.10 users.

Linux services are basically programs that start at boot time to provide certain features and services (Apache, the web server for example). After installation, every Linux distribution provides a list of enabled services. However, you might not need some of these services or you might need others that are not enabled by default. Having only the services you need running will make your system faster, more stable and secure. So the first thing you need to do after installing a Linux distribution is to manually edit the list of enabled services. Unfortunately, some services don’t provide a description, others provide a description that’s not understandable so you might end-up disabling a vital system service just because you didn’t know what it did and you thought you didn’t need it. In this post, I’ll try to explain as good as I can, most services you’ll see on a Linux distribution.

In May, Mozilla Labs vice president Chris Beard developed Personas, an experimental Firefox add-on for lightweight theming. The add-on makes it possible to apply custom artwork to the Firefox chrome, including the toolbars, tabs, and status bar. The addon is compatible with Firefox on all three major platforms. The Personas addon started out as Beard's personal project, but has now found a new home at Mozilla Labs and has undergone a major rewrite that is compatible with the latest Firefox 3 beta.

phpBB™, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License.

While the use of Linux continues to sail along at a nice clip, the number of people kicking the tires is shrinking, for all the right reasons. While Linux and complex RTOS products offer such attractive capabilities, they're also correspondingly difficult to learn and use due to these robust arrays of services. Linux includes hundreds of system services, virtual memory, and tens of millions of lines of open-source code. High-end commercial RTOSs also include many features and lots of code, making them (and Linux) a challenge to master.

A number of corporations are moving into the free software arena, and this has resulted in legions of programmers, paid by companies, moving into free software communities, Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun said Friday at FOSS.IN, a conference on free and open-source software in Bangalore, India. This development has thrown up questions about how open-source developers on corporate payrolls can protect their freedom and rights from the demands of their employers, and resist corporate influences that may run counter to the free software community's interests.

At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Readers questioned the need for realtime response in "enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. It's not surprising that the two companies most interested in selling Linux-related services into the enterprise market have announced offerings within a week of each other. What is surprising is the amount of silly sniping which has come with these releases.

The KDE Education Project is developing high-quality software for the K Desktop Environment. Its primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. Several programs were also made to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn. Here are some of the KDE-made programs that you may find interesting and useful.

The "brains" of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts. The avionics unit will provide guidance, navigation and control for the launch rocket, which will carry the Orion crew vehicle into Earth orbit.

Adobe Systems today announced it will release the remoting and messaging technologies used in Flex, Flash and other Adobe products as open source projects. Because the technologies are fairly mature, Adobe isn't so much looking for help from the open source community as it is looking to get its technology into more hands. Adobe intends to release the remoting and HTTP-based messaging technologies in its LiveCycle Data Services ES along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification under the named BlazeDS. They will be made available as public betas under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3 and downloadable from Adobe Labs.

GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA.

Ok, I admit. I thrashed the Digg.com servers for a little while using an open source website mirroring tool, which I wont mention, but it’s easy to find. :) About 30,000 user icons later, I present to you a product created by a couple very short and sweet command line tools. So how can you make your own mosaic? Simple! Download and install metapixel, if you’re running Ubuntu, it’s located in the universe repository.

Second in the Linux server business to leader Red Hat, Novell is continuing to strive for major server wins. In its latest significant victory, Novell announced that Office Depot has elected to consolidate its server infrastructure on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1. According to Novell, moving to SLES on commodity hardware has already helped Office Depot reduce its hardware and power costs.

Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China's Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.

In the last eight months, the islands of Andaman and Nicobar have witnessed tremendous development in the IT sector, especially in the case of open source and Linux. Those I call the “IT people of Andaman” have been reluctant to implement and explore the benefits of open source software in the past. Some still are. But the growing popularity of Linux within India is amazing.

Red Hat hopes to stand out from other vendors offering Eclipse-based Java tools by not discriminating between "free" and "useful" when it comes to features in its JBoss Developer Studio, released this week.

For months, I've been trying to get Microsoft to answer a few questions about the Unix technologies in its intellectual property portfolio. Microsoft agreed to an interview, then backed out. So the question remains: How much Unix code does Microsoft have its hands on?

LXer Feature: 10-Dec-2007 Back in 1999 I remember the first PC entered our house coming preloaded with Windows 98. One of the things I liked about it was the defragmentation screen where blocks presenting 'datablocks' on the harddrive were moving over the screen for almost eternally. I remember at that time it seemed like a logical maintenance requirement for any filesystem.

However, when I started using Linux four years later, I was told that with Linux I didn't need to defragment my filesystems anymore, since Linux filesystems don't get fragmented in first place. At that time it left me puzzled, but after a few years of using Linux without defragmenting my filesystems - and without any problems! - it seemed defragmentation was something antique. Nonetheless I still wondered how on earth it was possible the 100k+ files in Gentoo's portage system - updated every time I synchronize the portage tree - didn't fragment my filesystem. Or was my filesystem fragmented and did I not know?

Only recently, I found a script that is actually able to put numbers to all this gut-feelings, and the results were quite surprising in my opinion.