Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

We are pleased to announce the 10th Anniversary Linux Symposium will be held from July 23 ~ 26, 2008 in Ottawa, Canada. The Symposium will also feature multiple keynote presentations, in depth tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, papers on the most current topics in Linux and Open Source, mini summits open to related Linux and Open Source projects to be held in the day(s) before the Symposium and speakers from outside the industry who will share their experiences with Linux and Open Source and its impact.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming. Work on the new Linux theme has progressed rapidly in the past month, and the earliest pieces are now included in the latest Firefox 3 nightly build. We took a good long look at the new theme—called Gnomestripe—and we like what we see.

There are three well-known open source clients for managing PostgreSQL databases: psql, pgAdmin, and phpPgAdmin. If you use Postgres in a collaborative team, however, you should get to know phpPgAdmin, which is expressly designed for such environments. It lets users and administrators create user accounts, databases, tables, sequences, functions, and triggers. PhpPgAdmin is a Web-based application written in PHP that can manage one or more PostgreSQL databases. It is 100% compatible with PostgreSQL. It performs all the standard Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements. It can back up and restore an entire cluster, and can manage a Slony replication cluster, all in an easy-to-understand interface.

Do you ever get tired of listening to gamers who insist that all the best games are for consoles or Windows, so why bother with GNU/Linux? Do you have colleagues who maintain that GNU/Linux is suitable only for serious work, and that games are frivolous and unimportant? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people go on about how expensive games are to produce, and how they just couldn’t possibly work under a GNU license. My two favorite genres of computer game are graphical adventure games (GAGs) and computer role-playing games (CRPGs). For this article, I’ve chosen to focus on free software CRPGs currently available for GNU/Linux.

Linux has already permanently changed the enterprise desktop landscape, and is set to grow further, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The report, How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System, published this week, predicted that the days of ever more strict standardisation on the Windows platform are effectively over. Linux will only become a stronger force in the enterprise, according to Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray.

Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The project marks the first application that Sun has put under the GPLv3. Rich Green, executive vice president for software at Sun, told vnunet.com that the licence was a "first step", suggesting that the company could pick GPLv3 for other projects in the future.

Last week I wrote about transparency as an open source value. Today, in the second of this informal series, I want to discuss the value called consensus. Consensus is an essential open source value, and a value which distinguishes open source from the proprietary models which came before it. Every successful open source project I know operates through consensus. Orders aren’t given, instructions are worked out. Raised voices, fists hammered on tables, these lead to code forks, and to volunteers abandoning a project. Successful open source entrepreneurs do their work through consensus. They listen to the people under them, and they seek shared responsibility. The best will say “we” did what works but “I” take the blame for what goes wrong.

I have been experimenting with many different Linux distributions over the last month as I posted here and here. In my review of the various distributions, I was looking for ease of install and ease of use as the most important factors in my personal ranking system. I believe for Linux to win the desktop war over the next few years they have to appeal to more then just the technical folks who can install distros in their sleep and are wizards at the command line. With that said, here are the distributions I tested:

Fedora 8 has just been released, but of course plans for the next version are already under way: a Fedora 9 Feature List has been created in the Wiki, just like the one for Fedora 8, and people and groups now add their plans and aims. Two outstanding aims are the inclusion of KDE 4 as the default KDE version and the usage of PackageKit as an alternative package management frontend. Since the Fedora 9 release schedule aims at May 2008 both aims should be realistic and possible: KDE 4 is supposed to be released in a working state around christmas, and PackageKit already works pretty well now.

Low-cost computers meant to usher poor children worldwide into the digital age are being mass produced in China as US nonprofit One Laptop Per Child strives to deliver on its promise. The first of the XO laptops being built at a Quanta Computer facility in Changshu are destined for Uruguay, marking a milestone for the charity group founded by Nicholas Negroponte in Massachusetts two years ago. "Against all the naysayers ... we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children," Negroponte said.

Fabian pointed to an interesting article from a Red Hat engineer about CentOS and Red Hat's position. An interesting question popped up that I asked myself before: "Why is there no SLES alternative distribution ?". Given all the benefits a free Enterprise Linux brings to Red Hat, Novell must be eager to want to tap into this resource, right ? One comment suggested that Novell did not release SRPMs and therefor it was impossible to create a free SLES clone. Reality seems a bit different: Novell does release SRPMs. There are a few reasons why there is no Open Source SLES alternative.

Fedora Games spin is a custom variant of Fedora targeted at Linux gamers. This is to demonstrate the gaming potential of Fedora without altering user's existing configuration. The Live DVD also allows installation to hard disk or USB flash.

Got a Linux Gadget Geek on your shopping list? You can't fail with a gift from this guide to the ten hottest Linux-powered devices gleaned from LinuxDevices.com's news throughout 2007. There's something for everyone, at prices from $150 to $1,000, organized from least to most expensive. Enjoy!

With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a sought-after fruit in the Java community: The porting of Java to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not made Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

Every industry needs an old, crotchety curmudgeon. We have the always-entertaining John C. Dvorak who’s lately seemed to be slowly slipping into senility. That’s okay, though. That’s okay. He’s our grandpa and we love him and you don’t just cut people out of your life because they’ve started going crazy. His latest outburst is against the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. He thinks it won’t work. That’s a fine opinion but it needs to be backed up with a convincing argument. The reasons he gives are far from convincing, however.

Flyback is a backup and recovery tool loosley modified by Apple’s “Time Machine”.. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less.”

Linux desktop users looking for good financial software to run natively can forget about Quicken and Quickbooks. One glance at Intuit's website should be enough to convince even devout users of that company's products that despite Quickbooks for Linux servers showing strong growth, a port to Linux desktops is a long way off and a Linux version of Quicken is not even on the radar. So what are the alternatives?

Microsoft Corp. on Friday introduced a new pilot program to encourage refurbishers to install legitimate copies of Windows XP on used PCs. The new Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program offers a discount off the retail price of Windows XP, along with deployment tools to help refurbishers reinstall Windows and all of the relevant drivers on renewed PCs in as little as 15 minutes, said Hani Shakeel, a senior product manager on the Genuine Windows product marketing team. When MAR is fully expanded, it will also help stem what Microsoft acknowledges as widespread flouting of Microsoft's XP licensing rules by price-pressured refurbishers.

For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products. Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free. So, I did a test drive, trying to level the field as much as possible. Here are the results.

So, you just delivered that new PC to your customer and gave them a quick tour of what's new and then watched their eyes glaze over with confusion. After a few seconds, the questions start. Questions that should be easy to answer, but turn out not to be! Where is my start button? Where are my programs? What happened to the Menu in Internet Explorer? Why is the system constantly asking for my permission to do simple things? Why does my system take so long to boot? Now your eyes glaze over, not with confusion, but with frustration and you have to ask yourself: What did I do to deserve this? It's simple; you sold your customer a computer with Windows Vista installed, when that customer was somewhat satisfied with Windows XP. The answer lies with the open-source community and more specifically, Linux.