Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Microsoft have listed 100 reasons why people really ought to upgrade from Windows XP. They appeal to usability, mobility, security and entertainment. Yet, looking through the list, we reckon they’re actually talking about Ubuntu Linux, not that dog Windows Vista. Lets count down the top 10 reasons from Microsoft why you should upgrade to Ubuntu.

Dear Steve, Hi, this is François, from Mandriva. I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me. You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market. We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. We had a good answer to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.” How do you call what you just did Steve, in the place where you live? In my place, they give it various names, I’m sure you know them.

Everex, a longtime personal computer vendor, has unveiled its latest PC featuring Ubuntu Linux-based open-source productivity software and Google-based Web 2.0 applications, for a mere $198. The Everex Green gPC TC2502 includes popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype and OpenOffice.org. It runs gOS Initial G, which in turn is based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 The gOS operating system features a simple and intuitive Linux Enlightenment E17 desktop interface with a Google-centric theme. The system comes with a lifetime of free updates and revisions. The Everex gPC will be available at some, but not all, Wal-Mart stores and walmart.com for $198 starting in early November.

One of the oft-mentioned weaknesses of Linux, fragmentation, just happens to be one of its greatest strengths. A broad range of choices in an immature market is a good thing. Of course, choice does come at a cost. For example, there may be no standard way to do a particular task. Further, development resources will sometimes be split among two or more projects. However, these are weaknesses in the short term only.One could similarly argue that evolution of species suffers from the same ‘weakness’ of fragmentation. However, in the long term, the survival and consolidation of the best traits results in an improved breed. Eventually, one of the many approaches to some desktop task will rise to dominance and show the market the right way to do it, and, at the same time, reduce the fragmentation problem.

One potential way for a user to escalate her privileges on a system is to exploit a vulnerability in an SUID or SGID program. SUID and SGID are legitimately used when programs need special permissions above and beyond those that are available to the user who is running them. Unfortunately, a poorly written SUID or SGID binary can be used to quickly and easily escalate a user’s privileges. This leads us to the need for scanning systems for SUID and SGID binaries. This is a simple process.

mokoNinja posted a video a few hours ago on YouTube showing the newly created media player application for the OpenMoko. This is a pretty standard feature for all smart phones, and since I am looking to replace the need for a portable media player when I get a Neo1973, it is nice to see that it is coming along nicely with all the standard features one would expect raised when raised in an iPod generation. While it seems to lack the polish of the iPhone interface right now, OpenMoko seems to be shaping up into a decent contender, and once all the basic functionality is covered, we will start seeing some real innovation that makes open source applications so exciting to use.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management settings! I’m afraid that quite some people are getting a high Load_Cycle_Count because their laptop (BIOS or harddrive firmware) uses too aggressive powermanagement. These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn’t override these settings.

Day 2 of the Developer Summit was sunny and beautiful, as many took advantage of the rooftop garden near the conference rooms. Starting the sessions today were roundtables about many topics including the community, desktop, server, and others. After these followed the usual sessions, as per today’s schedule: The Community Roundtable, Defining a roadmap for supporting LoCo teams, Rethinking the logout dialog, Automatix and Ubuntu collaboration and Third Party Apt.

Sometimes the machine you're working on has a little oops. Maybe the reboot command has hung and the system will not shutdown or a kernel panic has occurred and although you still have shell access, there is little more you can do with the machine. The solution is simple: you need to hard reboot the machine. But you're in Phoenix and the machine is in L.A. Like any good system administrator, you have the machine hooked up to an IP-KVM (or serial over IP, if the machine is headless), but the magic SysRq keys won't send properly. So what's a sysadmin to do?

Last week I wrote the first part of this series which discussed the installation of Mepis, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, and Freespire on my laptops. Now that I have had time to play with each of the operating systems I would like to discuss my impressions of the different distributions. I have not spent any time on OpenSuse yet so I will leave it out of the discussion.

Colin Walters of Red Hat chaired a FOSSCamp session about Hotwire, a unique and innovative graphical shell environment designed to improve the command-line user experience. I've been testing Hotwire releases for some time now, so the opportunity to see Walters present his invention in person seemed too good to pass up.

iRiver is readying a Linux-based media recorder/player comprised of a detachable mobile unit and tethered docking station. The Unit2's base station offers a DVD/CD player, TV tuner, and PC-style I/O, while the detachable display features a 7-inch WVGA (800x480) touchscreen, WiFi, and USB. Apparently, the idea is to use the docking station to record DVDs, music CDs, or TV content onto the portable unit, which can then be carried with the user.

The release of Fedora 8 (codenamed Werewolf) is due out for release in less than two weeks and comes with a host of new features. Fedora 8 will offer a Codec Buddy for installing audio/video codecs, an open-source Java stack now based upon IcedTea, improved laptop support, the Pulse Audio sound server, remote virtualization support, and much more. As a sneak peak at the final release of Fedora 8, taken from the Fedora 2007-10-24 Rawhide spin we have screenshots of the improvements to the Fedora Firstboot, the Fedora 8 GNOME desktop, and also the KDE version of Fedora 8. Enjoy!

Have you ever taken a picture which would be just great only if you could remove that strange unwanted object that showed up in the middle of nowhere and now kills the whole effect? Or perhaps you just want to get rid of your ex-girlfriend and keep the photo with a fantastic landscape alone? Whatever your secret plans are, GIMP Liquid rescale plugin is there for you. Just use it!

Ars was at FOSSCamp this weekend. Think of FOSSCamp as an "un-conference" without a set agenda where the minds behind open source projects get together and plot world domination (and, err, ways to improve their code). One fascinating session (and one that shows how FOSSCamp works and why it's so productive) was given by Mirco Müller, who discussed using OpenGL in GTK applications. Müller—the developer behind Cairo-Clock and the LowFat image viewer—talked about the state of OpenGL support in desktop applications and described various techniques that developers can use to make OpenGL content integrate better with conventional GTK user interfaces.

Projity is a company that provides two alternatives to Microsoft's popular Project application. Project-On-Demand is software-as-a-service (SAAS) code that runs in any browser and is available via a monthly subscription. OpenProj is a desktop version of the application that is built on Java and is licensed with the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). Though Projity only recently "open sourced" its project management application, CEO Marc O'Brien says that the company's plan "the entire time" was to eventually do just that.

Gary Edwards of the Open Document Foundation has a fascinating post on the important of Microsoft Office compatibility to the success of the ISO-approved Open Document formats. It is in places a rare voice of sanity. In Edwards’ opinion, there are technical and political reasons why seamless ODF interop cannot be baked into Microsoft Office. Therefore the Foundation is now working on interop with the W3C’s Compound Document Format.

"Basically, what the gcc developers are saying is that gcc is free to load and store to any memory location, so long as it behaves as if the instructions were executed in sequence,"Nick Piggin noted, describing a linked discussion on the GCC development mailing list. He explained his concerns,"for x86, obviously the example above shows it can be miscompiled, but it is probably relatively hard to make it happen for a non trivial sequence. For an ISA with lots of predicated instructions like ia64, it would seem to be much more likely. But of course we don't want even the possibility of failures. The gcc guys seem to be saying to mark everything volatile that could be touched in a critical section. This is insane for Linux."

Alan Cox emailed me this morning to note a presentation he gave way back in 2000 called "Dear Mr Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world." It's no surprise to me that my recent blog post (on the topic of optimally sized development teams) was better articulated by Alan many years ago. What was surprising is just how prescient Alan's talk was. And how informative. For anyone who has ever wondered how open-source software development works compared to proprietary-software development, this is an absolute must read.

The SCO Group is seeking U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval to sell its Unix business to a New York investment management firm for $36 million, according to documents filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Lindon company said it sought court approval on Tuesday for an agreement it entered into with JGD Management Corp. doing business as New York-based investment firm York Capital Management LLC, to sell "substantially all assets used by (SCO) in connection with its Unix business and certain related claims in litigation." The offer also includes up to $10 million in funding for SCO's litigation expenses.