Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

It is already quite well established that Novell failed to stop Red Hat’s momentum after it had signed deal with Microsoft. The figures which Red Hat included in last night’s report left little room for doubt. They were very encouraging. It is still curious to find, however, that Red Hat’s desktop endeavors are facing a barrier which is due to Microsoft licensing (for codecs). This was mentioned about a month ago and it was once again mentioned in the press yesterday.

Is software a product or a utility? Free software proponents say it's as critical to economic progress as fresh drinking water. It isn't hard to get Eben Moglen talking. We were eight minutes into our conversation before I got to ask my second question. But that really didn't matter, because Moglen was describing the future of software, and his perspective is fascinating.

Xen is a powerful new virtualization system that enables you to run multiple operating systems on one computer. Here's how you can install it on your Fedora machine, and how to get it configured to best suit your environment. This article is excerpted from the book Fedora 7 Unleashed by Andrew Hudson and Paul Hudson, SAMS Publishing, August 2007.

In early August I stated in this blog that after the OOXML JTC1 ballot closed on September 2, the sun would rise, the birds would sing, and so on. As we are now at the end of the month and about to move into October, I can state that those things all happened. Indeed, from my perspective, September was a very good month, maybe a historic month, for open standards and open source.

QEMU is an open source emulator for complete PC systems. In addition to emulating a processor, QEMU permits emulation of all necessary subsystems, such as networking and video hardware. It also permits emulation of advanced concepts, such as symmetric multiprocessing systems (up to 255 CPUs) and other processor architectures, such as ARM or PowerPC. This article explores QEMU and its architecture and shows how to emulate a guest operating system on a Linux host.

One of the discrepancies in the reputation the US has as a tech innovator is the perception that it has lagged behind Europe when it comes to mobile telephony. As one critic said rather sarcastically about this lack of progress: "Ten years and all we have to show is ring tones." The first sign of change was the 31 July announcement by the FCC that licensees will be required "to allow customers, device manufacturers, third-party application developers and others to use or develop the devices and applications of their choosing." The second aspect of this change is the availability of open phones. Not only are the phones open, but their operating systems are open too, running Linux.

When you are a MSN + IRC user (like me), Pidgin 2.1.1 will be for you. Why? Because it introduces MSNP14 support, persistant chatrooms and more!

Linux is by far the software most commonly associated with (and often mis-identified with) open source and free software, where free refers to liberty, not costs. However, access to source code, ability to modify or redistribute, and the royalty-free nature of Linux are hardly the reasons why four out of five handset OEMs have adopted Linux. In other words, mobile Linux has not been adopted because of its "free software" qualities.

Below are addictive 3d games for linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most of it is cross platform and free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

[And 2007 isn't even over yet... :-)   – Sander]

Windows Addiction is an unperceived phenomenon which has gotten a hold of us, and we get upset when we don’t do Windows anymore. But what is the Windows Addiction? I think there is no proper working definition for it as yet but I feel it is an obsessive compulsive use of the Windows Operating System despite the fact the we don’t want to use it anymore and we feel miserable using it but we can’t stop using it due to various fears, false beliefs and myths. Now what is so bad about Microsoft Windows and if one is hooked on using them in an obsessively compulsive manor?

Microsoft continues to virtually own the desktop operating system and Office suite desktop market. Still, its recent market behavior signals that it is not taking any chances when it comes to Linux, or any other threat, on its prized desktop. Microsoft’s revised Windows XP downgrade rights policy that quietly went into effect this summer, for example, is designed to kill two birds with one stone: jumpstart PC sales and prevent Linux desktop vendors from exploiting its Vista headaches.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is well-known for promoting new development methods. Now, a European nonprofit organization known as FOSS Bridge hopes that FOSS can be equally innovative in promoting cooperation between companies and in fostering investment in developing nations. The organization is currently working to help pair European and Vietnamese companies for joint development and business ventures.

GNOME 2.20 was officially released last week after six months of development. The new version includes strong incremental improvements that contribute to a better user experience and provide more flexibility and integration opportunities for third-party software developers. This article explores some of the new features in GNOME 2.20 and GTK 2.12. In particular, we will look at how some of the most significant changes impact the GNOME user experience, examine some of the architectural improvements that are of interest to open-source software developers, and shed some light on the GNOME development process to see how some of these features came into existence.

The first U.S. GPL-related lawsuit appears to be headed for a quick out-of-court settlement. Monsoon Multimedia admitted today that it had violated the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2), and said it will release its modified BusyBox code in full compliance with the license. This matter came to the public attention when the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Sept. 20 that it had just filed the first-ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GPL on behalf of its clients, BusyBox's two principal developers

[Oops. Beaten to it by Scott Ruecker. See this article. – Sander]

Late last month, hardware vendor HP announced plans to offer desktop computers in Australia with Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox installed. Now the company has confirmed that it is expanding this program to other parts of the world. Moreover, sources close to the company tell Ars Technica that expanded Linux offerings will also be coming to the US. Our source says that it is a "real possibility" that HP will counter Dell's limited embrace of Linux "sooner rather than later," so long as pilot programs proceed as planned.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #58 for the week September 16th - September 22th, 2007. In this issue we cover the Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 beta release, new MOTU members, new Launchpad release, Software Freedom Day organized by the Ubuntu Nicaragua Team, and, as always, much much more!

Again, I'm acting as messenger of the Release Team. It has just been decided that the Beta 3 will be out one week latet than originally planned. This is mainly due to some changes in how plasma work that we'd like to see in the new Beta. Highlights of that will be a working panel implementation. In other news, Robert Knight is working on kickoff, which will probably also be part of the next Beta.

Consider this from Brian Jones, a Microsoft manager who has worked on OOXML for six years. In July, Jones was asked on his blog whether Microsoft would actually commit to conform to an officially standardised OOXML. His response: “It’s hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma [the European standards group that has already OK’d OOXML] in the coming years, because we don’t know what direction they will take the formats." Now that’s cynical.

"Lots of scheduler updates in the past few days, done by many people," noted Ingo Molnar, going on todescribe the more significant updates."Most importantly, the SMP latency problems reported and debugged by Mike Galbraith should be fixed for good now." Ingo noted that the current code base was looking stable and was likely to be merged into the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel,"so please give it a good workout and let us know if there's anything bad going on.

there's new a dpkg version in experimental: 1.14.7~newshlib, which contains my work to enhance dpkg-shlibdeps with symbol-based dependencies. The work is finished and thus we decided to upload it to experimental to have some broader testing before releasing it into unstable.