Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks. The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops.

images2mpg, a simple utility that's part of the KDE Image Plugin Interface (KIPI), lets you create an MPEG file from image files. Relying on a handful of command-line tools including the ImageMagick suite and mjpegtools, images2mpg creates wonderful videos from your images and even lets you insert your favorite song as the background. It supports SVCD, DVD, VCD, and XVCD video formats. To install KIPI, Fedora and Ubuntu users can respectively use yum or apt. Before you begin experimenting with images2mpg, you will need to install ImageMagick and mjpegtools too.

Mention Common Gateway Interface scripting to a Web developer, and their first response is likely to be "I use Perl." While Perl has long dominated the CGI scripting world, there are other, and perhaps better, tools available. In this tutorial we'll take a look at CGI scripting with Python, a fast, versatile, multi-platform language. Python is an interpreted, object-oriented language named after the BBC television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus." No johnny-come-lately, Python's first release was in 1991. Developed by Guido van Rossum, Python is the scripting language of choice for many enterprises, including Google, NASA, and ForecastWatch.com.

Shenzhen, China-based smartphone design company Tranzda Technologies is marketing five phone designs that use its NewPlus Linux phone application stack. All five Tranzda designs include GPS, along with optional features that include WiFi, cameras, and biometric fingerprint authentication.

Remember Munich, and its city council's 2003 decision to rip out Microsoft Windows and Office, and to replace them with free software? It was a seminal moment for open source, when Microsoft brought its heaviest guns to bear – in the shape of Steve Ballmer, no less, who made the city an offer it couldn't refuse – and failed..

Since releasing Google Desktop for Linux, we've added almost all of our most requested features, like 64-bit support and the ability to search applications and documents. All except one major exception: Desktop Gadgets. Gadget support is not just a single feature, but rather an entire platform for miniature applications. It's a complex undertaking, but we're now putting the finishing touches on the product.

One of the most interesting parts of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aims to supply its ultra-low-cost XO-1 laptops to millions of students in developing nations, is its highly customised GUI. Called Sugar, it presents the user with a greatly simplified interface that's quite a departure from a traditional desktop. The biggest shift is that Sugar is a "singletasking" interface -- users can work with just a single application (called an "activity") at a time, which takes up the entire display, though you can run multiple activities simultaneously and switch between them. Another major difference is that the filesystem is presented as a virtual log of files, called the "Journal", which records multiple versions of files over time.

Asustek Computer Inc. in September plans to launch the Eee Monitor, a PC built into a monitor designed to rival Apple Inc.'s iMac, the company's CEO said Monday. The new device joins the Taiwanese company's popular Eee family of products, which started with the low-cost mini-laptop, the Eee PC. Asustek has expanded its laptop line to include products with different configurations and sizes supporting various operating systems, including Linux and Windows XP. The company will launch two new Eee PCs at Computex Taipei 2008 today: the Eee PC 901, which boasts nearly eight hours of battery life, and the Eee PC 1000, which has a 10-inch screen and regular-size keyboard.

The phone rings. You pick it up, and it is the recruiter for your dream job. Your palms begin to sweat as the technical interview starts. “You want to know the run-levels for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® or Fedora®?” You pause, thinking. “Well, I use Linux every day, and I know single user mode is level 1…”. You stammer a bit, and say you’re drawing a blank for the rest. The recruiter thanks you in that “sorry” tone-of-voice, and hangs up the phone.

The appeal filed by India against OOXML is not yet available, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it likely is about by reading this open letter, Finally, My open letter on OOXML happenings in India by Dr. Deepak B. Phatak, a member of the committee, written to members of the LITD 15 committee of BIS, India. Among the issues Dr. Phatak raises are that OOXML is "not mature enough for acceptance as an ISO standard" yet; that there's no final draft available; the standard has been broken up into parts, and new conformance criteria introduced; and that the BRM meeting "failed in its basic objectives of resolution through technical discussion" since there was insufficient time to discuss most of the issues and in the end, most of the NBs abstained.

To keep up with the growing popularity of the recent wave of small, low-cost, flash-drive-equipped, wireless "netbook" computers, Ubuntu Linux today announced a specially modified version of the Linux operating designed to run on such machines. Called Ubuntu Linux Remix, the new operating system will be aimed at hardware manufacturers that are building netbooks for the consumer market, said Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu around the globe. Ubuntu Linux Remix is built to be compatible with Intel Corp.'s new Atom processors, which are miniaturized, low-power CPUs that can be used in smaller netbook chassis, Carr said.

The IT Service Center Berlinhas announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital (Google Translate to English). This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software. According to the ITDZ's press release, the integration phase has successfully finished and the KDE-based client for Berlin's administration is now ready for prime time.

Johnathan Zdziarski's book Open iPhone Application Development is a guide writing applications for the iPhone without engaging the restrictions of Apple's official software development kit (SDK). The book takes readers on a concise tour of iPhone jailbreaking, setting up the free compiler tool chain, writing basic Objective-C apps, and the available libraries and APIs. Apple might not like this book, but if you need to develop for the iPhone or just want to learn more about how it works, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better practical resource.

Over the past two years, I've reviewed free software first-person shooters including Tremulous, Alien Arena, and Nexuiz -- all top-notch games. Now we can add Urban Terror to that list. While the first three sport other-worldly, sci-fi-style opponents, Urban Terror goes for realistic opponents -- as realistic as today's headlines. You're fighting terrorists in Algiers and other locations around the globe, and you're using realistic weaponry to do it.

The world's third-largest PC vendor has announced a "netbook" based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Centrino processor and Linpus Linux. Acer's $380 Aspire One offers 512MB or 1GB of RAM, 8GB flash, an 8.9-inch, 1024x600 display, WiFi, webcam, and an optional 80GB hard drive.

Pat Volkerding and the Slackware team released the latest version of Slackware Linux, 12.1, on May 2. Even though it is a "point one" release, the list of new features reads like what other distributions would consider a major new version. Slackware 12.1 features the latest KDE 3.5.9, Xfce 4.4.2, and a number of improvements, especially to udev. The full list of updated features is in the official product announcement. From a user's perspective, version 12.1 is a true refinement of the previous version.

If you've been an Open Source advocate for any significant amount of time, you've no doubt heard someone say, with a sneer in their voice, "You get what you pay for". Let it be noted, I really hate that cliche. It does make me think, however, about what you really get when you purchase the license to use a commercial operating system like Windows or OSX.

When I make videos, I almost always use Ogg to encode the audio. Storing the audio in Ogg saves space on my machine without sacrificing quality. However, I invariably need to loop, concatenate, or change the audio in some way, which can be difficult. For many of these tasks I turn to the OGMtools suite to make the process easier.

As we covered earlier today, Facebook has released a big chunk of its platform code as open source - using the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) for their main license. If you haven't been closely following the proliferation of open source licenses, this is probably a new one to you. As with any open source code, it's smart to understand your rights before you start depending on the new platform - especially since some of the provisions of the CPAL may surprise you.

n spite of fragmentary information about changes, that I’ve published since my last insight (like the Amarok 2 visual changelog), I’ve decided after all to gather them all in one place. Hence, I invite you to the next insight of KDE 4. The revision of the day is 811150.