Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place.

In an interview at Wired, Darl McBride, the CEO and President of SCO Group, remained defiant in the face of SCO's recent crushing setbacks in its lawsuit against Novell over the copyrights to UNIX SVRX. The article briefly reviews the history behind SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others, however it gets a few things wrong.

I finally had a chance to meet with our new librarian today. After being without an actual librarian for so long, it was incredibly cool to talk with someone who knew something more about academic research than how to Google. When I asked her how she felt about spending big chunks of her budget on commercial library software like Follett’s Destiny, vs. potentially more labor-intensive but free open-source solutions, she said, “I’m not afraid of learning new things. Why don’t you set up a server with one of the open source systems and I’ll give it a shot.” Rock on.

Mark this Saturday, September 15th, in your diary. It’s Software Freedom Day and it’s coming to you. That's "free" as in "free lunch" but also "free" as in liberty. Software Freedom Day is described by its organising body as a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of free and open source software (“FOSS”). Previously, Software Freedom Day garnered 200 teams around the world and is sure to well exceed that figure this time around in 60 different nations.

Sliverlight for Linux? Not so fast. You’ll need to pay some ‘Microsoft tax’ first, for protection from Novell — a ‘protection’ that expires within about 4 years. How do we know this? Thanks to our reader, Victor Soliz, we have it right from the horse’s mouth. To paraphrase Victor and quote Miguel de Icaza, he says that in order to legally use Moonlight you will have to “download it from novell.”

Regional Linux users received a boost today as open source leader Red Hat announced the opening of a regional support centre for the Middle East. The Red Hat Certified Support Centre is set to open in Dubai on December 1. Red Hat's local partner Opennet will operate the facility, which will be only the fourth partner-operated centre in the EMEA region.

Recently on this blog, I wrote You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser. In this, I argued that any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I specifically mentioned some breathalyzer software that people were fighting to see the source code of. Though the Florida legislature and many regional prosecutors obviously feel that the breathalyzer company’s rights were more important the individual rights, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered that source code to a popular breathalyzer be revealed. The results, if you’ll pardon the pun, are breathtaking.

Just some more images of the work done so far on the extensions for the plasma clock, that i have been working on with Riccardo Iaconelli. Right now i´m working on a time zone extension. The one you can see here is the date extension... Basically, what you get when clicking the date area ;)

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #56 for the week September 2nd - September 8th, 2007. In this issue we cover new Ubuntu and MOTU members, the Tribe 6 milestone, an Ubuntu get-together, the one year anniversary of French UWN translations, and, as always, much much more!

You finally got your Linux environment to crash. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace does nothing, nor do the F-keys. You know you shouldn’t have installed that bad driver, but you did it anyway. So you reach for the power button. Stop. Mashing in the power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC should it ever stop doing its job.

You've got to hand it to Microsoft. It hates ANYTHING and ANYONE that gets in its way of selling its software. Including, apparently, itself. In a very funny turn of events, Microsoft is out preaching to the industry that XP is a bloated expense hog, while svelte Vista will cure world hunger (or, at least, cost less). Anyway, Microsoft must really be hurting if it has to resort to beating up on its most stable product in years.

This past week the Phase 2 "Mass Market" schedule for the OpenMoko Neo1973 was revised. OpenMoko now expects the GTA02v3 design to be finalized by September 20 while on December 10 it will begin production in "moderate volumes". On December 20 the OpenMoko Neo1973 GTA02v3 will go on sale, and with "Santa's Sleigh Package Service", the OpenMoko Neo1973 will arrive on December 25 for those celebrating Christmas.

The new VirtualBox brings seamless virtualization to Linux. This puts Linux on par with the Mac - users can run their native desktop but still launch the odd Windows-only program when they need to. The VirtualBox manual doesn’t give much detail on the new feature, so here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of VirtualBox 1.5

You’ll all have seen and read by now about NetApp suing Sun for patent infringement. I’m not going to re-hash the arguments, but there are a couple of points of interest related to Sun’s patent strategy and open source. What occurs to me is that NetApp has gone out of its way to maintain that its patent claim is not an open source issue but an issue between two vendors about a technology that just happens to be open source. But ZFS is not an open source project.

So you have one of those sophisticated office printer models with adjustable guides that allow you to use any weird media size (with some sensible min/max value for width and height)? And you don't know how to tell CUPS to use that size when printing? (Ah... you don't have such a printer, and you are about to skip this article? Wait. The content may still be useful to you. See the last paragraph.)

A computer mouse is no longer a simple object as nowadays it may come in a variety of shapes and sizes, colors and tones, bigger and smaller and sporting exotic or more common features. Among the shapes that a computer mouse can take these days is the shape of a little happy penguin, looking especially for those Linux lovers out there. But, while this mouse is certainly cute and does not look half bad, I have to speak up my mind and say that it may be less than ergonomic or practical for that matter to the above average computer user.

IDF might have a tad more attention when it kicks off the week after next in San Francisco but Itanium loyalists will also get their moment in the sun soon when the Gelato ICE conference kicks off on 1 October in Singapore. This is a pretty specific show aimed at ISVs, SIs, developers and others that are working on big scale-up Linux-on-Itanium projects but two interesting things are likely to come out of the confab: a catch-up on the Itanium roadmap and developments in LinuxOnLinux, a project to support virtualisation on the chip.

[Huh? Is the "Itanic" still around? – Sander]

In a move which may raise eyebrows amongst the Linux developer community, Pieter Knook the CEO of the smartphone vendor, HTC has said that mobile Linux will face difficulties unless it gets support from a major long term partner - and named the company's own long term partnership with Microsoft as an example to follow.

[Here's some FUD to round off the week – Sander]

Wondering around my Linux filesystem I found a weird directory in /home… Ok, I thought, I didn’t create that. If it’s a virus, it’s the most stupid virus in existence, but, we never know. Anyway, The Oracle would know the answer… Searching for mrtstub, the first hit is directly from the enemy’s site. Not too far I found the origin: "mrtstub is part of the Malicious Software Removal Tool. It is responsible for copying mrt.exe to the correct location and launching it".

I’m working on setting up a new server to host windley.com (including this blog) and my other websites. Since the server will be running far from my watchful eye and largely unattended, I didn’t want to rely on a backup system that required changeable media. So, I decided to buy two 80Gb drives and configure them in RAID-1. Now, I haven’t configured a RAID system for a while (five years?) and I was surprised at how easy Linux makes it.