Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Via's first motherboard in the tiny, 3.8 x 2.8-inch pico-ITX format appears to be available, and priced to appeal to device-builders with limited budgets. The PX10000G supports Linux and other x86 OSes, and ships with a reasonable complement of pin-header I/O cabling. Despite the form-factor having just been introduced in January of this year, the first pico-ITX motherboards are already showing up in the Web-stores of several board suppliers, priced below $300.

McBride says he was caught off guard by the judge's decision because SCO's position was backed by nine witnesses. "We believe this is a very appealable case," McBride said. McBride said he believes that U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball missed the mark when he ruled that Novell, and not SCO, holds copyrights over the widely used computer operating system. "We thought we had a pretty legitimate story," said McBride. Kimball ruled on Aug. 10 that a 1995 asset transfer agreement from Novell to SCO did not include Unix copyrights.

I sometimes think that certain people are either paid directly or ‘compensated’ (indirect payment) by Microsoft for sidling with a malicious and monopolistic agenda. Two individual examples would be the ZDNet bloggers George Ou and Ed Bought. Sometimes, however, a long-term strategy requires exploration. Yesterday, Linux.com published an article that contained another ‘red flag’ statement from de Icaza. Can you see it? Building a desktop that revolves around the Microsoft API was a goal since inception.

You won't find a single other company making a concerted effort to fight open source. Not a one. Larry Ellison (Oracle) says open source is not something to be feared, but rather something "to be explained." Only Microsoft fights. Why? It relies, more than most companies, on a big, upfront license fee. Microsoft's "house" is built on sand. The very factors that drove its success - easy-to-use, low-cost, integration between components - are the same things driving open source into the enterprise. Except that instead of lower cost, open source is free.

Thanks to a note from its creator, DesktopLinux.com learned about a new "release candidate" of Custom NimbleX 2 this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images -- in minutes! One especially interesting feature of the NimbleX live CD is that it allows access to the hard drive on the system on which it boots -- making it a useful system troubleshooting tool, but also potentially dangerous.

Ubuntu Xorg maintainer Bryce Harrington recently demonstrated the BulletProof-X feature that is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 7.10. BulletProof-X provides a failsafe mode which will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line. If Xorg fails to start, the failsafe mode will initiate with minimalistic settings, low resolution, and a limited number of colors. The failsafe mode also automatically runs Ubuntu's new GTK-based display configuration utility.

For the past several years, the annual, invitation-only kernel developers' summit has been held immediately prior to the Ottawa Linux Symposium. This year is different, though: the summit is, instead, happening just after LinuxConf Europe in Cambridge, UK. The preliminary agenda has been posted, though, as has the list of attendees. So it is possible to look forward and get a sense for what is likely to be discussed.

My last entry talked about the imperative to grow the application base for Linux via greater collaboration among vendors and standardization. In the future, I will have further comments on some of the more challenging aspects of getting this done. But before it gets too late, I wanted to comment on the other major excitement coming out of LinuxWorld San Francisco – progress on the Linux desktop. It has been a year since we shipped Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. What has happened since? We have been building out our ecosystem, reaching a crescendo at LinuxWorld.

Ubuntu Month of Screencasts is a mad plan concocted by the Screencast Team to produce one full length screencast per day for the whole of one month. That month is September 2007. The goal is that each video will go into one subject in some depth, to help educate new users about Ubuntu. We aim to go into enough detail to be interesting, hopefully without being baffling or boring. There should be enough information to get a new user from "zero to hero" in one month. That's the goal anyway.

The battles for energy efficiency aren't just being fought by chipmakers, server and PC vendors, and other hardware companies out there. There's a similar battle heating up on the OS layer between Microsoft and Linux. Linux appears to have an advantage at the moment: Big-name vendors like IBM, HP, and Novell are giving the penguin a push in the datacenter, framing it as a flexible and energy-efficient platform.

Announcing the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), the next version of Ubuntu that will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release in October 2007). Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008.

Okay, I’ve watched a few of these articles floating about that apparently don’t speak any new information, but do try to come across as authoritative. It’s basically a waste of BLOG time and space. I always have to look with a critical eye when it appears the “chicken” is telling the “fox” everything is “okay” for them, and bad for that old “fox.” There is an interesting reality that is not captured by financial analysts, Gartner, or Microsoft.

Zonbu has sweetened the pie for Linux enthusiasts wishing to purchase its low-cost, silent, eco-friendly, PC outright -- without committing to an ongoing service contract. The $250 Zonbox PC now includes OS upgrades, 2GB of free online storage, automatic backup services, and root access. Zonbu launched the Zonbox in July, priced as low as $100 when purchased with an ongoing service contract with monthly fees.

Iyou ask a Linux (or BSD, or *nix) user what their favorite window manager is, there is a strong chance that they will tell you that they use KDE. The good people at KDE are set to release their next major version - KDE 4.0 - currently slated to drop on October 23, 2007. I spoke with Wade Olson, the North American contact for the KDE project about what we can expect. Wade has been in the software industry for 14 years as a programmer in C, COBOL, SAS, shell scripting, Java, and PERL.

In a recent series of patches posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list, it was proposed that some imported Atheros wireless device drivers be re-licensed, some from a dual-BSD/GPL license, others from a modified BSD license, all to a pure GPLv2 license. Christoph Hellwig asked,"is this really a good idea? Most of the reverse-engineering was done by the OpenBSD folks, and it would certainly be helpful to work together with them on new hardware revisions, etc.." Luis Rodriguez suggested that there was no choice,"technically the best we can do is to leave the license as dual licensed, but keep in that technically that means nothing and is just for show, the GPL is what would apply as its derivative work and is the most restrictive license."

North Rhine-Westphalia has selected Novell for the supply of its IT infrastructure. Novell already supports 300,000 students in the states of Bavaria and Thuringia; the new deal will add another 560,000 students and thousands of employees. It's not clear how many of the students actually will use the desktop Linux software. Forty percent of all German students now use Linux systems, according to Novell. The company said the universities chose its Linux offerings to deliver cost savings and flexibility, while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Be on guard against alleged representatives of Linux Corporation offering to buy your photos -- it's a scam. That's the message that Indian models and photographers should take to heart, if the experiences of Rohan Patwari and Praveen Toshniwal are any indication. They tell a story that, indirectly, shows both how well-known Linux has become and how mysterious it is to people outside the free software community.

Around 560,000 German students plus thousands of staff at 33 German universities will now be supported by Linux systems from Novell. The Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia has selected Novell to support the critical IT infrastructure systems at the universities in its region.

ASIC vendor Micronas has introduced a hardware/software development kit for a small camera claimed capable of streaming D1 (DVD) resolution video over IP (Internet protocol) networks. The "Mini-IP Camera" kit is based on Micronas's Cypher ESN7108A SoC (system-on-chip), and runs Linux on the SoC's MIPS core. The Mini-IP camera design targets surveillance and other types of monitoring applications. It is said to accept audio and video input from attached sensors, compress it in real time, and send it out using single- or multi-cast Internet protocols such as RTSP.

Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of children's learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the company's best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software.