Showing headlines posted by caitlyn

Last night, I enjoyed the nice feeling of using simple, already “obsolete” technology—that is, CentOS 5.3 on my laptop. My antiquated scanner Genius ColorPage Vivid4 still works very well, and I only needed to add a small firmware blob, the same way I was doing it in the past with SuSE and with Debian. Scanning with Xsane was faster than scanning in Windows. I don’t know why. Small operations on the resulting images were accomplished faster in gThumb than in GIMP. OpenOffice.org 2.3 worked very well, despite being “obsolete”. And it even generated a surprisingly small PDF from the final 100 MB document. Amazing. And fast. Nothing crashed. At all.

Kai Hendry has announced the release of Webconverger 4.9, a Debian-based live CD and web kiosk designed for deployments in places like offices or Internet cafés where only web applications are used. What's new? "Shows a new Iceweasel (Firefox) security update 3.0.11; back to Xpdf despite printing dialog problems, because it's lighter and integrates better with the browser (no EULA to agree to every time); Webconverger base 4.9 featuring wireless essid with spaces fix and a compose key option; known to work flawlessly with Eee PC 900. Known issues: hard drive installer is not present on the ISO edition (or any edition for that matter)."

BlankOn Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Indonesia Linux Movement Foundation (Yayasan Penggerak Linux Indonesia / YPLI) and Indonesia Ubuntu Community which aim to fulfill the need of computer user in general. Using the easiness and stability philosophy of Ubuntu Linux as the base distribution, BlankOn Linux developed as an open source project and developed together to create a unique Indonesia Linux distribution. Jakarta, June 16th, 2009 - Today the BlankOn Developer team officialy release BlankOn 5.0 with the code name Nanggar, the culture that is brought up to this version is from Batak culture. The name Nanggar is taken from Batak language which means “Hammer”. Some of the new unique features in Nanggar are the Contextual Desktop which developed by BlankOn Developer Team, with the ability to change the theme and the wallpaper of the desktop based on the computer clock or based on the current weather condition.

Of course I’m fed with Mono. I am so annoyed by the public passion for this technology that I won’t bother anymore to blog against it. A tiny mention though, in this short post.

First of all, I was exceedingly pissed off by a long pro-Mono plea by Jo Shields, which I have read as posted by Carla Schroder. I can’t comment on it, as I don’t want to read it again. It hurts my guts.

The only thing I can say: we don’t need Mono, the same way we don’t need Java. It’s not just about Microsoft. It’s about stupid people who try to force some technologies there where they’re not needed.

Abuse. Intimidation. And support. You can find all that and more on the Ubuntu Users mailing list. An official support channel, the mailing list is where new users are directed by Canonical for technical support and discussions about new features and ideas. But there are some key problems with the mailing list. In the past few months, I believe there have been unacceptable comments posted — directed at peoples’ race, gender, sexual orientation and nationality. There’s no moderation and no consequences to stop people from repeating their offenses.

User GwydionDd commented on my previous anti-Vista rant post: "My daughter’s PC had Windows XP on it and as a teenage girl she likes to use the PC as an extension of her personal life (facebook, skype IM, etc, etc) and also as her media centre for music and DVD’s as well as her photo booth. Just your avarage typical home user. … I had enough of wiping Windows and I installed Pardus 2008 on the PC, setup her WiFi … imported her music and photo collection and sorted out the DVD codecs... "

If you get on google, yahoo, bling, ming or any other search engine and type the words Ubuntu, Debian and upgrade you will get hundreds of articles relating to converting, or upgrading, Debian to Ubuntu. You will not find many that talk about going the other way. After all, why would you want to go back to Debian after you have tried Ubuntu?

Stanislav Hoferek has announced the release of Greenie Linux 5j, an Ubuntu-based distribution and live CD optimised for Slovak and Czech speakers. What's new? Based on Ubuntu 8.10 "Jaunty Jackalope" (Linux kernel 2.6.28, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1), actualised with all recent security updates; new keyboard shortcuts for launching Firefox, calculator or any other application; availability of a meta package that can turn a standard Ubuntu install into Greenie Linux; new documentation; inclusion of Greenshot - a utility that takes a screenshot and uploads into to ImageShack in three seconds; availability of extra applications, including Skype, VLC and Opera via Greenport; new desktop theme....

Many open source projects start with a single developer trying to scratch an itch by making a new tool for their own use. But what if the need to be addressed is bigger, and affects more people? How can the creation of open source software involve a whole community?

Note that the quoted story wasn't referring to netbooks running Linux. It was referring to all Intel Atom powered netbooks. I am assured over and over again by tech pundits like Mr. Weinberg that nowadays almost all those netbooks run Windows, not Linux. Did it ever occur to people that Windows might actually be the cause of the disappointment customers face and the high returns?

The rise of the netbook has been an extraordinary saga. When the Asus Eee PC was first launched at the end of 2007, it seemed to come from nowhere: there was no real precedent for such a low-cost, small machine, using solid state storage and running GNU/Linux.

It might seem strange to put a phone operating system on a netbook, but Don Reisinger thinks it might be a better choice than Windows 7. Acer announced that it's bringing Google Android to its line of netbooks. It's planning to release an Acer netbook with Google Android installed in the third quarter of 2009. This is a major announcement: right now, Acer offers a variety of netbooks under its Aspire One line and they all have Windows running natively when shipped. For the first time, it's Google - not Linux - that will take Microsoft on in the PC space. And by the sound of things, Acer wants to see Android take off.

A way back I blogged in a self-important and knowing way about Why People Don’t Use GNU/Linux. I'd like to update that now, and thus the appearance of The Four Eyes:

Should Microsoft be scared about Google expanding its mobile OS Android to netbooks? Well, how scared can a company be when it owns 98 percent market share of something? Not very. Let's face it: The netbook "battle" between Windows and Linux is a straight-up massacre.

OpenSolaris came out with its third release last week and within a year there seems to have been some pretty good progress. But with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle earlier this year, the biggest question hanging over OpenSolaris is whether Oracle will decide to continue with the project. I'll come to that later.

BenQ is readying a netbook boasting an 11.6-inch display, optional HSPA, "eight hour" battery, and the largest (500GB) HDD (hard disk drive) we've heard of. In addition to offering the "Joybook Lite U121 Eco" for Linux and Windows XP, BenQ also announced an upcoming Android netbook.

My Acer A1 netbook that I purchased three months ago has already had four operating systems installed and run on it — it shipped with Windows XP, then it had ref=”Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.04, then I upgraded to UNR 9.10, then I went back to UNR 8.04. Oh and I burned an image of the Moblin OS onto USB and took that for a test drive, too. I’ve also used the Linpus OS that shipped on my wife’s Acer A1 and felt stunted and limited on both Linpus and Windows XP. So far, my preference is UNR 8.04.

As I write this, the new Mac news is coming out and Microsoft just decided to back down from limiting Windows 7 Starter Edition to no more than three applications. So, why do I think you may want to buy a Linux desktop instead? Easy: Price. The Macbook still starts at $999. The new 13.3" display. MacBook Pros starts at $1,199. That's great! If you've got that kind of money to spend…

We are pleased to announce that Untangle 6.2 is now available for download. Highlights of the release are our new multiWAN services: WAN Balancer and WAN Failover. Also included in this release is Ad Blocker, for filtering out banner advertisements.

ANALYSIS: The war between open source and Microsoft Windows to be the operating system of choice for netbooks is hotting up, with some major skirmishes last week. But who is winning? Netbooks running open source were the star of last week's Computex show, which saw a flurry of demonstrations of Linux, Moblin and Android-based devices, noted Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.