Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

A board vendor in China/Taiwan is touting a mini-ITX system based on Freescale's fastest PowerQUICC II processor. Micetek, which specializes in 8- and 32-bit processor development boards, said its MPC8349E-mITX system comes with Linux, and can be used to build networking, communications, and "pervasive computing" equipment. Micetek's mini-ITX system is based on its MPC8349E-mITX board, which it appears to have originally developed for Freescale. Freescale resells the board as its MPC8349E-mITXE reference platform, and will feature the board in this fall's 23-city MontaVista/Freescale roadshow.

Phil Shapiro seems to delight not only in remaining a staunch supporter of free software ideals, but also in his role as a encourager and defender of people."I see myself as more of a follwer than a leader," he says. But Shapiro really is a leader, the best kind: one that nurtures the gifts in others instead of promoting himself.

FrOSCon is due to start this weekend, and KDE will have our own room and give several talks. The KDE room will be shared with developers from Amarok and Kubuntu DE. There will be talks on Marble, Amarok 2, Kubuntu in Deutschland and in the main track one on KDE 4. If you are in the Bonn area, drop by Sankt Augustin this weekend and meet the developers and community.

Get it while it's hot. After being available for two years now, the formerly CLI-only firmware-tools now has a pretty slick GUI, called 'inventory_firmware_gui'. Firmware-tools is available in the Dell Software Repository. Once you have firmware-tools installed, you probably want to be able to actually use the new GUI to update something.

Linux developers have been dying for a phone of their own ever since Sharp killed the Zaurus Linux-based PDA. Apple's decision to close iPhone to 3rd-party applications gave the green light to Linux phones and mobile devices. LinuxWorld Expo 2007 basked in Apple's unwitting generosity, with one booth after another featuring fledgling mobile Linux projects prospecting for funding, direction, and developers. The whole exhibit floor had the feel of a mining town that was just getting its footing.

Open source software has introduced a radically different development model -- and mindset -- to the stream of high-tech innovation. It is one that is having repercussions in the corporate world that go beyond how software, telecommunications and other information technologies are developed. Through a collaborative process that's somewhat akin to peer review in academia, open source taps into the skills and talents of a global pool of software developers -- organizing, coordinating and leveraging their efforts to allow industry-wide use of the results.

According to DesktopLinux.com's just completed survey, the number of Desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year, and Ubuntu remains their Linux distribution of choice. Since DesktopLinux.com's recently completed survey is a self-selected group, we can't claim scientific proof that the number of desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year. Still, this year's survey produced 38,500 votes versus 14,535 votes over the same number of days in a similar survey one year ago.

A research study on failure sampling in KDE is scheduled for September. We are now looking for skilled C++ developers to test one or several C++ classes. The developers at KDAB have already provided some code for the occasion from kdepim. Discussions have been held with the SQO-OSS project on adding the sampling method's basics to Alitheia, the successor to the English Breakfast Network, if the outcome of the study is promising, now all we need, is you...

When Asus first took the wraps off the Eee PC a few months ago, this small, Linux-based laptop drew a great deal of attention for its unusually low price. Since that time, though, Asus' estimates of what it will charge for this model have crept up a bit. Citing anonymous sources at the company, DigiTimes is reporting that Asus will begin shipping the Eee PC in September in four different configurations priced at $200, $240, $350, and $370. Exactly what these configurations will be is not yet known.

A recent bug report led to a discussion about potentially dropping support for pre-4.0 versions of GCC. Adrian Bunk noted,"currently we support 6 different stable gcc release series, and it might be the right time to consider dropping support for the older ones. Are there any architectures still requiring a gcc< 4.0 ?" Russell King noted that on some architectures GCC 3.x is still preferable to the newer 4.x branch,"I want to keep support for gcc 3.4.3 for ARM for the foreseeable future.

I use some common Linux tools to remotely support my Grandparents’ PC. These tools are SSH and X11vnc. X11vnc lets me take over the display, and the VNC traffic is tunneled with SSH. They can be a bit of work to set up, but work beautifully.

This is the third article in a series highlighting lesser known applications for Linux. These articles will be a bit Ubuntu-centric, but these applications should run nicely on your distribution of choice. This installment will review applications that aid in writing screenplays, plays, and novels. It varies somewhat from the previous two articles in that it does reference a couple of better known applications for Linux, although it discusses some of the lesser known ways to use them.

September 1, 2007 will see the official launch ofOpenEMR HQ, a solutions provider offering several"enterprise level" EMR solutions to small to mid-sized clinics. The service will offer both hosted and on-site installations of theOpenEMR electronic medical records software package and a pre-configured, semi-managed appliance called"EMR-RACK" which promises to offer clinics an easy and affordable way to implement OpenEMR. They will also provide customization, development, installation, support, and training services to clinics worldwide.

Gentoo uses a unique package manager to distribute source code that is "compatible" with Gentoo. That is, it's optimized to work with Gentoo's basic system and correctly installs any needed components in the system that a vanilla version may not offer. It tracks dependencies for the packages, and will install all the needed packages when installing a package. When this system works, it's great. Oh, and it's called Portage.

I hear the argument everyday. That somehow, any open source project must not be very good because it does not cost anything to use it. Well, allow me to poke some holes into that theory, generally made by people who have yet to ween themselves from closed source dependency. First off, not everything in the open source world is without a profit making system. Google and Mozilla for instance, have manged to do fairly well using open source licenses. They ‘give away’ their product or service, yet seem to manage to pay the bills somehow…

Cheese is a relatively new open source webcam application for Linux that supports image and video capture and allows users to apply visual effects. Created by Daniel Siegel for Google's Summer of Code program, Cheese closely resembles a Mac OS X program called Photobooth. Cheese 0.2.1 was released yesterday with some nice new features like a countdown timer and support for saving pictures to Flickr.

It created a bit of a stir at the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing on Open Source a few weeks ago when Eben Moglen, who'd been invited to speak with me about free software licensing in the era of Web 2.0, chose instead to take me to task for talking about open source rather than free software for the past ten years, and for "wasting time promoting commercial products." A number of people asked to see the video from the session. Even though we hadn't planned to release the video from the executive briefing, we were able to get a copy.

Yesterday I installed Debian Lenny on one of my workstations to give it a try. Ever since I tried Ubuntu I've been in love with it, but you all know how love can be blinding ;) So trying a new distribution every now and then is a good idea. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so I wanted to see where the latest version of Debian differed from the latest Ubuntu release. The second part of this posting is about initng, the next generation init system.

Several colleagues of mine now also use Linux as their primary work desktop. In fact, we now have about a 50/50 split between (K)Ubuntu and XP users in our office. I wanted to get their views on why they use Linux and if they are happy with it. Hopefully the answers will be useful to others considering Linux. I asked everyone the same set of questions. So without further ado, here are their thoughts.

We know our video editing applications for Windows (read Adobe Premiere, AVID, Ulead Video studio etc) and Mac (Final Cut Pro!), but what about video editing on a Linux powered system? Well here's a list of video editing applications for your Linux PC. A look at Kdenlive, Open Movie Editor, Blender, Cinelerra and PiTIVi.