Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

This may not be as absurd a claim as you may think, especially when you take into consideration the minor backlash that Ubuntu has experienced. So is PCLinuxOS the next poster-child of usable Linux? It's only natural that something that gains a massive amount of popularity in a relatively short period of time receives some criticism.

Somebody toss me a Che Guevara T-shirt. Google and Microsoft have gone to war over open source software. On Aug. 10, Redmond submitted the Microsoft Permissive License to the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Should the license be approved, Microsoft would receive the "open source" seal of approval that only the OSI – by self-proclamation – can okay. Of course, one could argue that Microsoft – once blessed with the open source label – will only abuse its status. The company could claim to be a huge open source supporter, derailing critics' arguments by displaying nothing more than the OSI logo when needed. Chris DiBona, Google's open source manager, seems to fall into this cynical camp.

A top ten complaint that we have received is directed at our user interface. Many people feel like the current interface doesn’t address their exact needs. The organization is not “intuitive”; the colors are not pleasing; there is no simple way to navigate “exactly” where you want, exactly when you want. We went back to the drawing board with OpenedHand — lead by their vast experience with GTK+, Matchbox, and mobile user interfaces — and redesigned an incredibly promising new interface. Today I’m extremely excited to announce that everyone can find this, right now, in our subversion repository, under the name OM-2007.2.

If everything goes well, Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, the next community version of the popular Linux distribution, will appear in October. It will not, however, include the latest and greatest X window server and utilities: Xserver 1.4 and X.Org 7.3. The reason for this, as Bryce Harrington, a Canonical developer who works on Ubuntu's X windowing system, explained is that at a developer's meeting on August 16th, the Ubuntu programmers decided to "opt for leaving xserver 1.4 for Gutsy+1.

I just read two really interesting articles (Giving proprietary vendors a run for their money & Could Linux become the dominant OS?). These articles and a discussion I had yesterday about budget constraints for the next calendar year makes me think that Open Source Software (OSS) is on the verge of becoming mainstream over the next few years. I have already seen the statistics where 51% of companies are using OSS in mission critical applications. This is starting to look very similar to the days where everyone was fleeing the mainframe for client server technology. The client server craze was driven by lower cost and greater flexibility. Does that sound familiar?

Managing disk space used to be a royal pain for admins and users. Running out of disk space often meant reinstalling Linux or spending a few hours with tools like Parted to resize partitions. However, using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) tools, you can grow, shrink, and manage disk space with very little hassle.

Acrosser has introduced a compact, fanless computer aimed at the harsh environments found in trucks, taxis, and other vehicular applications. The AR-ES0831FL runs Linux on Pentium and Celeron M processors, and meets IEC-68-2-6 vibration and IEC-68-2-27 shock standards, according to the company.

The topic of Linux on the desktop is one that raises its head every couple of days somewhere on the web - and here it is again. I was a bit amazed last week to note that someone who wrote that the continued piracy of Windows was affecting the spread of Linux on the desktop was described as raising an "unusual" argument. It has been known for at least the last 10 years that Gates & Co have a public stance on piracy - which is: "shoot the buggers down" - and a private stance - which is, "it's helps to spread usage of Windows, do nothing."

We all believe that open source is associated with free, as in free speech, software. Any open source software can be downloaded free of cost and without paying any money and we have plenty of those softwares; I believe the most commonly used free open source software is Firefox browser. I did a little check on the popular open source companies, to find out their source of income, and it turned out that these open source zealots have a very sane mind in their heads. Open source companies are indeed making huge money. In this article I'll give a brief of the money Redhat is making.

WHEN I switched from Windows to Linux last year, a decision I had to make as a technology writer was what to do with readers who were still on Microsoft’s proprietary operating system. On one hand, I felt a responsibility to help them see that for many computing requirements, Linux is the superior and more cost-effective choice. On the other hand, I realized that 90 percent of all computers still run on Windows, and that many new programs appear first on this platform, precisely because of its huge user base. Still, I learned quite a bit trying to get there, with a free and open source program from Innotek called VirtualBox, which runs on Linux, Windows (2000, XP or Server 2003) and OS X (Intel-based) computers.

The technical debate around whether OOXML (ECMA 376) should be approved as an ISO standard (fast track or otherwise) has been raging for a while. Numerous organizations and individuals have expressed technical and legal concerns. The latest summary of the objections I noticed is from the New Zealand Open Source Society. Vikram weighed in with his objections to an Indian approval of OOXML. The last two months however have seen reports from various countries questioning the basis on which their votes are being decided. The constitution of the committees and the manner in which the national position is decided seem to me to be flawed.

More than 500 people were killed when Peru was hit with by an enormous earthquake last week. When we learned that Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the GPL under which the GNU/Linux operating system is licensed, was in Peru during the quake, we asked if he would share his experiences with us. Here's his report.

Sauerbraten, the game known as "Cube 2" and being based upon the open-source Cube engine, has its 2007 summer edition out. Sauerbraten 2007-08-19 features a number of improvements to the Sauerbraten editor as well as to the Cube 2 engine.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 101 for the week of August 13th. In Ask Fedora, we have "Location For Menu Entries And Customization" and "64-bit Java Plugin". In Daily Package, we have "Fedora Daily Package Articles in Chinese", "MediaWiki - Collaborative publishing", "RenRot - Rename and rotate photos", "Wednesday Why: Logins and Sessions", "GKrellM - System monitoring tool", "TaxiPilot - Drive a Space Taxi" and "Fedora Daily Package Weekly Video Summary".

The xm block-attach command can be used to add additional storage to a running para-virtualized Xen guest. To ensure this succeeds, use the xvd device as the frontend device, and NOT sd or hd.

Over the last four days, I’ve been exploring how to convert physical Linux boxes into virtual machines. VMWare has a tool for doing P2V conversions, as they’re called, but as far as I can tell it only works for Windows physical machines and for converting various flavors of virtual machines into others. I could have just rebuilt the whole machine from scratch on a new virtual machine, but that takes a lot of time and the old build isn’t that out of date (one year) and works fine. So, I set out to discover how to transfer a physical machine to a virtual machine.

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite and operating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications. Open source security applications are free, or at least much less costly than their proprietary counterparts. Even when the cost of paid support is factored in, they provide much more bang for the buck. Having many more eyes watching the code and a community of developers backing up users, open source security applications provide a wide range of options and made-to-order uses.

MontaVista® Software, Inc., the leading provider of Linux® for intelligent devices and communications infrastructure, together with Freescale Semiconductor, Avnet, and EBV Elektronik today announced the Embedded Linux World Tour 2007, a series of live seminars for device designers and developers across North America and Europe. Embedded Linux World Tour seminars will be presented in 23 cities in 9 countries between September 4 and November 15, 2007.

Today's software business model isn't about writing software; it's about the enablement and servicing of software. And that just happens to be what the open source movement is all about. So far, the open source movement has tended to develop software that mimics commercial products. We will soon see it graduate to creating entirely new solutions. One of the great freedoms of open source is the ability to take just the bits we need and recombine them into new applications, accelerating innovation and time to market.

Obsidian has been appointed as an official South African value-add reseller for Zimbra, the award-winning open source messaging and collaboration platform. "Zimbra is a highly original product," says Muggie van Staden, managing director for Obsidian. "It is not based on any existing collaboration server and does not try to emulate what is already available in the market. Instead, Zimbra offers a new and refreshing approach to messaging and collaboration."