Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Ark Linux team have announced the release of Ark Linux 2007.1, the latest version of its multi-purpose desktop operating system. Ark Linux is an end user-friendly Linux operating system suitable for office and school work, desktop publishing, graphics, multimedia entertainment. This latest release of Ark Linux includes a number of application upgrades, an imporoved integration of the Wine Windows emulator and better hardware detection, according to the development team.

What defines upstream? KDE, GNOME, Apache, even the Linux kernel are upstream for a Linux distribution, and even a totally different distribution altogether may be considered upstream (for example, Debian is considered upstream for Ubuntu). These upstream projects are the ones that write most of the code that goes into powering your free software operating systems, and to a distribution, they are what makes the whole thing possible. What do you do with the changes you make to the upstream packages? After you've made changes to help fix some bugs, add or change some features, you end up with quite a large set of patches that you need to maintain.

Freespire, the free as in beer version of the Linspire Linux distribution, this month released Freespire 2.0, the first version of the operating system based on the popular Ubuntu distribution, and the first to contain proprietary codecs and drivers. Despite its attractive appearance, it left me with mixed feelings.

“No way! That’s impossible.” Well, actually it’s not. Using Open Source technology, it’s actually possible to create a competitive IT infrastructure for very low costs. Not only does Open Source software enable you to create more customized solutions to better fit your needs, but it also means that you can spend your budget on hardware - not software.

It looks like PC maker Dell is climbing onboard the virtualization train with its consumer PC division. It has been confirmed that Dell is developing a consumer PC line that will run multiple versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux software at the same time using virtualization platforms to perform the magic.

A vulnerability report maintained by Jeff Jones, strategy director at Microsoft's Security Technology Unit, claimed that the firm's Windows XP, Vista and Server operating systems required patches for some 20-45 vulnerabilities each. During the same period, vendors such as Red Hat, Apple and Novell have had to patch hundreds of vulnerabilities, according to Microsoft. Jones released a similar report in June chronicling vulnerabilities reported in major operating systems during the first 90 days after release.

[Ah, there's nothing like the smell of biased reporting from Redmond to start off your Monday.—Sander]

Whenever I mention in a crowd that I use free software, someone always seems to comment that I must hate Microsoft. When I add that I write about free software for a living, someone is apt to call me a Microsoft-basher. In either case, the implication seems to be that my identity is defined by Microsoft, and, perhaps, is composed of an unhealthy amount of envy. When I reply calmly that Microsoft is mostly irrelevant to me, the people who made these comments seem disbelieving, or at least disappointed. But why would I care about what Microsoft is doing, beyond a mild interest in news that doesn’t particularly concern me?

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), (http://www.lpi.org), the premier professional certification programme for the worldwide Linux community, will offer reduced price certification testing during LinuxWorld Conference and Expo 2007 in London. Registered conference delegates and trade show attendees will be able to enter the exams for half price –just £40 rather than the usual price of £80 per exam. LPI will offer LPIC-1 exams (101 and 102), LPIC-2 (201 and 202) exams , the Ubuntu Certified Professional exam and the new LPIC-3 exams (LPI-301 and LPI-302 (Mixed Environment).

Trusted Computer Solutions (TCS) has launched what it calls the first Linux hardening tool that is designed to be easy to use and to help system administrators out with compliance issues. The program, called Security Blanket, was first shown last week at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, and will be available on Sept. 17 for Rs 8,118 per licence. It is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has partnered with TCS on the system.

Microsoft currently faces three primary threats to its future business: Linux and other open-source software, cloud-based computing and a number of players in the entertainment devices space, according to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. But Rob Enderle, an analyst with The Enderle Group, disagreed with that assessment, saying the greatest threat to Microsoft is the perception that it cannot compete in many of these areas without cheating.

The non-profit Free Standards Group is getting big support from ISVs for its latest effort to make sure Linux doesn’t split into a variety of non-conformant versions. The FSG project, called the Linux Standards Base (LSB), already a core standard among Linux platform vendors, is gaining support from commercial and Open Source software makers – including IBM, Novell Oracle, Veritas and MySQL.

He’s been leading us, let’s face it, for around three decades – far longer than John Howard has been in power in Australia. And if we do say goodbye to Bill Gates and that long succession of Microsoft operating systems – an institution we’ve come to know as Billdom - will the incoming government, which calls itself Open Source, be up to the job?

This paper examines whether OOXML can be fully implemented by vendors other than Microsoft and concludes that a number of application specific and undisclosed behaviours (as well as a number of other technical flaws) in the proposed standard make this impossible. Also while Microsoft has waived patent claims for the explicit and required parts of the specification it is clearly stated that this does not extend to the undisclosed behaviours or ambiguous definitions, providing a legal as well as technical barrier to OOXML's implementation.

While everyone was expecting Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux based upon Epic Games providing native Linux clients for their past Unreal Tournament titles, this week it was officially confirmed by Epic's Mark Rein that there will be a Linux client for UT3.

Few events have created more fodder for the blogosphere, more fuel for Microsoft critics and more emotional responses than the Microsoft patent deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros. While putting together a list of things people hate about these deals is easy, generating a list of positive aspects is much harder. So I tried to take a more balanced approach and put together a love/hate list about these deals.

My Grandparents’ Linux desktop had to be super-simple for them to use. While default GNOME or Xfce are pretty straight-forward, I wanted something better. I decided to go with Xfce just because they would not be needing any of GNOME’s fancy features. Like GNOME, Xfce is easily customized but is slightly faster.

Lately, mobile phones have evolved extremely fast, and whether you need them to access the Internet, record videos, send/receive MMS and SMS messages or e-mails, listen to music or radio stations, cellular phones are the most indispensable devices these days. But today's guide will teach you a very easy way to connect and transfer files to/from your mobile phone using an USB cable through the Pop-Port interface.

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos). I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

A small group of internet activists from New Zealand, Australia the Solomon Islands and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) plan to take the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative to the Pacific islands. A local not-for-profit, to be called OLPC Oceania, is planned but is yet to be formally constituted, says Ian Thomson, the New Zealand member of the initiative, best known for his work with the 2020 Communications Trust. OLPC Oceania plans two programmes: first, a pilot deployment of 20 machines, to be given to Solomon Islands children to supplement their regular education. A second more ambitious project aims to deploy 100,000 of the laptops throughout a number of the Pacific islands.

At Phoronix we are constantly running Linux benchmarks with quad-core and even octal-core systems with more than enough RAM and all of the latest and greatest hardware from the chipsets to the graphics cards. However, with an increasing number of new Linux users trying out Linux for the first time on their old computers, we have been asked to conduct some benchmarks using popular desktop Linux distributions on older hardware. We have done just that as we try out Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS with an old Intel Northwood system.