Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

No, it’s not the “Top 100,” nor does this list contain the “only” 100 open source downloads you should consider – there’s a big ocean out there, so please keep swimming.

The Software Freedom Law Center's first Annual Legal Summit for Software Freedom October 12 includes a closed private meeting in the morning for key open source attorneys and a series of educational lectures in the afternoon that will be open to other interested lawyers as well as the general public.

The single biggest argument against a smooth migration to one of the popular desktop Linux distributions is the belief that key applications are not available on the Linux platform. However there are a multitude of fantastic open source alternatives that are easy to install and free to use.

Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

KDE's new technical documentation library, TechBase, hit an important milestone today when it served up its one millionth page. In step with the KDE 4.0 development cycle, TechBase is rapidly maturing into a central hub for high-level technical information related to KDE and the Free software desktop.

Two new documentation directories were merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 mainline kernel, containing translations of the HOWTO and stable_api_nonsense.txt documents in Japanese and Chinese. Greg KH explained, "here are some patches that add some translations of some procedural documentation files to the Documentation/ tree." Regarding some of the concerns that were expressed with merging translated documentation into the mainline kernel tarball, Greg noted, "these files change _very_ slowly over time, and are quite easy to keep up to date by the translators."

Playing around with radio-frequency transmission and reception used to be restricted to those of us with hardware skills. That has been changing for some years, though, as processors get faster and software techniques advance; now, many radio transmitters and receivers are built with simple (but flexible) hardware. The hard work of generating the signal to be transmitted is done in software. Some wireless network adapters work that way now, as do a number of other devices. There is a well-advanced project - GNU Radio - which enables experimenters to do amazing things with software defined radio (SDR) systems.

The alpha 1 development release of Damn Small Linux (DSL) 4.0, which hit the Net on Tuesday, is "a very different version" that includes a number of features requested by users on the DSL forums.

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didn't matter.

In response to another merge request, Andrew Morton retorted, "argh. I have a backlog of maybe 300 patches here which I am cheerfully ignoring while concentrating on preventing 2.6.23 from being less of a disaster than it has already been." He noted that he was not planning to merge any new code into his -mm tree for 2.6.23 inclusion, "the door for new 2.6.23 material shut two weeks ago. Here, at least."

In a recent interview with Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, the executive was asked about the future of Windows. In response, Turner had this to say: "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office."

LXer Feature: 19-Jul-2007

A few days ago Rob Enderle proclaimed that Open Source and Linux are losing momentum, without any evidence to back this up and despite that IDC and Gartner are saying the exact opposite. The FOSS community responded with rebuttals after which Rob posted a follow-up in which he makes some particularly nasty accusations. However, trying to follow Rob's logic in the original article quickly showed that it was not about a loss in momentum at all. That was just a framework on which to hang a different tale, one that gives us some insight in how he sees the world of software development.

Supergamer is a unique Linux distribution whose primary focus is on fun -- specifically, gaming. Supergamer VL, now based on VectorLinux, is all new, with additional games, new code base, and new look and feel. Let the games begin.

In the world of Linux, many things have changed in the last decade. The operating system itself has grown up, and is no longer an"upstart." But one mainstay of the Linux community, the Linux user group (LUG), appears to be on the decline in some areas. Attendance is down, LUG presidents say, and some groups have stopped meeting. Does this mean we don't need LUGs anymore?

It's a bit later than Linspire had planned, but the company's CEO Kevin Carmony told DesktopLinux that the new commercial version of its Linux distribution, Linspire 6.0, along with the free version, Freespire 2.0, and its revised CNR (click-and-run) software update system, should be out before Augus

A recently merged KVM patchset included support for guest SMP, various performance improvements, and suspend/resume fixes. KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, "a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions".

Updating the pluggable scheduler patches for the 2.6.22 kernel, Peter Williams noted, "probably the last one now that CFS is in the main line". CFS author Ingo Molnar asked, "why is CFS in mainline a problem? The CFS merge should make the life of development/test patches like plugsched conceptually easier." Peter explained, "it means a major rewrite of the plugsched interface and I'm not sure that it's worth it (if CFS works well). However, note that I did say probably not definitely :-). I'll play with it and see what happens."

OK, Desktop Linux heads, I'm a confessed newbie trying to switch to Linux from XP. My simplyMEPIS install from an ISO went well, but now, on day two, my attempts to install the just-released Firefox update have failed.

Thanks to everyone who commented on The Dubious Benefits of Porting F/OSS to Windows. There are a lot of good points in the comments. For example, Simon Hibbs responded that more users of a piece of software increased the value of that software. This is important for programs that follow open standards, such as Mozilla Firefox, or OpenOffice.org and Abiword. In one sense, I see the value of open standards and unfettered access to data as more important than the four software freedoms. If I had to choose one over the other, I’d choose open standards… but I think that’s a false dilemma.

A U.S. vote on whether or not to support the application for ISO approval failed to pass.