Showing headlines posted by wjl

Those of you who - like me - are more interested in topics like Free and Open Source, and everything that’s related, will find some good pointers here. All of these great sites provide RSS feeds, so if you’re using modern browsers like Iceweasel or Firefox, you can “live-bookmark” them to see the headlines even without visiting the pages.

Great news for the English-speaking IT Crowd: the German makers of c’t magazine, Hannover-based Heise Verlagsgesellschaft just opened their great news portal heise online in the UK as well. Jonathan Bennett, who is editor-in-chief of the new English-speaking sites, wrote a first editorial and greeting message for the readers, headlined “Born at the right time“. And indeed, it seems so. Thanks for providing us with high-quality articles, and I wish you all a good and successful start.

This is aimed at beginners - or at least, at non-developers. Every so often, we forget to mention the “easy” stuff like this, and people get confused, or - like in this case - downright frightened by warnings like these: ... (continues with screenshots & explanations)

Every now and then, someone suggests that Debian GNU/Linux should be more commercial. To further this goal, some create derivative distros like Linspire, Ubuntu, or Xandros, or organizations like the stillborn DCC Alliance.

Debian Developer Benjamin “Mako” Hill, who also runs Planet Debian, announced that the planet now has a search function - thanks to another Debian Developer, Steve Kemp.

Asus obviously announced a shipping date like formerly only Apple did, together with the exact time. It will be this Friday, the 25th of January, at exactly 1700 (or 5pm).

The Everex Cloudbook, which seems like a compelling alternative to the Asus Eee PC, will be available in the US from around 25th of January, according to ZaReason, Inc.

People around the world are cheering up and joy-dancing about the release of KDE4. The Indian EFYtimes for instance said something like: “Goodbye Vista, KDE 4.0 Has Arrived!“ That was both foreseeable and inevitable.

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. Just want the details and downloads? Skip to the bottom. But you might like the story of how we got here.

For me, it started like it did for others as well - I first saw an ad from the German company Raidsonic about their IB-NAS4220-B in some computer magazine. Then I tried it in my favourite search engine, and ended up in a German-speaking forum, where people discussed their experiences with it. Now one of the most active forum members, Thomas Knoefel of the software division of IBM Germany, started a community Wiki around the device - both in English and in German.

The Berlin-based union of the German police issued a press release two days ago, where they said that their “Poliks” system to handle reports isn’t stable and reliable enough. The demand of the police union now is to drop the Microsoft-based software and to reconsider the usage of free and open source systems instead. The saved money could then be used to pay the officers their full christmas gratification.

A step-by-step installation of gOS onto a (virtual) machine, aimed at beginners - with 25 screenshots of the process.

Turns out that people are finally getting it. You can buy a “green” low-power-hungry machine built on a VIA C7 chip from Wal-Mart and ZaReason these days, and both stores report that they already sold all of their first stock.

I reported about James Burgett and his non-profit organization ACCRC already - so why am I repeating it? Simple answer: first, it is a really outstanding thing he’s doing, and second, because of personal ideas and involvement. It should be done everywhere, including here. And I’m willing to do it.

Now it’s finally official: the Asus EeePC (for Easy to Learn, Work, and Play) will be available from December in Germany and Austria for a recommended end user price of €299,- including tax. The good news? Debian developer Ben Armstrong has realized that this is the perfect text editing device for himself and his wife, bought two of them, and is currently porting Debian to it!

Yesterday, thousands of people in Germany gathered in about 40 towns and cities to protest and demonstrate against data retention. I was one of them.

I’ve thought about it for quite a time now. Should I write up a report on Systems? What happened? And was that the usual and to-be-expected stuff? How was it after all? No, I don’t have pictures - I never even thought of bringing a camera. But on Thursday, we had a party, mostly organized by Simon (thanks!), and all in all Systems 2007 was a great experience.

Yesterday, Buffalo Technology and the German-based New Media Net published a press release claiming that from now on, you can buy Buffalo’s WHR-HP-G54 Router with the open source DD-WRT firmware. You’ll get the usual 2-year guarantee here in Germany, which you would lose with installing free software on most vendors’ products yourself.

Today’s big news: Alice will bring Fiber to the building (see Wikipedia’s “Fiber to the premises” entry) to Hamburg, as does Netcologne in, well, Cologne, and M-Net in Munich. Now if they would only understand that it’s not all about triple play (read: TV over Ethernet) for end-customers, but a really distributed and symmetric internet. That would be innovation indeed then. Give us Gigabit to the homes, and we will give back Gigabytes of useful information for the rest of the world.

Hasannudin Saidin, director of the government programmes from IBM Malaysia has written a very good article about open standards, and why they are important. I pointed to and thanked him for his article - and asked him for a job.