Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Linux Journal's Mitch Frazier explains how you can use the "It's All Text" Firefox plugin to use your favourite text editor to edit textareas, such as blog comments.

Last year Intel had launched the GMA X4500HD integrated graphics processor as a nice upgrade to their G3x series. Our Linux results found these chipsets with Intel integrated graphics to perform better than past Intel IGPs, but still was limited in what games and tests could run on the G43/45 hardware with the open-source Intel Linux driver stack. Now, however, Intel is preparing to refresh their IGP line-up.

There is an interesting disinformation campaign being waged against ODF. You won't see this FUD splattered across the front pages of blogs or press releases. It is the kind of stuff that is spread by email and whispers, and you or I rarely will see it. But occasionally some of this does cross my desk, and I'd like to share with you some recent examples.

Intel on Tuesday gave the first preview of its next-generation Atom chip, with a more integrated design intended to improve performance and energy efficiency. The company also launched the beta of version 2.0 of the Linux-based Moblin netbook platform, with a new interface. The upcoming Atom chip, code-named 'Pineview', incorporates the memory controller and graphics chip onto a the same silicon as the processor, a more efficient design that should lower costs for system builders, lower energy consumption and improve performance, Intel said.

Hacker groups have reported that man-in-the-middle attacks can be used to strip away the benefits of SSL security when transacting online. However, says the inventor of SSL, these are a browser problem and, moreso, they're not so black and white.

This one is strictly for the hardcore fan - for the very first time, it says here, you have the chance to purchase a giant poster showing the history and development of Unix. That's right - this 40 foot poster includes over 1,000 versions of 150 different types of Unix. Backed with fractal art by Alan Tenant, the poster is based on Eric Levenez's diagram of the heavy duty operating system.

The Netherlands in Open Connection and OpenDoc Society are happy to announce the immediate availability of the beta of Officeshots.org, a free webservice that allows users to compare the output quality of office applications. The Officeshots project entails both an open source service framework, and a free online service based on this framework. The service is now in closed beta, exclusively available to members of the international OpenDoc Society on http://www.officeshots.org. If you wish to join the beta program you can become a member or sponsor of the OpenDoc Society. Officeshots will be put to the test significantly in the first ODF Plugfest that will be held June 15/16th 2009 in The Royal Library in The Hague.

Zeroshell Linux is a compact, fully-featured distribution for providing a wide range of secure network services. Eric Geier wraps up this excellent series with building a captive wireless portal, and using Zeroshell as an Internet gateway and LAN router.

Besides Intel, VIA, and ATI/AMD cooperating with X.Org and Linux developers by providing source code and documentation to help with the enablement of their hardware under Linux, another major company has come to the open-source table. No, sadly it is not NVIDIA...

Why does the EU Parliament stick with Office and other Microsoft software ? An Italian EU deputy, Marco Cappato, had the guts to ask. The reply was they were basing on a study made in 2005. He asked to them to make it public, but his request was refused. Nobody believed he could get the EU to make it public. An well known Italian IT website even called that ‘a miracle‘. I’m going no further, I’ll just translate Cappato’s post and attach here the document for the world to see. Up to you to judge how good it is. (not that is that the document is still super-secret, but it has been disclosed very recently and I guess you won’t have many other chances to read it otherwise)

[In the actual study, Gartner claims there are no mature Linux deployments in Europe(!) -- Sander]

Back in March we witnessed the release of Qt 4.5 which was also met by an announcement that Qt Extended was to be discontinued and that was just weeks after the announcement came down that Qt Jambi would be discontinued. There have certainly been many changes since Nokia bought out Trolltech and then renamed it to Qt Software...

Despite being overshadowed by the popularity of Ubuntu in recent years, SimplyMepis is still one of the most friendly desktop distributions in the Linux landscape. Installation is easy, as most Linuxes are these days, but that's only the first step. Susan Linton reports on how SimplyMepis performs over the long run.

In Burning the Ships, an open letter from then-20-year-old Bill Gates, written in 1976, is cited. In that letter, Gates says To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software. He is talking about computer software in what was then a burgeoning computer industry, run mainly as a hobby. He goes on to say that the prevailing assumption that hardware must be paid for but software is something to share is not a model for the successful creation of quality hardware. As the Open Source community has proven, his statements are not quite validated, but I am not opposed to developers making money for their code. At the beginning of this year, several people at Linux Journal and elsewhere, took a pledge to be DRM free.

Market share, market share, what's Linux's true market share? That, in essence, has been the question du jour on the Linux blogs in recent days. It all started when NetApplications' Hitslink.com released some statistics for April indicating that Linux just passed 1 percent for the first time. Around the same time, however, W3Counter published figures for the same month indicating that it had just passed 2 percent. Many FOSS aficionados, meanwhile, argue that it could be 6 percent or higher. The result? You guesstimated it: nothing short of chaos and confusion.

Last month the plans for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" were outlined with this next major release of our Linux (and Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD too) benchmarking software set to introduce many new features for the testing core, Phoromatic for providing remote benchmarking support, a performance and benchmarking oriented Linux distribution, and many other advancements. Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will not be released until late July or early August, but the first alpha release has been made available this afternoon.

An element of Hadopi which hasn't received much or enough attention as yet, is a section which specifies steps that can be taken by computer users to ensure that they will not be found liable under the new regime. What the law intends is to set up a meeting between security software vendors, antipiracy organizations and ISPs to decide what software you need to install on your machine, so that they can be sure that you behave yourself. If you don't fancy installing their device, then you'll just have to swallow any liability consequent to someone else using your machine or accessing your connection.

[Not really FOSS related, but still of importance I think. -- Sander]

The European Commission on Wednesday will fine the world's biggest computer-chip maker, Intel Corp., for breaking European antitrust rules, people familiar with the matter said Friday.... Intel's trouble with the commission dates from 2000, when chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., filed a complaint saying Intel was blocking its access to the market.

Intel and Nokia have announced a joint partnership today to develop oFono, an open-source telephony solution. The oFono software stack is GPLv2 licensed and includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by other telephony applications and a low-level API for communicating with cellular modems and other devices.

More information (along with source-code and documentation) on this new Intel open-source project can be found at oFono.org...

Big, purple, and old, the Yahoo! bus parked outside this weekend's Open Hack Day venue in London looked like a survivor from a bygone era. So too, Yahoo!? Yahoo! remains a web giant, the second most visited web destination after Google, according to both comScore and Alexa, and second only to Google in search engine share. On the other hand, in search, Yahoo! comes second by a long way, according to Nielsen online (warning: PDF) and Net Applications. Yahoo! also struggles for attention. It might be famous for rebuffing Microsoft's proposed purchase last year, but when it comes to trendy topics like cloud computing, or the social web, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are talked about more. So why should anybody, especially developers, care about Yahoo!?

Nokia has reduced the barriers to contributing code to the Qt cross-platform framework. The Nokia-owned Qt Software has created a public repository for outsiders to contribute and monitor code and eliminated the need for filling in a faxed copyright assessment of code and manual checking by Qt Software. Instead, contributors will now be asked to grant Qt Software a non-exclusive right to re-use code as a part of Qt, the first time they submit code for inclusion.