Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Gobuntu, a flavour of Ubuntu that adheres to the strictest requirements of Free Software Foundation's "Four Freedoms", now has daily images available. Mark Shuttleworth made the announcement on the Ubuntu developer's mailing list and in his blog, where he put the call out for all developers interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom to join the team and help in identifying places where pieces must be separated from the standard Ubuntu builds.

This page is a guide to using the email client Mutt to send, receive and read email on an Ubuntu computer using a Gmail account as a relay as well as a description of my own path to this goal. If you need to ask why I have put such an effort into this project and did not simply use the web interface of Gmail perhaps this page is not for you. Mutt is an amazing piece of software and it will handsomely repay the effort involved in setting it up with Gmail.

How would you like to buy your PC for $99 and pay $12.95 a month to use it? A new company called Zonbu is hoping a lot of people are willing to take the plunge. They’re offering a cigar-box sized PC that runs Linux and uses only 15 watts of electricity, with the possibility of savings subscribers $10 a month on their electric bill.

Sun Microsystems' on-off relationship with Linux continues with news that the company is looking to emulate the Linux distribution model in an effort to win some mindshare among users for its OpenSolaris software. InfoWorld reports that in an effort to catch the Linux wave, Sun has announced Project Indiana which will see the company releasing its OpenSolaris (OS) operating system as binaries in 2008.

On Friday July 13th, INCITS V1 met via teleconference for 3 hours but failed to reach a 2/3 consensus necessary to recommend an "Approval, with comments" position on Microsoft "Office Open XML" (OOXML) document specification. An important factor in the V1 vote was the large number of members who joined very late in the process. There was a clear pattern in the voting where the long-time V1 members voted for the "Disapproval, with comments" position as well as "Abstention, with comments" while the newer members voted overwhelmingly "Yes, with comments" and against "Abstention with comments." This is not surprising since the new members were largely Microsoft business partners.

[Not about Linux, but likely to be of interest to our readers — Sander]

I remain frustrated by the complete lack of marketing and business sense that many open source companies continue to display. I thought that we were past the whole foolishness of competing in the ghetto amongst ourselves vs. the big proprietary guys with lots of dough but it seems that the argument has just started taking other forms. If you work for an open source company and your team is focused on trying to beat other open source products you are doomed to economic failure.

A while ago I started thinking about how multi-touch and gesture support could look like. Looking around on the web and in the research literature, I found that all the multitouch systems are a hack (I'm talking about software integration here, not the hardware!). Multi-touch support needs to be in the windowing system. Any client-side approach is wrong. (Feel free to disagree with me on that). We don't need gesture support in X. Gestures depend a lot on the context. What we really need is a way to convey events from a touch device to a client application.

On Linux on the desktop, episode 24, we look at a proposal for a high-end Linux laptop with only Free Software. We also look at gNewSense and Gobuntu two Free Software only Linux distributions. A second Open Linux phone goes on sale for developers . A Intel ClassmatePC with Linux review story. Linux coming pre-installed for European small and medium businesses. Acer India introduces a Linux laptop. And IBM promises standards-based patent protection for all.

Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008. The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (SSI) Clustering less of a factor in computing. The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.

Patents are supposed to give inventors an incentive to create things that spur economic growth. For some companies, especially in the pharmaceutical business, patents do just that by allowing them to pull in billions in profits from brand-name, blockbuster drugs. But for most public companies, patents don’t pay off, say a couple of researchers who have crunched the numbers.

The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD porters are pleased to announce that there is now a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD amd64 machine available to the Debian developers. It is kindly hosted by "ETH Zürich, Department of Physics". We would like to thank them for their contribution to the GNU/kFreeBSD development.

I am software developer, and I write software for the .NET Framework / Windows platform. A short while ago I noticed that I was no longer doing development from home, so I didn't really need Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Internet Information Services, etc. etc. Enter Linux.

[Nice story of a Microsoft MVP who tried Vista but went Linux instead. — Sander]

Everyone loves to bash Windows, and for the most part, there’s good reason to. With questionable business practices and a massive amount of bugs found inside the OS, sometimes it’s a wonder that Windows is as popular as it is. With that being said, in any honest debate, you have to give credit where credit is due, and with over 90% of the market share, Microsoft is surely due a little credit.

[The week has just begun and already there's a candidate for next week's FUD of the week. Happy deFUDding! — Sander]

One of the major disadvantages of Linux is that it won’t let you play most Windows games. On the other hand, lots of great free Linux games have been developed over the last couple of years. Here’s a list of some entertaining Linux games I’ve come across so far.

Popular Science runs an online game called PopSci Predictions Exchange (a game where you bet - with virtual money - on the future of science and technology). An IPO I saw today caught my eye: Will the Firefox Web browser gain a market share of 50 percent by January 1, 2009? Interesting - ideal for a quick poll.

Jeroen van der Zijp, the author of Fox Toolkit, gives kerkythea.net an interview. The Fox Toolkit is a platform independent GUI that has become one of the fastest and well structured APIs.

Following up to a bug report against the 2.6.22 kernel, Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds offered some tips on how to debug kernel problems. Andrew first pointed to netconsole.txt for instructions on setting up a netconsole, "when the machine has stalled, see if you can get a task trace with ALT-SYSRQ-t. This will require CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ=y and possibly setting ignore_loglevel on the kernel boot command line."

So I'm having a conversation on the phone with Scrap [another IT Toolbox member — Sander] this morning and he relayed this little story from his adventures as a professor of information security studies at a local school. I'm going to share this story with you and include my usual warning and disclaimer: Put your beverage down. Do not attempt to drink beverage while reading this. I am not responsible for liquids spilled in your keyboard or all over your screen! Scrap tells the story...

If you maintain a portal, ecommerce site, or heavily trafficked Web site, you might appreciate the ability to identify the geographical location of your site visitors. Geolocation information can help you localize content, serve relevant local advertisements, offer a download mirror close to visitors, and detect online fraud. Techniques like whois lookup of IP addresses are of some help, but they don't always find accurate locations. A better approach is a database that maps each IP address to a location -- such as MaxMind's GeoIP.

The latest installment of Pardus, version 2007.2, was officially released on, July 12, 2007. Worried this review has been rushed due to the recency of the release? Do not worry, I had been using the release candidate for a while now and installed the official release before authoring this review. Please note that this review is quite short, therefore I invite any Pardus users to write about their experience in the comments section.