Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

I've been playing with one of many new systems that are hitting the market which allow the user to quickly boot the machine and go directly to a small version of Linux rather than wait to load Windows. If people are using Linux like this routinely, how long will it be before they can be convinced that Linux is just as good as Windows? And it's free.

We took a look this week at the first official alpha release of the Maemo 5 SDK, which introduced the platform's new user interface framework and other components. Maemo 5, which is codenamed Fremantle, will be used on the next generation Nokia Internet Tablet. Fremantle will offer richer graphics capabilities than previous versions of the platform and will support OpenGL ES. This is opening the door for a lot of creativity and has made it possible to port a whole new class of applications that previously did not fit within the scope of the platform's capabilities. Developers have already started to experiment with the SDK and some of the results are quite impressive.

The KOffice developers have released their seventh beta for KOffice 2.0. This release may be the last of the many betas. A decision on whether there will be another beta or if the next version will be the first Release Candidates will be made next week. The list of changes is longer than ever. For this release we have concentrated on crashes, data loss bugs and ODF saving and loading. Take a look at the full announcement to find out more, or look at the changelog for the details.

Google's decision to launch an open-source mobile platform may be key to Android phone sales overtaking the iPhone's by 2012, according to estimates by Informa. Researcher Gavin Byrne predicts that phones like the T-Mobile G1 will eventually outrun Apple as a new focus on software over hardware will reportedly favor Android's open development system versus closed systems like Apple's. Other open-source platforms like LiMo and the eventual Symbian update should also benefit, Byrne says.

Every week I read a new blog post giving 10 – 25 or even 100 reasons you should switch to Linux right now. I say bah humbug to them. If you need someone to give you 100 reasons to switch your current OS of choice, you are better of sticking with it. As someone who is literally forced to use windows for work-related task, use a Mac just because I have money to blow and runs an obscure Linux distro to prove my point about my anti conformist views; I know a thing or two about why you shouldn’t switch to Linux.

Every so often I take a stab at Linux, to see exactly what I like and do not like about the OS. Many of its problems, for me, stem from its inability to run on my overloaded hardware, or the occasional driver that makes the OS impossible to use without hand-tweaking something or other. That said, I seriously like the Ubuntu 8.10 implementation and will now install it permanently on my latest machines. It's a winner.

The Linux Foundation’s user-generated “We’re Linux” video contest enters its final week today. Final submissions for the contest that began in January are due this Sunday, March 15 at midnight ET. Contest winner(s) will be revealed at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit on April 8, 2009, in San Francisco. More than 35 videos have been submitted so far for the contest that seeks to find the best user-generated videos that demonstrate what Linux means to those who use it and inspire others to try it. The winner of the contest will receive a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009.

The Debian distribution of Linux is one of the most well established of the Linux distributions and is used as the basis of several other more recent projects, perhaps the most famous of which is of course the Ubuntu family of distributions. Our German language associate site, heise Open recently spoke to Steve McIntyre, (at the time of this interview) the current Debian Project Leader about the present state of the Debian project and and about his hopes for its future.

Everywhere we turn these days, we see evidence of open source developers trading their time and hard work for little more than the hope of benefiting the ever-growing open source community. While there are many companies world-wide enjoying the benefits of a number of Linux and open source products, there are instances where creating sustainable employment for these talented individuals is problematic at best. Then I came across the The Development Cloud. This is a company that has found it mutually beneficial to share fifty percent of its profit – which is derived from closed source software – to reward developers of associated open source software projects. (See details here.) I think this is fantastic.

[A Matt Hartley piece that makes sense. I'm as flabbergasted as you are. - Sander]

Microsoft has brought a lawsuit against car navigation system manufacturer TomTom. The products in question incorporate Linux, and at least one of the seven patents involved concerns a Linux kernel implementation rather than TomTom's own software. Is this Microsoft's first direct salvo against Linux? There are other striking features of this suit: the technologies claimed in the 8 patents involved are so old and obvious that it's fair to say they have a high "Duh!" factor. There's an anti-trust angle to this suit that could blow up in Microsoft's face. And there's a high probability that some or all of the patents involved are invalid, due to recent court decisions. Let's take a look at what is happening.

OSPERT (Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications) is now seeking papers for its fifth annual workshop. OSPERT'09 is co-located with the Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems's ECRTS'09 academic real-time conference. This move, along with the naming of Red Hat Linux kernel hacker Peter Zijlstra as OSPERT co-chair, is billed as an attempt better integrate the academic real-time community with the Linux real-time embedded community.

The iPod may have won the popularity war for PMPs in many markets, but that hasn’t stopped a healthy ecosystem of unknown-brand media players that are usually cheap and, in varying degrees, cheerful. Such players just got a little more useful, with a hack to run Linux on PMPs using the common Ingenic JZ4732 chipset, such as the Onda VX747.

Recently I had a chat with another member of the Linux media about what Linux really needs to do in order to finally reach the masses. It was a long discussion that meandered in and out of various topics. But ultimately one topic won out over all others as being the be-all, end-all means for Linux to gain large scale support in both the end user and enterprise crowds. The conclusion? The Desktop. Why the desktop? Linux has already conquered the server market. All it needs to do for that portion of its audience is to continue to scale upwards and keep creating incredible, usable servers. What Linux has failed to do yet is to show the world exactly what a desktop can do for the user.

We'll come right out and say this – Linux breaks. There, we've got that off our chests. No matter how much we might like our chosen distro, there is no denying that things can go wrong, or that it might not even be right in the first place. Here's our guide to dealing with some of the most common problems, and some advice on how to deal with new disasters. The types of difficulties most often seen can be split into a number of broad categories: booting, hardware and drivers, misbehaving software and networking are among the most popular topics for discussion. We can't show you solutions for every problem that might arise, but we can show some of the common issues people face and, more importantly, show you how to go about identifying a problem.

Rather than throw old hardware away because it can't cope with Vista's bloat, we show you how to put it to good use - read on to learn how to transform your old computer into a mail server, a fileserver, a web server, a spam blocker, a PC for kids and more!

Compiz may be the prime suite of effects on the desktop, but it can’t go too far beyond decorating the windows themselves. What if you could give GTK+ widgets effects themselves? Depending on your theme, you may be able to.

The SCO Group of Lindon has filed an appeal reasserting its ownership of the copyright of Unix computer operating system software, a move officers believe will get it back on track to pursue claims against IBM in a case that has riled the open source software community. In a brief posted Friday by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, the software company seeks to overturn rulings by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball in Utah. Last year, Kimball held that Novell retained certain copyrights to the Unix system after it was sold in 1995 to a California company and that was subsequently purchased by The SCO Group. Left standing, that decision could prove fatal to SCO's claim against IBM over code in the popular Linux system.

The following is a translation of an interesting post by Kumail on Ubuntu Life. Ubuntu is a great operating system, but a small modification and adding here and there will make the ubuntu desktop an enjoyable experience, such as animated waalpapers and a visual folder hierarchy.

We are proud to announce the 6th major version of Zenwalk GNU/Linux. This release comes with the biggest changelog in the history of the project to offer many new features and optimizations. As usual, our challenge was to provide latest versions of the most modern applications as well as kernel, while keeping the usual level of simplicity and performance that makes Zenwalk special in the GNU/Linux world. We spent the 2 last month polishing the desktop around the new XFCE 4.6, making sure that this brand new version is well integrated into Zenwalk 6.0. We also replaced Gnome Office with our lightweight and optimized version of Openoffice 3.0.1, splited in 2 packages : the base package provides Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw ; the “extra” package (available via Netpkg) provides Math, Darabase and Java support.

MontaVista has announced Meld, a new community for developers of embedded Linux devices. Meld provides a forum for developers of all skill levels to connect and share information, ideas, and software around embedded Linux designs, accelerating their development efforts and delivery of commercial products. Developing embedded Linux systems is a complex process. Meld addresses these challenges by bringing embedded Linux developers together in an online community.