Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

It took a little longer than we had expected, but we can finally announce that Sacred Gold has been sent to the production company, and we expect it to be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks. We expected to have had it ready weeks ago, but some last minute issues caused some unexpected delays. But that is all past us now, and the game is in production!

It's been a decade since Linux proponents first argued their OS was ready for mainstream adoption. Yet for all intents and purposes, Linux remains nonexistent on "regular" people's desks. Sure, developers and other tech experts use Linux, but that's about it. So when my colleague Neil McAllister, author of InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog, made the case for desktop Linux, I snorted, "Give me a break! Desktop Linux is nowhere." He challenged me to try it myself. He had a point: It had been a decade since I fired up any desktop Linux distro. So I accepted his challenge. My verdict: Desktop Linux is a great choice for many regular Joes with basic computer needs. And not just on netbooks.

Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t appear to pursue its rights against companies that supported FAT32 in their Linux thumb drives and consumer electronics. Until the TomTom case. At which point Jeremy Allison of Samba says Microsoft had secret cross-licensing deals with all those other guys which violate the GPL. So the question becomes, who should Software Freedom sue?

While Linux is widely used in servers and is growing slowly on the desktop side, the embedded market for Linux is one that continues to have momentum. One such proof point for came this week from the year end financial results for embedded operating system vendor Wind River. For its fiscal 2009 year, which ended on January 31, 2009, Wind River reported $359.8 million in revenue, a 9 percent increase in year over year increase. The companies net income hit $10.8 million, which is a turnaround from the net loss of $2.4 million for the prior year.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced additions to the speaker lineup for its March 21st-22nd LibrePlanet 2009 conference. The conference, to be attended by GNU/Linux users, free software activists, and programmers from around the world, stresses three themes: strengthening global free software activism, addressing the threats posed to free software users by moves toward "cloud computing" and "software as a service," and advancing the projects on the FSF's High Priority Projects list. Jeremy Allison, lead developer of Samba, will be giving a talk entitled, "The Elephant in the Room. Free Software and Microsoft." Evan Prodromou, member of the autonomo.us working group and founder of the identi.ca free software microblogging service, will be sharing lessons learned from his experience bringing free software concepts to web services.

Microsoft's dismissive attitude of VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure, calls to mind Red Hat's stance toward the desktop as a viable Linux commercial offering. Red Hat has said it has yet to figure out how to monetize the Linux desktop as a product, but now seems to be figuring out a way to make the desktop pay while continuing to give it away via the Fedora distribution. With its recent desktop virtualization agreement with Microsoft and other work it's done, Red Hat may soon be offering VDI capabilities.

If there was one thing Linux Format magazine learned from the Readers' Round Table event it organised, it was that us Linux folk like to get out and have a good chat. Over the several hours we were all together, we covered dozens of subjects, and the conversation was lively and opinionated. And that was with only nine of us. Imagine what such a meeting could be like if there were more attendees, more of a schedule and a little better organisation? This is the realm of the Linux User Group – a network of Linux enthusiasts that weave a web of community across the UK, and across almost every country in the world.

With deteriorating global economic conditions making their impact felt in the wireless industry, handset OEMs and mobile network operators are looking to Linux-based operating systems to cut costs and diversify their handset portfolios, reports IMS Research. While Linux-based operating systems have had a presence in the mobile handset market for years, growth has been slow and steady until recently. However, recent announcements from Motorola, Vodafone, HTC, and Huawei, among others, all stating that Linux-based operating systems will figure in to their upcoming handset releases, clearly demonstrate that OEMs and operators are ready to embrace Linux software on a larger scale, according to IMS Research.

Small, efficient devices such as the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC are taking the battle for free software to a different front, bringing Linux to hordes of computer users who don't know or care about Linux. They just want something that works, and when they try it, they like it. This isn't just empty rhetoric: our neighbours across the road at Vista Mansions frequently pop over to ask questions about their Linux-powered Aspire One and borrow a cup of sugar. But the Aspire One's interface is aimed at newbies, and you're not a newbie: you're a Linux guru in the making, so let's see what we can fiddle with…

Recently Eigen 2.0 was released. You might already have heard about Eigen, it is a small but very high performance maths library which has its roots in KDE. Below, the two core developers are interviewed about it.

Xandros is porting its desktop Linux distribution -- noted for use in the pioneering Asus EEE netbook -- to two ARM-based platforms for netbooks and other mobile devices. The ports are part of a larger push to support ARM-based devices, including 3G-enabled MID-like devices and even smartphones, says Xandros. The two Xandros ports are to the Qualcomm Snapdragon and netbook-focused Freescale i.MX515. The ports will include "a variety" of user applications, and will support both keyboard and touchscreen input, says Xandros. Applications are said to include a browser, push-based email, PIM, instant messaging, a photo viewer, a media player, and a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2009

In the weekend of 7 and 8 February, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future. This is our report of the second day covering the talks about Thunderbird 3, Debian release management, Ext4, Syslinux, CalDAV and more. Coverage of the first day can be found in our previous article.

LXer Feature: 11-Feb-2009

This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future.

Here is the blow-by-blow of the first day with talks about Mozilla's future, the role of Debian, two OSI talks, Reverse engineering and much, much more.

The European Commission (EC) has granted Mozilla, the open-source collaboration behind the Firefox Web browser, the right to join its antitrust case against Microsoft, a spokesman said Monday. The Commission, Europe's top antitrust authority, charged Microsoft last month with distorting competition in the market for Web browsers by bundling in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system. If the charges stick, then Microsoft could be forced to change the way it distributes IE, as well as pay a fine for monopoly abuse.

Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include a release update, Debian Summer of Code 08: Where are they now? Dedicating Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" to Thiemo "ths" Seufer, Open Source study conducted by Heise Open and much more.

The One Laptop Per Child project has quietly shut the door on small-scale OLPC deployments, preferring to focus on large-scale installations only. The move is a serious blow to many already-existing projects in countries such as South Africa which were built around the programme in order to get OLPCs into schools.

Ubuntu should not be considered merely the desktop Linux distribution of choice anymore if a new survey conducted by Canonical and open-source analyst firm RedMonk is an indicator. The majority of nearly 7,000 businesses surveyed that are using Ubuntu Linux said they use it for a range of mission-critical workloads that are typically run on servers, such as proxy/caching, routing, mail security, clustering, virtualization, data backup and databases.

Hewlet Packard has released a custom interface for Ubuntu running on netbooks. DownloadSquad (DS) reports that the interface was designed for HP’s Mini 1000 Mi Edition netbook and is built on an Ubuntu 8.04 base.

Flying the South African open source flag at this year's IndiaSoft 2009 show as well as at Germany's CeBIT show will be Durban-based OSS company Thusa. Thusa managing director Warwick Chapman will be speaking to the Indian software development community at IndiaSoft about the opportunities available to them on the continent of Africa and in South Africa especially.

Monty Widenius, the main author of the original MySQL database and a founder of the MySQL AB company, has finally left Sun Microsystems following a falling out with Sun over the status of MySQL 5.1. We reported last year that Widenius was unhappy with the release of MySQL and had told Sun that he was planning to leave the company. Now he has finally announced on his blog that he has done that and has established a new business, called Monty Program Ab.