Showing headlines posted by sakgarg

When Microsoft announced it was planning to offer lightweight, web-based versions of some of its Office components, there was some speculation that maybe it could be used with alternate browsers. It seemed Firefox would be a likely candidate beyond IE, and some ventured to wonder about Safari.

The GNOME Foundation executive director, Stormy Peters, recently wrote a bit about why the focus on "the KDE versus GNOME" debate is not the real issue. Many commenters on her post agree (while others actively demonstrate) that it is counterproductive.

For years, there has been one uploader option listed on Flickr that is Linux compatible. jUploadr continues to be a great tool (and though updates aren't frequent, it handles basic Flickr uploading tasks well). Don't let the fact that it's the only Linux uploader listed on Flickr's site make you believe it's the only option, or that Linux targeted uploaders are one trick ponies.

Angela Byron is one of the lead developers and a community manager for the open source content management system Drupal, which OStatic is based on (along with sites such as The Onion and Fast Company). Few people have more influence on and knowledge of Drupal than she does, including working directly with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. We caught up with Angie and she weighed in on the future for Drupal, and what the open source movement needs.

Slowly but surely, open source media center applications have evolved into rich applications that anyone can get a lot of enjoyment out of. There are now many players in this space, and the applications show a lot of range. In this post, you'll find introductions to three of the most interesting projects out there, including a media center that can transform and energize a home theater PC, an open source way to get TiVo-like DVR functions, and an innovative mashup of social networking features and slick media center capabilities. Any of these can make for a great weekend project.

Black Duck Software, which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, just had a phenomenal third quarter, with quarterly bookings for its services up 62 percent. There were some other strong metrics for the company as well. This company has a shrewd approach toward the growing open source arena, participating in growth as many disparate kinds of projects are adopted, and the need for open source auditing rises. Here's what they've done right, and why more success may lie ahead.

If you work with lots of files at a time, work with large files frequently, need a simple way to zip and unzip file archives, or just need a good file and archiving management tool when on-the-go, check out PeaZip.

Though I'm not as guilty of chronically changing content management/blogging software as I am of switching up Linux distributions, I've used more than a few in my day. I began using WordPress in its 1.x days, and moved through Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla in a quest to see what really worked best for my situation.

Many people think you can tell a lot about a person's subconscious thought by measuring various bodily functions including heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension (think polygraph machines). Whether you believe that biofeedback technology is cutting edge, interesting to ponder, or just a lot of hooey, there are a few biofeedback apps for Linux users who want to explore the concept.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.

Amazon will have XO laptops for sale on Monday, November 17th. The XO laptops at Amazon are sold in the same manner as they were initially at the OLPC site, with a $400 donation securing a laptop for the customer, and a laptop for a child in a developing country. This donation (or at least the portion used to purchase the laptop for the child) is tax deductible.

Today Fixstars Corporation announced it has acquired Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux. Fixstars has created a new subsidiary to manage the Terra Soft employees, products, and offices. Fixstars provides application development and optimization tools for Cell Broadband Engine multi-core processors. This makes the acquisition of Terra Soft fitting from the historical standpoint, and promising for Yellow Dog's future.

One of the main complaints about the open source OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications is that the applications are slow compared to the comparable Microsoft Office apps. If you've run into this problem, and if you use OpenOffice but occasionally run into compatibility problems in sharing files with the Microsoft Office applications, try Go-oo. Even if you don't use Go-oo all of the time, it is good to use in conjunction with OpenOffice for several reasons. Here they are.

Last month, the open source community was buzzing over a report released by the Linux Foundation that placed the value of the Linux ecosystem at around $25 billion. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, we caught up with Amanda McPherson, the foundation's VP of marketing & developer programs, to get her thoughts on the study, what the results mean for the community, and what the take-away message ought to be.

Proprietary virtualization player VMWare has just announced its VMWare Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) designed to bring virtualization to mobile phones. It's due to ship in 2009, and is a lightweight software layer that can run even on memory-constrained phones. For several reasons, this virtualization platform could have an impact on mobile phones running open source operating systems, and on application development for mobile open source operating systems.

Over on TechRepublic, Jack Wallen shares what he feels was KDE's major transgression with KDE 4: Using Dolphin in lieu of Konqueror for file management. KDE has gotten its share of criticism for its delivery and handling of the 4.0 version since the initial release last January. The new desktop rolled out massive changes -- some good, some incomplete, and some that were just puzzling. The past eleven months have seen the KDE project build on the good and make impressive progress on the incomplete. As Wallen points out, however, there are still some aspects that people find puzzling.

I've been doing some thinking since writing about kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman's statement that Linux supports more devices than any other operating system. Readers made some good comments, and after some time spent wrestling with my (yes, supported) webcam, I can venture an additional suggestion as to why it doesn't always seem that way, beyond Kroah-Hartman's theory of a non-supported device becoming "personal."

Recently, there's been a lot of noise regarding Linux netbooks -- from how well the devices have sold to the return rates. Sam mentioned in a post that reasonable expectations need to be set for netbooks. I agree with Sam on this point (which applies to more than netbooks, when it's fully considered). These machines are designed for basic tasks, not to serve as a complete office substitute when traveling.

Most developers are at least passingly familiar with the notion of code review - that having source code read over by another developer, or a group, is a good way to catch things that the original author missed. While code review started out as a physical meeting process, there's been increasing interest in supporting distributed code reviews via the web.

Over at Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner points out an intriguing bit of information spotted at Groklaw indicating that SCO appears to be taking some steps toward reincorporating the Caldera International name. Insert copious amounts of wild speculation here.