Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

And it came to pass. Asus saw the EeePC and it was good; it’s even better with a 9-inch display. Asus has officially named the 9-inch EeePC the EeePC 900 and has released some detailed specs about the low-cost laptop. The EeePC 900 will be available with either Windows XP or Xandros Linux. Instead of using flash memory, Asus will be using SSD (solid state drives) for storage this time. The Windows XP equipped model will ship with an 8GB drive with the Linux models having either 12GB or 20GB capacities.

I'm going to take a pause from my usual blog topics and discuss something very dear to everyone's heart, wifi. This weekend I stopped by wal-mart to look around. My wife and I have been wanting to move the computer upstairs for some time but have been prevented by the need to be physically connected to the router. While I was at wal-mart I saw a 802.11n wireless PCI network card made by Linksys. I bought the card, went home, installed it and fired up Ubuntu 7.04. iwconfig showed nothing. but lspci showed something that would send me into shock "02:07.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43XG (rev 01)". Yes, the infamous broadcom chip.

So you’ve got an idea for a great app and you’re thinking of making your own open source project? Here are some items to consider and some sites that will help you on your journey. We’ll also see how some well-known open source teams did it.

At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use open standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process.

Software developer Unison has launched what it claims is the world's first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux. Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 81 for the weeks March 2nd - March 8th, 2008. In this issue we cover the release of Hardy Alpha 6, interesting Brainstorm stats, interview with Server developer Mathias Gug, and, as always, much, much more!

$100 for a laptop for a child in the poorest countries is still too much for Nicholas Negroponte. The founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and founder and current chairman. of the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) wants to give portable computers to all the children in developing countries. If possible, free of charge, he said to German Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. "$100 is prohibitive. Our computers should and will be zero dollar laptops. There are many ways of achieving this, and we will endeavour to do just that."

I wish I knew how to fix it but I don’t. What I do know however is that the ISO/IEC process is severally broken in that it is riddled with room for game play. I guess ISO/IEC managed to get away with it for a long time but things have changed now that Microsoft has shown how to use every loophole in the process to get to its end. Hopefully, justice will prevail and OOXML will rightly get voted down at the end of the month but the process shouldn’t have allowed to go that far into this sad farce in the first place.

The European Union' 899-million-euro antitrust fine is the result of a continuous effort by the European Commission dating back to 2000. Carlo Piana, a partner at the Milan law firm Studio Legale Tamos Piana & Partners, represented the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba project in the case.

As hardware gets smaller and cheaper, we can expect to see Linux in more and more unexpected places. Why is this, and how does this benefit open-source developers?

Free software Flash replacement, Gnash, has just released a beta version. Gnash, for those not in the know, is a GPL-licensed SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes. with growing support for SWF v8 and v9.

I recently returned from a grueling three-week stay in Peru, where I worked with the serious Ministry of Education team entrusted with the country’s 260-thousand laptop OLPC implementation. I wanted to know what the laptops had done for the kids. I told them I’m not a reporter, I don’t answer to the Ministry, and — an important disclaimer for an overpoliticized country like Peru — I don’t pander to bullshit politics. I wanted to hear if they thought the laptops were helping. After looking at me blankly for a good half-minute, Mr. Navarro shot back with “evidentemente”, “obviously”, and palpably left off “you idiot” from the end of the sentence. I appreciated the small courtesy and asked a more specific question: what changed in the 8 months since the laptops arrived?

It seems that the £200 ultraportable Asus Eee PC can do no wrong. The size of a paperback, weighing less than a kilogram, with built-in Wi-Fi and using Flash memory instead of a hard drive for storage, the Eee PC has been winning positive comments not just from hyperventilating hardware reviewers, but also from ordinary people who have actually bought it. The combination of good functionality and out-of-the box ease of use with a price so low that it's almost at the impulse-buy level could prove problematic for Microsoft. Until now, there has been no obvious advantage for the average user in choosing GNU/Linux over Windows on the desktop, and plenty of disadvantages.

Dear Windows Professional Service Pack 2: I didn't want to tell you this in person, because I thought it might be too complicated, and might take too long. After all, we've been together for a long time, almost five years and running now. I know, i know. I know you so well; your control panel, your installation procedures, even when you get mad and go all blue screen on me; what can I say, you kinda grew on me. But to be honest, things have been going downhill for a long time now.

Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days. Looks like more and more software companies and developers have seen the barriers of closed-source programs and have now fully realized the significance of freedom. Here are some of the most notable software packages which were published under a proprietary software license but later released as free and open source software.

Software developer Unison has launched what it claimed is the world's first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux. Advertisement Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, email and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

I cannot tell the details of the meeting, but I can tell a conversation we’ve had (myself and another Brazilian delegate) with a person, at the beginning of the lunch break on Friday. I will disclose this conversation because the person has identified himself as a member of the ECMA, a member of a national delegation present at the BRM but didn’t said that he was speaking on behalf of anyone (the protocol used there), so I understand that this was a conversation that is not covered by the scandalous “Law of Silence” imposed on us all.

IDC is reporting that Windows server growth hit 6.9 percent in Q4 2007, bringing it to 36.6 percent market share. Linux trounced Windows' growth at 11.6 percent to hit 12.7 percent market share. Microsoft owns the market, but Linux owns the future. Therein lies the rub of the tale behind much of Microsoft's fear and loathing of open source.

In a 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at “like for like” software replacement using existing networks and computers. Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps.

Joining the array of low cost Linux offerings such as the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook , Elonux announced the Elonux One a sub 200 dollar Linux laptop targeted to go on sale in the UK starting in June. We saw similar announcements in the last couple weeks from Acer, who stated that “”Between the second and third quarters, we will have products that address ultra mobility and low-cost segments.” In addition Dell stated that it will “introduce more low-cost notebooks in Asia.” which will augment its Vostro 1000 notebook for sale in China which runs Red Flag Linux. This is a key direction for the industry as it fills out a market segment not previously addressed, particularly at this price point in the notebook computing world.