Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

SAM Linux Desktop, an Xfce-fronted distribution based on PCLinuxOS, aims to be a complete and modern desktop operating system. Though it has problems that need to be worked out before it will match the competition, it offers an easy install, a 3-D desktop environment, and a flurry of programs to suit your needs.

Vimicro Corporation, a leading fabless semiconductor company that designs advanced mixed-signal multimedia products and solutions, today announced the launch of its most recent open mobile platform, Vinno-III-Linux, based on the Linux operating system, and the addition of two new Vimicro Mobile Multimedia Processors, the VC0848 and VC0878, to the company's product line when attending Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain.

In the time between the previous community news and the last, there have been a number of new and interesting cool features added to Compiz-Fusion. The changes have taken place due to our community and our very own onestone who has added a slew of KDE 4 composite features to Compiz. Some highlights this week are: KDE 4 Window decorator plasma integration, Show Mouse and Area-Based maginification through the mag plugin, Wiimote integration and True blending of wallpapers and cubecaps.

Like most people who do tech work of some sort or another for a living I love my toys. I’d love to have the latest and greatest gee whiz system and if I won the lottery I probably always would. Today’s best full-featured distros all have native 64-bit versions. One of my favorites, Vector Linux was a little late to the table but I’m pleased to report that the current release, Vector Linux 5.9 Standard, has a 64-bit version in beta right now. Good news.

Sick and tired of hearing various "Bill Gates is Satan" jokes, the Prince of Darkness today issued an edict demanding an end to such friviolities. "How dare you compare Bill Gates to me!" Satan snarled during a fake press conference from the Fire & Brimstone Briefing Room broadcast live on CSPAN. "Yes, we all know Windows is an evil piece of cr@p -- and I applaud Bill Gates for his efforts -- but he doesn't even come close to the sheer vileness that I possess!"

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported. Related Stories * First look: Qt 4.4.0 with Phonon and WebKit These efforts are largely made possible by the inherent portability of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit, the underlying framework used by KDE software. Qt is designed for cross-platform portability and even uses native widgets on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Netherlands-based systems integrator Deciso is shipping a 1U Appliance Development Kit (ADK) for routers, firewalls, and other rack-mounted network appliances. Based on PC Engines' ALIX single-board computer (SBC), the 19" ADK comes preinstalled with Voyage Linux.

Every field of knowledge has writing that defines the field. In the open source field one of the key essays is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Steven Raymond, or ESR as he is often known. In the essay Eric S. Raymond compares and contrasts the cathedral as a highly structured, highly organized approach of creating software against the faster adapting less structured bazaar like approach used in open source. In this interview Mr. Raymond talks about a number of the projects he is involved in.

Over the last several years open source has grown in stature and maturity, becoming more worthy in the eyes of corporate buyers and investors. Everyone could point to Red Hat, which dominates the Linux operating system space, as the poster child for open source but few other “pure” open source companies rose up to that level. Sun has gradually been making its vast portfolio of software open source under various licenses, embracing the notion of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). “Volume drives everything, and developers are picking free and open source software,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has said.

Just some quick points worthy of clarification: Moonlight is not Silverlight. Microsoft does not support GNU/Linux as far as Silverlight is concerned. Novell merely plays catch-up trying to implement something which Microsoft refuses to make available for GNU/Linux. There is no promise of full compatibility and future support. Microsoft can (and will) change it any time it wishes to suit other business goals such as O/S competition, application integration, Web services, or advertising.

Personal computer (laptop and desktop) prices may have crashed. The low price tags, however, can be misleading - especially for first-time buyers. Consider this. All low-cost laptops and desktops come pre-loaded with a Linux OS or a DOS version (obsolete on desktops). The installation of a legal Microsoft operating system (OS) and office suite (for word, excel, etc) will increase the price of the desktop or laptop by 20 to 35 per cent.

[Here's my submission for FUD-of-the-Week - Sander]

The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability. Elisa offers all of the basic features one would expect from a media center application, including support for video and audio playback as well as image slide shows.

The Nemo project is a new, experimental file management tool for Linux that provides a unique calendar interface and leverages indexing systems like Beagle and Tracker. Documents, PDFs, images, videos, and compressed archives are displayed as items in a calendar based on the dates that the files were last modified. The calendar view can be customized to show a day, week, month, or year.

Red Bend Software, the market leader in Mobile Software Management and Firmware Over-the-Air (FOTA) updating solutions for mobile devices, and Trolltech®, the leading cross-platform software development company, today announced they have formed a partnership to bring over-the-air software component management to Linux mobile phones that use Trolltech's Qtopia® application platform.

It happens to the best of us. We forget where we put things. Car keys. Flash drives. Yes, sometimes we even forget where certain files are on our computers. We can't really help you with the car keys and flash drives (although we inexplicably find things like that in the refrigerator here), we can help you out with finding missing files.

The extraordinary Richard Stallman, prophet of free software, always makes a deep and lasting impression. With his long brown locks, flowing beard and an unexpected air of innocence, he appears Christ-like, even if a slightly portly one. That's how he struck me when I first encountered this iconic figure five years ago for a magazine interview, and like everything to do with the feisty founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), it turned out to be amusing and unpredictable.

This is an editorial about file conversions. It starts with a story about Free Software Magazine and our struggle with article formats, and continues explaining why the world needs to get rid of Office Open XML, which could create more problems than the Microsoft monopoly itself. What I experienced with Free Software Magazine while converting (which, admittedly, wasn’t really that big a deal) would be nothing compared to what the whole world will have to deal with if OOXML became “the” file format “normally” used to exchange office documents.

This is a look at the state of Linux through the eyes of Google Trends, Google’s highly useful search trend analyzer. Though looking at search statistics can never give a complete picture, this gives an interesting perspective to how things are going for Linux, especially when viewed through the eyes of such a dominant and pervasive search engine as Google.

Today marks ten years since Netscape Communications Corporation announced its intention to release the source code of the then in-development Netscape Communicator 5.0, heralding the beginning of what would become the Mozilla project. At the same time, Netscape stopped charging for Netscape Navigator 4.0 and Netscape Communicator Standard Edition 4.0.

Hard-working KDE Input/Output (KIO) slaves perform much of KDE's functionality. KIO slaves provide consistent access to different resources, such as filesystems, network protocols, and search functions, making them accessible to all KDE applications in a standard way. For example, you can open a remote FTP session and copy, move, rename, or delete files as if they're on your own box, or connect via Secure Shell (SSH) and use remote files as if they were local. Even browsing the Web uses a KIO slave.