LXer Weekly Roundup for 30-Dec-2007

LXer Feature: 30-Dec-2007 In this week's LXer Roundup we have several OLPC articles, Carla Schroder gives a tutorial on building your own Linux music studio, Steven Rosenberg pits Debian Etch with Xfce and Damn Small Linux with JWM/Fluxbox against each other, SCO gets delisted, Why there's more to Linux than Ubuntu, Linus talks about Linux and a great review of the Chumby by our very own Sander Marechal.

In this week's LXer Roundup we have several OLPC articles, Carla Schroder gives a tutorial on building your own Linux music studio, Steven Rosenberg pits Debian Etch with Xfce and Damn Small Linux with JWM/Fluxbox against each other, SCO gets delisted, Why there's more to Linux than Ubuntu, Linus talks about Linux and a great review of the Chumby by our very own Sander Marechal.

SCALE is Full: The Southern California Linux Expo has filled all available speaker slots.

Top 40+ GIMP plugins: GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular. Much like Firefox, GIMP’s strength lies in its plugins, which are developed by the open-source toting community. Since the users themselves develop them, they know all the needs and conceive a plugin for everything.

Kubuntu LTS: The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.

Laptop project enlivens Peruvian hamlet: Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Tutorial: Building A Linux Music Studio: This is a great time to be your own recording and sound engineer. There are all kinds of great digital recording gear, from tiny portable recorders to multi-channel mixer-recorders with CD burners, and Linux has a wealth of good-quality audio recording and editing programs.

Debian Etch with Xfce vs. Damn Small Linux with JWM/Fluxbox: I've had Debian Etch with the Xfce desktop on the $15 Laptop for a couple of weeks. It took up a lot less space than Slackware 12 with Xfce (and NOT KDE), so I left Debian on the computer, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 64 MB of RAM. I had a trick to get the ALSA sound working in Damn Small Linux, but it wouldn't work in Debian. I don't have the soundcore module installed, and that's the next step in getting the sound working. I also found out that doing a Google Docs session in Debian on this box is ... frustrating. The screen moves way too slow. So I went in a different direction. I popped in the Damn Small Linux 4.0 CD (I know they're up to 4.2, but I haven't downloaded and burned the new ISO yet ... I plan to soon).

SCO Delisted as of Today: All those Mesirow and legal hours working on the SEC delisting did not pay off. SCO announces today that Nasdaq has sent them a letter. SCO will be delisted as of December 27. They found out on the 21st, it seems, but they tell us today. Here's the press release, where they once again describe themselves as "a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobile services".

People Who’ve Never Run Linux Shouldn’t Write About Linux: The title of this post occurred to me when I read the post Our Linux Dream. Somehow, even though people get the idea that specialized fields require some experience in that field before you can say anything intelligent about it, people hear the word “Linux” for the first time, Google it long enough to see Tux the penguin, and go “OK, I’m qualified now.” To go through that list of Linux-dream items one by one…

There's more to Linux than Ubuntu: I've told a million times by now, that I am a Linux person. I like the operating system, the tools, the applications, the works. I like the process. I like the community. I like the people. And all these positive feelings are not distribution-specific, or "KDE vs. Gnome" or "Is Amarok the best media player?" kind - its genuine people-to-people kind of a thing, and the love for the technology. Recently I got to read more and more stories about Linux in general (at least that what it was insinuated by the name of the article) where term "Linux" is quite replaced by Ubuntu.

Linus Torvalds: Linux Put Open-Source in the Spotlight: The creator of Linux sees his operating system project as an exemplar of the merits of the open-source development model. In an interview with APC Magazine, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds says, "Linux was instrumental in making the whole issue of Open Source move into the mainstream software development consciousness."

The migration of a fussy Windows user to Linux: I’m a very fussy user when it comes to my operating systems and I have managed to get by with Windows XP for a long time, but its days are numbered. Vista is looming and I refuse to install that rubbish, so I have chosen Kubuntu 7.10. Having declared myself a part of the KDE crowd in the long-running desktop environment flame war, allow me to describe how this fussy and long time Windows user upgraded from XP to Linux to avoid the impending doom of XP’s old age and the otherwise inevitability of Vista…

Microsoft makes hard decisions easier: Let's pretend that we're OEMs. Original Equipment Manufacturers, the people who design and build the actual hardware which finds its way onto desks, into backpacks and under thumbs. We make it run a Microsoft operating system, because that's how we get to all the applications software, and we sell it as a better, cheaper (sometimes more stylish -- but mostly cheaper) way to run Microsoft. But next season is 2008. Suddenly, three things have happened...

Linux indifference and hostility from “mainstream” technology shows: So called mainstream technology shows love to bash Linux.

How to run games on Linux (sweet links): The most important thing that make youngsters so attached to Windows and reject Linux distributions is running games. To solve this problem we propose these links. containing explicit tutorials on how to run games on Linux.

Winning by not competing at all: When I was very young, I used to fight with my younger brother. One day, after being made to give in, he went to my mother and complained about the fact that I had been in a fight with him, and mom told him that if he didn't want to fight, he didn't have to. He could just walk away. She also told me the same thing. I drove my brother nuts by doing exactly what my mom said. I quit competing. I started working on my inner geek, while he was off trying to figure out why I didn't engage anymore. This is why Linux makes MS nuts.

The Chumby: Fun, Hackable and full of Potential: Thanks to a friend who knew a friend who knew someone else, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Chumby for a few days even though it is only available as a limited preview and not outside the Unites States. It's probably one of the first Chumbies in Europe. I only had it a few days as it was only lent to me by the owner, but this gave me ample opportunity to play with the device, give a thorough review and hack it a little. And what fun I have had!

Hands-on with the OLPC XO laptop -- and loving it: The XO laptop I received last week as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project's "Give One Get One" (G1G1) promotion is unlike any other laptop I've ever used, both in appearance and functionality. It's smaller, for one thing. The XO weighs only 3.13 pounds, is 9 inches wide, and approximately an inch thick when closed. But there's a lot more difference between the XO and a normal laptop computer than size. It has strangely marked keys, unusual buttons, external wi-fi antennas, a unique UI, and an original reason for being. Most people, myself included, will compare the XO to normal laptops, but that's not a good comparison. The XO is not designed to do the things that most notebooks are called upon to do, and no other notebook in the world can do the things the XO can do. There is some overlap, of course, but in the main it's apples to oranges.

ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words Chapter 4: By the end of December 2005, I had been blogging on ODF developments in Massachusetts for about four months, providing interviews, legal analyses and news as it happened. At that time, not many bloggers were covering the story, and email began to come my way from people that I had never met before, from as far away as Australia, and as near as the State House in Boston.

Has GNOME finally killed off KDE in the Ubuntu interface wars?: The leader of the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical, Scott James Remnant, has admitted that KDE 4 will not be stable enough to support for the term of the release. Posting to the ubuntu.com mailing list, Remnant states “I've not seen anybody who believes that this would be the case; a long-term supported release would have to be based on the stable KDE 3.5 series.”