Showing all newswire headlines

I debated long and hard before deciding to take a stab at this article idea. Because KDE and GNOME users are so furiously loyal to their preferred desktop environment, I had to take into account that no matter how I stated my case, someone was going to come away feeling let down. Those concerns aside, I am writing this piece in hopes of sharing what each desktop offering has to provide and which of these options makes the most sense for your business.

[Get your asbestos undies ready! - Sander]

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has confirmed his commitment of giving 50,000 laptops to Ethiopia. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature - it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. Nicholas Negroponte has recently said in an Interview that a Give 1 Get 1 program for Italians to donate more laptops to Ethiopia was under consideration to be launched very soon. Perhaps the program could even provide a second donated laptop by the Italian government as a donation matching encitement.

The #1 item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD Patterns concerns its learning curve. This pattern is probably the most prevalent and primarily appeals to fear by attempting to convince you that Linux is too hard for the average person to use or that it is simply not user friendly. There are many variations of this pattern, from the straight-forward “Linux is for geeks” assault to more mature, logical arguments, such as “if Linux can do everything the fill-in-the-blank OS can do, why bother with the hassle of switching?”.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips. Note that AMOR will only work with some window managers. Both KWin (the KDE window manager) and Metacity (a GTK2 window manager) are supported.

HP released a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed, Over time HP will develop additional Agents that can be used to perform all sorts of useful analysis on software of all kinds.

Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we’ve managed to bundle up Patrick Michaud’s Rakudo (that’s the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next month’s release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress.

If you have a dual-boot Windows/Linux system, you probably know this problem: you can access files from your Windows installation while you are in Linux, but not the other way round. This tutorial shows three ways how you can access your Linux partitions (with ext2 or ext3 filesystem) from within Windows: Explore2fs, DiskInternals Linux Reader, and the Ext2 Installable File System For Windows.

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. The keynote was recorded, and is now available for streaming through Google Video.

I did a minor bump in etu (the enlightenment thumbnailing utility) when it occured to me that I have not made the good readers here aware of the fact that etu development was ongoing ... so yes development is ongoing. A lot of cool stuff has been added to it and for what it is worth development will soon come to and end and it will flip into maintenance mode. In any case - we appreciate the users and hope you enjoy. See systhread for details.

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with Networking 101. This installment, we take a look back at everything we covered in our series. We designed the series with the belief that everyone in networking should understand all of these concepts...

[This is not a new article, but it's such an excellent series I figured it was worth a re-run.-- TC]

I don't care whether or not you are thinking of using Vista, OS X or Linux. As a personal rule, I rarely upgrade until any release has been out for at least 6 months. Why is this?

Users by the truck load fill various user forums with problem topics in Linux despite widely available support documents available online. Today, I will talk about a few key areas that would solve a number of problems if they were to be addressed in the open.

Why is it that we can manage to sway countless hardware manufactures into looking our way yet those who work in other business circles continue to ignore Linux to the point of almost being laughable? Today, we will highlight these companies, just to remind them how their decisions are costing them money.

I haven’t really been keeping track of how the OLPC project has been evolving for the past few months, honesty. I truly admire the motivation behind what they’re doing, and I wish them all the best, so when I heard about their Give One Get One program, I was instantly intrigued.

The second day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, was a very busy day. Reporters and users joined the hackers, peeking over their shoulders, asking questions and generally trying to figure us out. Talks were given - most notably the keynote by Aaron Seigo, but also covering KOffice, the KDE-Edu project, and multimedia.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A whole set of bugfixes and feature additions in Plasma, and various optimisations across KDE. Usability improvements in Blinken. More work on the timeline tool, including fuzzy selection in Digikam. Support for XComposite translucency in the Konsole KPart. QtScript can now deal transparently with all scripting backends supported by Kross. Improvements in KWin Composite effects. Support for an old feature request, "parenthesis highlighting as an expression" in Kate...

We called it Free Software at first. It wasn't until we started calling it Open Source that the punditry line counts began creeping up higher than the code line counts. We had this baby and we were proud of it, and the deep rooted insecurity born of being the ridiculed and utterly misunderstood underdogs made us require the approval of business and Grandma Bessie before we could ourselves be satisfied. Well, now we've got it, and in some ways Open Source is not better off because of it.

LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

DeviceVM demonstrated a Linux-powered PC preboot application environment lets users instantly run several Internet-based applications, including Web browsing and Skype messaging, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. 'Splashtop' integrates with the PC’s BIOS and is launched prior to operating system boot-up.