LXer Weekly Roundup for 22-Jun-2008

LXer Feature: 22-Jun-2008 In this week's Roundup we have Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu, Is Linux Ready for Firefox 3?, After 15 years in beta Wine 1.o finally arrives along with a review, an interview with Andrew Morton, AMD Makes An Evolutionary Leap In Linux Support, a Damn Small Linux 4.4 Review, the top 10 best GTK applications not included in GNOME and Nokia thinks that open source developers should play by their rules.

In this week's Roundup we have Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu, Is Linux Ready for Firefox 3?, After 15 years in beta Wine 1.o finally arrives along with a review, an interview with Andrew Morton, AMD Makes An Evolutionary Leap In Linux Support, a Damn Small Linux 4.4 Review, the top 10 best GTK applications not included in GNOME and Nokia thinks that open source developers should play by their rules.

A Future of Instant-On Cloud Computing: All the technology of the future is here, and it runs Linux.

This week at LWN: Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu: The life of South African Mark Shuttleworth has been a kind of geek dream: found and sell Internet company for $500+ million in mid-20s; spend $20 million to become the second space tourist; and create a GNU/Linux distribution with a cool name that has become the most popular on the desktop. Here, he talks to Glyn Moody about Ubuntu's new focus on the server side, why Ubuntu could switch from GNOME to KDE, and what happens to Ubuntu and its commercial arm, Canonical, if Shuttleworth were to fall out of a spaceship.

Microsoft and Its Open-Source Gambit: Microsoft has made another move in its open source gambit by becoming a sponsor of the Open Source Census The move follows Microsoft's partnership with the Eclipse Foundation, where Microsoft pledged to support Eclipse open-source projects at the EclipseCon conference in March. Now Microsoft joins the Open Source Census effort as a sponsor.

Vista's big problem: 92 percent of developers ignoring it: And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP. Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data.

Is Linux Ready for Firefox 3?: With the new Firefox 3 set for release tomorrow (Tuesday June 16), tens of millions of Mozilla Firefox users on Windows will get an update notification directly from Mozilla to upgrade. But what about Linux users? Is there a conspiracy to keep Firefox 3 from them? Most Linux users do not get their Firefox browser directly from Mozilla, but rather get it from their Linux distribution.

Wine 1.0 Released: The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing.

Microsoft Ruins "Open Source" from the Inside: Microsoft's strategy goes like this: invade open source, redefine open source, make open source work better on Windows, force open source to 'license' for software patents.

Kernel space: Interview with Andrew Morton: Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.

OS Smackdown: Linux vs. Mac OS X vs. Vista vs. XP: Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

AMD Makes An Evolutionary Leap In Linux Support: Less than a year ago we shared with you the revolutionary steps AMD was taking to deliver significant improvements to their once infamous proprietary Linux display driver and at the same time the work they were doing to foster the growth of an open-source driver for their latest graphics card families. These steps have certainly paid off for both AMD and the Linux community at large. AMD's proprietary driver is now on par with NVIDIA's Linux driver and there are two open-source ATI drivers picking up new features and improvements on an almost daily basis. AMD also continues to publish new programming guides and register information on a routine basis for their latest and greatest hardware.

To Those Who Make My Job Easier: Recently, I did a laptop install for an individual that needed to upload files to his home computer from his laptop. It was important to him to do so. He didn't need a full feature SSH protocol or anything remotely (sorry) close to it. Many of the files are too big to get past his email size limit so he was worried that his Linux Box wouldn't be able to do what his Windows install did. That is where droopy comes in. That fact that it is a Python script endears me immediately but more so, the absolute ease by which it is utilized makes it the perfect little app for almost anyone's use.

Damn Small Linux 4.4 Review: DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what itâ??s got.

Wine 1.0 Review: Finally, the so called 'stable' version of Wine, 1.0, has been released on June 17, 2008. The last Wine review I made was to 1.0RC2 (release candidate 2), in which I already tested World of WarCraft, mIRC and DC++. I had no issues with World of WarCraft (tested using a trial account) which performs very well, without any visible problems, DC++ has minor stability problems and the mIRC scripts editor crashes, but otherwise, mIRC behaves good enough.

Top 10 Best GTK Applications Not Included in GNOME: The article reviews 10 GTK applications which don't come with the GNOME desktop environment: GIMP, Banshee, Inkscape, Firefox, Deluge, XChat, OpenOffice, VLC, LinuxDC++ and Geany.

Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules: I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.