Showing headlines posted by hkwint

[ Note: This news hits the LXer frontpage for the third time, except this is the original press release - hkwint ]

Linux feature phone will accelerate 3G mass market penetration - Eindhoven, The Netherlands, January 31st, 2008, NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and Purple Labs, a leading supplier of embedded Linux solutions for mobile phones, jointly announced today the release of a 3G Linux reference feature phone offering video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming at a transfer price below US$100. The new Purple Magic phone serves as a reference design for phone manufacturers creating entry-level 3G handsets, including those targeting mobile markets such as Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Summary taken from KDE.news:

As a longtime KDE user forced to use Windows, is the recent announcement and availability of a port of KDE for Windows a dream come true? "KDE 4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy. More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released." Blogger MrCopilot gives us a hands on review with 50+ screenshots of KDE in action on that other operating system and tries to answer that question. KDE on Windows is not yet ready for the masses but hopes to be declared stable for KDE 4.1.

[ Take a look at this article. It won't happen often you see such nice Windows screenshots being referred to from LXer! - hkwint ]

Christopher Negus is responsible for some of the most widely-read and well-respected mass-market books on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You may already know of, or own, Linux Toys, its sequel Linux Toys II, or one of his miraculously up-to-the-minute Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible books. Negus has an uncanny ability to [...]

The infrastructure and tools required to make Linux a green operating system are now in place, according to Linux leader Linus Torvalds, who was in Melbourne this week attending Australia's largest Linux conference.

By combining VMware Server with some free software, you can run Windows XP along with Linux, not inside a console window, but completely integrated into the Linux environment. You need three tools installed on your system: VMware Server, rdesktop and Cendio's SeamlessRDP, which is a GPL-licensed utility that lets you integrate rdesktop with Windows XP.

There's no doubt that 2008 will go down in history as the end of the first Microsoft era. This year, Bill Gates will finally hang up his Microsoft mouse and leave the company he cofounded over 30 years ago. Most people know that he's going off to spend the very large sums of money he has acquired from those Microsoft years, most of which has been used to set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with $37.6 billion in assets. But what will that really mean for free software?

[This story is not about open source software, but about Bill Gates 'charitable' intentions to prevent the uptake of open source software in developing countries and make them dependent on Microsoft - hkwint]

Related story: Bill & M. Gates foundation for-profit investments harm the health & environment of the poor

[ My personal opinions are between () parentheses. If you like to read a rather unbiased article, skip the bits between brackets and you should be fine - hkwint ]

(Dutch source here)
Yesterday Webwereld.nl (a Dutch IT-site called "Webworld") revealed it laid its hands on a 'non-public' document which describes a non-public tender for new software for 3k to 21k desktops for the financial department of the Dutch government. It seems the tender favours Microsoft and other closed software over other solutions leaving little chance for open source software. That's because the tender asks for support for several closed / proprietary platforms like Active Directory to manage logins and firewalls, and (the patent encumbered) .NET. After protest from society and politicians, the Dutch Minister of Finance / Vice Prime Minister, Mr. W. Bos answered the Dutch government will switch to open standards and open source software in 2012, but at the moment this is not a viable option (not viable since they are locked in rather badly it seems).

Standards wars? Mini-Poll
Long, long ago, in an industry far, far away, a number of large companies struggled to decide whether to adopt a document interchange format as a global standard.

Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

Not really open source news, but still it might be valuable for those running a Win/(Lin/BSD) dual boot: PandaLabs detected a new kind of trojan (has to be Windows) that overwrites the Master Boot Record, and upon inspection of the MBR passes the original MBR of which it made a backup. This master boot 'virus' could run too if you boot Linux, before Linux is started. You can fix it by running 'fdisk /fixmbr' from some kind of Windows bootdisk PandaLabs suggest, but of course you could also do this using GRUB from a Linux/BSD LiveCD.

The KDE Project Ships Fourth Major Version of cutting edge Free Software Desktop.

With the fourth major version, the KDE Community marks the beginning of the KDE 4 era. January 11, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

[Congratulations to KDE on behalf of LXer and probably our readers too!- hkwint]

Even the unadventurous Israeli education system may soon discover that there is (computerized) life after Microsoft. The country's schools will forgo Word and Windows in favor of parallel programs from Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the education system's tenders committee has authorized cooperation in principle with Sun, in a move that could undermine Microsoft's sovereignty in Israeli classrooms.

[ A few minutes ago I read the OLPC / XO will have a dual boot between Linux / XP, but contrary to popular believe, XP doesn't run on the OLPC yet - as this old blog from a Microsoft-dev working on it shows - hkwint ]
There have been suggestions in the press by Nicholas Negroponte and others that “Windows already runs on the XO.” That’s not really the case yet [...] We started the project around the beginning of the year (2007 - ed) and think it will be mid-2008 at the earliest before we could have a production-quality release.

While you can find dozens of products to secure Windows laptops, security products for Linux laptops are scarcer -- but they do exist. We found a range of products and fixes ranging from security patches for the operating system to encryption to the equivalent of computer bicycle locks which can help keep your Linux laptop or notebook safe.

The next hackathon will be held January 19th and 20th, 2008. The focus will be on closing PR's that are not relevant anymore after the release of 4.0. I.e. 2.0 becomes unsupported. Participation is open to everyone. Check out the Hackathon community page for more details.

-3 jours pour faire le point sur les solutions proposées par plus de 189 acteurs majeurs des solutions Open Source
-Un programme sans précédent réparti sur 10 salles de conférences pendant les 3 jours du salon.

[Real impressive lists of what's coming up! Sadly, French organizations only receive government funding if all talks during their expositions are offered in French language (too), so I'm afraid this expo is of no use if you can't understand spoken French language - hkwint]

Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new “Emacs.Net” tool the company is building.

[No, you're not drunk, it's not April Fools' today, but yes, hell just froze over - hkwint]

LXer Feature: 2-Jan-2008

Lately, some articles appeared which stated the open-source way of development didn't bring us any innovation. Jaron Lanier even goes further by saying closed source is the better approach to innovation. However, these people miss a lot of important points and facts about innovation, and therefore the conclusions they make are false. Having read a lot about innovation myself lately, I will try to show that the open-source way of doing things leads to more innovation, and more important, I will give some real life examples showing the closed-source inventions aren't that innovative at all, and pointing to some open-source inventions the other writers missed.

"As a former MEPIS user, ComputerBob wanted to find out what was under the hood of his GNU/Linux system. Therefore, on December 3rd he decided to try Debian out and keep a diary about his adventures. The first part, which can also be found at LXer details his adventures in the first half of December. He sets up a working Debian GNU/Linux system and tackles some problems, but several networking issues remained. In this shorter but still worthwhile 'part 2', we find out why he had to re-install Debian four times (wow!) and what else happened in the second half of December." - H.Kwint

CNN reports that "switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%." It's no longer about software freedom. It's also about environmental responsibility.

[ Indeed, green probably will be a marketing point for Linux in the future. It's one of the most important point Zonbu is using for selling their harddisk-less PC - hkwint ]