Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Why not have just one version of Linux that everyone can use and enjoy? Wouldn't that make things less confusing and encourage more people to adopt Linux? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds. Multiple distros are "absolutely required," he was quoted as saying.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc unveiled a slimmer version of its Kindle digital book reader on Monday, with more storage and faster page turns, but kept a high price tag that could discourage mass adoption. The new Kindle, still priced at $359 on Amazon's website amazon.com/kindle2, is available for preorder and will ship February 24, the company said. Amazon shares were down about 1 percent at $65.94 in midday trading on Nasdaq.

The development community behind the open source Compiz window manager is undergoing a major reorganization effort that will converge disparate branches of the project and help it overcome its recent lack of direction. Compiz is responsible for bringing rich visual effects such as cube rotation, transparency, shadows, and wobbly windows to the Linux desktop. It includes a powerful compositing engine that leverages hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and the latest features of Xorg. It is shipped with several popular Linux distributions and is extremely popular among Linux enthusiasts.

The netbook market is not just limited to the Eee PC any more, now every major manufacturer has a netbook of some description. The software arena hasn't stood still either with many custom distributions having been created to accommodate these little machines. Intel sponsors the Moblin project which has just released a new alpha, and we take it for a test run. In the news section, the creator of Puppy Linux explains his new project called Woof, Mandriva finalises the structure for their new Assembly, things heat up in BSD land with new releases on the way, the unofficial Fedora FAQ provides updates to version 10, Fedora causes a stir after disabling the popular 'kill X' feature, and a new online Slackware package finder is made public. Also in this issue are links to two interviews - the first with a KDE developer and the second with the creator of Xfce.

In case you needed extra evidence that Microsoft worries about the Linux threat, here's more: Microsoft is advertising for a Director of Open Source Strategy, and the job is aimed at combating Linux on the desktop, not on servers.

One of the largest mobile operators in the world, Telefonica, joined wireless Linux foundation LiMo on Monday and committed with five other major operators to sell phones using its software this year. Vodafone, Orange, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, Korea's SK Telecom, and the top U.S. operator Verizon Wireless will also introduce phones using LiMo software in 2009, the operators said in a joint statement ahead of Mobile World Congress trade show next week in Barcelona.

LXer Feature: 08-Feb-2009

At the beginning of the week Debian went into a deep freeze until their announced release date for Lenny on Valentine's Day. A group of developers have brought the dark horse of file managers Midnight Commander back from a deep sleep. Jimf exposed me to midnight commander, it was way over my head at the time and in a related article Carla Schroder says you "You Get What You Pay For" that talks about projects having a hard time making ends meet. Both of which I will be talking about again soon..

Walter Leibbrandt and Friedel Wolff of South African localisation specialists Translate.org.za attended this weekend’s Fosdem 2009 conference in Belguim. They sent Tectonic their thoughts on the two-day European FOSS gathering.

The differences between Linux and windows are chalk and cheese in respect to how the two operating systems are put together. While the end result of putting together these operating systems are pretty much the same functionality. It is the way they are put together which ultimately determines the true underlying nature of these layers between man and machine.

I am thinking the unthinkable…..I am considering changing from Ubuntu 8.10 for my desktop to Debian 5. I have been running the Debian 5 Lenny candidate for awhile and have bee very pleased with the stability and features. It actually functions and acts more like the distribution I need and work on than Ubuntu. Not so say that Ubuntu is bad, just that I typically do not need or use the latest applications. I mainly work on my Linux desktop for about 60 hours a week. So I really need something I can count on. Again, not that Ubuntu has let me down, it has never really crashed on me but I do struggle with bugs from time to time. I use my GUI desktop to work from as I manage Linux servers, either Ubuntu or CentOS.

Microsoft's recent survey proclaimed nearly half the population believe it is ok to use pirated software for personal use. This diminishes the argument by Linux advocates that you can use their operating system without any cost. Yet, you can't confuse free as in cost with free as in freedom. Here's what FOSS really means.

Back in May 2000 the first issue of Linux Format magazine hit the news stands. One of its features was a group test of Linux distributions, reflecting the state of play in Linux flavours at the time. If you fancy a trip down memory lane or just a quick look at how beautiful Linux wasn't all those years ago, we've dug out the original article complete with screenshots - read on!

In order to consolidate project planning, bug reporting, team organization and translations as well as the freedom to add other models in addition to openEHR; OSHIP development has been moved to Launchpad.

The team behind the development of the ioquake3 engine, a spin-off of the open-source Quake 3 engine, is preparing for the release of a new update. The second release candidate for ioquake3 1.36 is now available and it features a number of new improvements.

Here's an interesting post from Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's boss, commenting on the EU's decision to investigate Microsoft for its Internet Explorer. It's mostly a useful statement of history and why Firefox on its own shouldn't be regarded as the solution to the problem. But for me the most significant portion is its conclusion..

This paper describes the recent imaging advances by Elphel, supplier of open source (hardware and software) cameras to customers that include Google (for select Street View and book scanning projects). It should interest imaging engineers, fans of open source, and those curious about open source hardware. The paper was written by Dr. Andrey Filippov, the Russian physicist who founded Elphel in 2001. Filippov has contributed many papers to LinuxDevices through the years, as regular readers will be aware.

A survey of the Ubuntu Server communityPDF has been published showing that more organisations are relying on Ubuntu for "mission critical" tasks. The survey, carried out by Canonical, the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu, and RedMonk, an open source oriented market research organisation that makes all of its content freely available, breaks down the 6800 responses, from predominantly Ubuntu users, and analyses it by business size.

BitDefender, a global provider of award-winning antivirus software and data security solutions, has launched a new version of BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices, the on-demand antivirus and antispyware scanner for Linux and FreeBSD, which is free for personal use. The new and improved features of BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices enhance the user experience and increase the level of protection.

gOS and Linux Mint are two of the many Linux distributions based upon Ubuntu, but they provide their own spin of things. gOS, for instance, ships with WINE and Google Gears by default and focuses upon providing an easy and rich experienced catered around Web 2.0 services. Linux Mint ships with its own set of customizations and its focus is on providing an easy-to-use Linux desktop by having a distinct user interface, its own set of system, and shipping with various proprietary drivers, plug-ins, media codecs, and other packages. We had a question though from a reader asking whether the performance of these Ubuntu derivatives is vastly different from Ubuntu itself. With that inquiry, we have run a couple benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 8.10, gOS 3.1, and Linux Mint 6.

Marten Mickos on Friday told fellow employees that he's resigning from Sun Microsystems, just a few days short of his first anniversary as senior VP of database software. The news was greeted with dismay by those who thought he was going to play a key role in guiding Sun through its transition to an open source company. "There's a question whether Sun can make money as an open source company. I would take someone who's been highly successful in an area that Sun has been struggling with and give him free rein," said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource and head developer on the open source Spring Java framework project, in an interview.