Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Bloggers and their readers continued to pick apart the finer details of Microsoft's case against TomTom over FAT file system licensing. What they found seemed to indicate a greater effort underway at Microsoft to undercut open source software.

The release of the very nice Asus Eee PC 1000HE signals a turning point in the sub-notebook market and it's one that Linux desktop advocates will not like. It looks like the 10 inch netbook has hit the sweet spot for consumers and that sweet spot includes Windows but not Linux.

Numerous irrelevant issues and feelings about them are ventilated in comments on the case. However, there are only two important issues. One is what the law is, the other is what we think the law should be.

Plans to introduce modular features in Windows 7 have been welcomed by the European Commission's former Microsoft monitoring trustee. Windows Features allows users to turn off applications such as Media Centre, Media Player and Internet Explorer. Professor Neil Barrett said this would help promote effective competition.

I've turned off the "build" option because ...... the order queue met the "price scaling fulcrum point" (how's that for sesquipedalian pleonasticity ?) :-) In other words, there's now over 50 Illuminato slot pre-orders, which means that starting on Monday, I'm going to start placing all the orders for parts and building them up - Thanks!

Well, not quite. In fact, it’s been darn cold this week in the Mid-Atlantic USA, with lows down in the single digits Fahrenheit, wind chills below zero. But nevertheless, change is in the air — in this case, the Fedora trademark guidelines. But before I get to talking about those, I wanted to give a nod to Joe Brockmeier, with whom I’ve talked about this subject before. Joe and I share an interest in doing tough grindstone work to enable communities, and one of the things that gets in the way sometimes is the long arm of the law — in this case, trademark law. That’s one reason why I started working last summer with Red Hat Legal to revise our trademark guidelines.

A New York State Assembly bill intends to give open source developers the opportunity to offset 20 per cent of their development expenses, up to a maximum of $200, against tax. The bill summary explains that the New York parliament considerably reduces its costs by using open source software "such as Mozilla for email, Firefox for web browsing and WebCal for electronic calendars".

LXer Feature: 08-Mar-2009

In this week's LXWR we have more news coming to light on the Microsoft vs. TomTom suit, fat free XFCE, going back to dial-up to save some cash, news and opinions on netbooks, Flock ditches Firefox for Chrome, Linux gets put to the Mom test and much much more.

Last September, LWN pointed out the OpenBTS project, which is working toward the creation of a free GSM base station using GNU Radio and Asterisk. OpenBTS had just been demonstrated through the creation of a cellular network at Burning Man. More recently your editor, who had been looking in other directions, was surprised to learn that the OpenBTS developers are not allowed to tell anybody where to get the source from, despite the fact that it is available as free software. Intrigued, your editor decided to look into what is happening with OpenBTS.

Fedora 11 Alpha came out a month ago, 2 days later than the initial schedule, and it has recently entered its “Feature Freeze” state. Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 is due to be released on May 25th and it includes a large number of new features (most of them have already been approved). I’ve been using Fedora for more than 5 years and I often run Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch) to preview some of the future improvements. I couldn’t have missed this Alpha release, so I installed it for testing (first, as a guest OS in VirtualBox and then on my laptop).

!whatever:p, sudo !!, ^foo^bar ... if they whet your appetite and set your pulse racing do I have a web site for you! It’s the Digg or Reddit of the Linux command-line world.

When Eric Raymond posted the first of the Halloween Documents in 1998, it marked the end of the beginning for open source. That is to say those documents demonstrated that the logical superiority of the open source development model had penetrated the most headstrong corporate skull in the proprietary software universe: Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft could judge major open source projects to be equal or possibly superior to their own efforts more than 10 years ago, and the fact that they recognized

It's not very surprising as we've all speculated a full-fledged Google OS for years, then Google's mobile OS hit the phone market, and now we've seen it (Android, of course) already installed and working dutifully on netbooks. It's not rock-solid, but Google's CEO has hinted that there'll be subsidized, Android-powered netbooks backed by Google or its partners arriving to the netbook scene soon.

Thinking of buying a BMW, a Peugeot or a Citroen in the near future? If you are then the chances are pretty good that you'll be buying an automobile with a small Linux computer behind the middle console

Most migrants from other operating systems will seek out a Linux alternative to the ubiquitous iTunes, and chances are they'll come across Amarok 2.0 and Songbird 1.0. They're both contenders for the Linux music player crown, but take different approaches. Which one is right for you? Amarok is a native KDE application (but is also available for other operating systems besides Linux via KDE ports), while Songbird has been built using Mozilla technology, so it's cross-platform from the first step. Migrating to either from other, lesser, applications is a breath of fresh air. They do the same kind of things, but in a more effective and better-looking way.

The developers behind Novell's openSUSE Linux distribution have unveiled the roadmap for version 11.2 and the schedule for the next several releases. The distro is moving towards a time-based eight-month cycle.

A few weeks ago, after some soul-searching, I decided to pack up the OLPC and ship it off to a new user elsewhere in the world. I've relayed it to a second party in America, who is better equipped to present it to its new owner.

Free screenshot manager Shutter provides a really handy upgrade from the built-in GNOME screen grabber, sending your images to editors, auto-thumbnailing, sending to FTP or hosting sites, and doing much more. Shutter is actually the 0.7 version of what was once known as GScrot—and, boy, did that name need changing. The free app is a serious boon to bloggers, technical writers, or anyone else who needs to show off part or all of their Linux desktop.

Stephan Kulow, the OpenSUSE project manager, has proposed a roadmap for the future versions of OpenSUSE. While Ubuntu and Fedora distributions currently aspire to provide a new release every six months, which is loosely pinned to the GNOME development schedule, previously OpenSUSE did not have a have a fixed release schedule. OpenSUSE will now try to ship a new version every eight months as part of their new release cycle.

Back in November we saw the launch of the S3 Graphics Chrome 530 GT and with that they talked up a new magical Linux driver that would provide HD video acceleration support along with OpenGL 3.0 capabilities. But no driver was released, however, a day later it was confirmed by S3 Graphics that they were working on a new Linux driver. Their PR representative said the driver was to be released in December, but that didn't happen. In February they continued to talk up their Linux support but months later there still was no driver. However, that changed in late February when S3 Graphics did in fact roll out a new Linux display driver.