Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Given the number of Linux distros out there, how did we pick just 14? Some were obvious; the likes of Slackware and Debian have been around since Linus was in short trousers. SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu are similarly too significant to ignore. What about the others? To survive, a distro must have something to offer – a large userbase, unique features, ease of use – something that makes it a little (or a lot) different from the rest. We hope that the selection here is sufficiently varied, but please forgive us if we have omitted your favourite distro – try some of the alternatives to see what you may be missing out on.

Here in the states we are coming up on a very important election - the election of the President of the United States. And I would be remiss if I did not address this topic in a blog dedicated to the topic of open source. The last two presidential elections proved that our system of voting is either broken or corrupt (or both). In August of this year Deibold (the maker of electronic voting machines) finally admitted their systems have been broken for ten years: Chris Riggal (a spokesman for Deibold) says their system contained a: “…critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point”

The free software movement aims for a social change: to make all software free so that all software users are free and can be part of a community of cooperation. Every non-free program gives its developer unjust power over the users. Our goal is to put an end to that injustice. The road to freedom is a long road. It will take many steps and many years to reach a world in which it is normal for software users to have freedom. Some of these steps are hard, and require sacrifice. Some steps become easier if we make compromises with people that have different goals.

I’m writing this from Ubuntu 8.04 in a live session (booted from USB stick). This *nix distribution runs well, does what I want it to do and runs just fine without complaint. Let’s forget the fact that it’s super-awesome-cool I can just pop in a USB stick, boot Ubuntu, run it, connect to a wireless network with no problems at all and do my work. You can’t do that with Windows or OS X. Let’s also forget the fact for a moment I’ve been using *nix distros off and on since Red Hat 5 (Apollo).

For every random need, group, or type of hardware, there seems to be a specific Linux distribution available. Looking for Christian software? Check out Ubuntu Christian Edition with GnomeSword, BibleMemorizer, BibleTime and Web controls powered by Dansguardian. Want Ubuntu on the PlayStation 3? Look no further than PSUbuntu. Need one specific for the firewall or router? There are a few choices, including ClarkConnect, Coyote Linux, Devil Linux, IPCop, SmoothWall, eBox and Gibraltar.

Netcraft -- er, Jim Zemlin, confirms it: Solaris is dying. Customers are leaving it and legacy Unix behind for Linux, in his purview. Open sourcing the platform was too little, too late. Well, maybe not sundown, but it's getting mighty dark out. These are actually not new sentiments; I picked them up from Jim when I talked to him back at OSCON -- a place where, ironically enough, I had also talked to folks from Sun. They were and are smart guys, deeply proud of the work they're doing, but I hope they all understand they are never going to steal any of Linux's thunder. (The refrain I've heard from many different quarters about this issue has been expressed in almost the same exact words by all concerned: "If only they had done this [open sourced Solaris] three/five/ten years earlier...")

Big Money Matt Asay is fairly dismissive of European open source. It lacks the killer instinct, he writes. The only way to graft that on is to bring the European to America. He cites Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, as an example. He has a point, as my friend Roberto Galoppini demonstrated recently at OSIMWorld in Berlin. Roberto held a workshop on bringing open source into the business model during the show, which was well attended. And he had all his facts in order, complete with attractive charts.

For some Linux distribution projects, new releases come twice a year. That had been the plan for Gentoo Linux this year, until it canceled its current planned release -- the second time it's done so in the past 12 months. But the news doesn't necessarily mean a setback for the project. Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution -- one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages.

As travel expenses escalate and budgets shrink during this economic slowdown, businesses are finding ways to"do more with less," according to Brent Arslaner. As vice president of marketing at Unisfair, Arslaner says the concept of virtual conferences is"starting to catch on."

Discussions about free and open source software can arouse strong emotions. That's something I've known for many years but one often tends to forget these things in the rush of daily life. It comes back to you in a flash when someone reacts in a totally unbalanced way to something you've written or said, a totally harmless comment that should be absolutely inoffensive when considered logically. But logic rarely comes into the picture when people feel that you are criticising the free and open source community and anything associated with it.

Microsoft may be the only company in a position to provide "any real competition" for Google in the online search business, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. But first it will need to figure out a way to do it. "We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said during a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. "You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user." And that will take some time. "It's a five-year task," Ballmer said. But Microsoft is ready to spend a lot of money trying. The company told its shareholders recently that it was prepared to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income for several years" to improve its position in search, Ballmer said.

This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious. These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

One of the pleasures of Linux is that you can try out different distributions to see which one works best for you. You like Ubuntu, but you want to fine tune the desktop engine? OK, try Kubuntu with its KDE desktop then. Some worthwhile distributions, however, don't get as much attention as they deserve. So, here's my list of five great distributions that you might want to try.

In case anyone hasn't been paying attention, apparently the US economy isn't doing too well these days. There is a lot of news lately about banks failing, government bail-outs, and natural disasters that will cost us all a lot of money (thanks, Ike).

John Lilly became chief executive of Mozilla Corp. in January, moving up from his role as chief operating officer. He's been with the company that created the open-source Firefox browser since 2005, the year Firefox 1.5 was released. Before Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the Web. Now Microsoft's share is down and Mozilla's share is 20 percent. The size of the organization makes Mozilla's tremendous success that much more remarkable. Headquartered in Mountain View, it has fewer than 200 employees.

As November's national election looms in the United States, voters can expect increasing coverage of the hot-button issues through the mainstream media and campaign ads. On issues important to the open source and free software communities, however, information is harder to come by. Today we take a look at what the Democratic and Republican candidates say about questions close to the FOSS voter.

IBM has had enough of the silliness that goes on at some of the standards bodies it belongs to. So Big Blue now has a new policy: No shenanigans. Setting standards for hardware, software, communications protocols, document formats -- is a job that's way too important to be done in the dark, says IBM.

Everyone loves open source - well, everyone apart from Microsoft, that is. The only problem with open source is deciding how much code control you're willing to relinquish, especially when open source puts your precious bits and bytes - and ultimately your own product plans - into the hands of your competitors.

Visa announced plans Thursday to develop payment and payment-related services for both Nokia mobile handsets and those running Google's new Android platform. In addition, Visa announced a pilot program that enables U.S. Bank Visa cardholders to transfer money using a mobile phone. The announcement looks to revive the efforts of credit card companies to push consumers toward mobile payments and mobile commerce.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I only know about 5% of what VLC can do. Everyone knows it's a dependable, free, cross-platform media player. But read through the release notes for the latest version, 0.9.2, and you will see a dizzying array of server, network streaming, and conversion functions, most of which I have never even touched -- and the new VLC exposes a lot more of that functionality. You can grab source code and Windows and Mac OS X binaries from videolan.org. Ready-made builds for Linux are not as easy to come by; VideoLAN prefers to work through distros' packaging systems, and the hot-off-the-presses 0.9.2 is not yet available in most of them.