Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There are many great FOSS projects that utilise old PC hardware and give it a new lease of life. The best is desktop computing with various Linux distribution flavours like Mint, PCLinux, Ubuntu and countless others. In fact it is my considered belief that the best hardware to run Linux on is infact (almost) any machine that is at least 12 months old. It is possible, of course, to select components based on the degree (and maturity) of the specific support under Linux but this has two major drawbacks.

Linux is great to use at home. It can be handy at work. It's a great server operating system. But there's one other place that Linux is really worth its weight in gold: public, or semi-public, computers. There's nothing quite as nerve-wracking as seeing someone on a computer you're responsible for, and wondering what exactly they're up to. Except for maybe seeing someone you're responsible for on a computer, and wondering the same thing.

Free/Iliad is a French Internet provider with a whooping €1B in revenues. Its founder Xavier Niel boasts being a very profitable business with all salaries representing only a few percents of Free’s revenues: a performance that might be better explained by the amount of open source leveraged by their massive infrastructure.

Linux might benefit from a changing conception of what computers are for. With the rise of Web-based applications that reduce the need for desktop-bound software, more of the action comes through an Internet browser now. The feel of the underlying operating system is less important.

"I skipped the public announcements for versions 5 and 6, but here is 7 :)," noted Vegard Nossum, announcing the latest release of his kmemcheck patch, currently applying against the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel. Vegard noted he is now hoping to get the patch merged into the mainline kernel during the upcoming 2.6.26 merge window.

Last week Weekly Wire sent Roblimo to San Francisco for the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). While there, he had a chance to talk briefly with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth even though Mark was getting full "rock star" treatment from an adoring crowd and was totally mobbed by press and fans whenever he showed his face.

Altimeters... lie. For those of you who are a bit uneasy about flying, this bit of news may not make you feel any better. Nor will this piece of information: most analog instruments on airplanes are prone to quite a bit of error. Yet for over a hundred years, these instruments were more than enough to get most aircraft safely from place to place.

Granular Linux is a desktop-oriented distribution based on PCLinuxOS. Its primary goals are to be easy to use and user-friendly. With the new preview release of version 1.0, Granular has come a long way toward achieving these goals, and becoming a unique distribution with its own benefits and problems.

Observers (all two of you) may have noticed a flurry of commits in the systhread cvs repo at SourceForge. The enlightenment transform utility etu and libpcab based pktutils underwent major changes over the last two weeks.

Max McLaren sounds very satisified these days. Not to say that the man who's been managing Red Hat's affairs in Australia and New Zealand for nearly two years has sounded disconsolate at any time when I've spoken to him. But right now he has very good reason to be feeling a trifle smug - Red Hat recently released an extraordinary set of figures for the first US quarter.

With OpenOffice.org 2.4 just released, OpenOffice.org 3.0 (OOo3) has already passed its feature freeze, and is scheduled for release in September. Based on recent development builds, what can you expect? In the Base, Draw, and Math applications, very little change, at least so far. But in the core programs of Writer, Impress, and Calc, some long-awaited new features are arriving. Combined with the improvements in the charting system that are the major feature of the 2.4 release, these new features promise to increase both usability and functionality, although some of the changes do not go far enough.

Web-based automatic translators such as translate.google.com are great for getting the gist of what a document is saying, but it can be cumbersome to have to open a new tab in your browser, load that URL, and copy and paste the text you want to translate into your browser. The twandgtw project allows you to get language translations directly from the Linux command line using either local dictionaries or online services.

Gernot Heiser, professor of operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has stated that Windows and Linux will remain as the future of desktop and server operating systems. In an interview at the recent Linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Heiser said "the operating systems of the future will be called Windows and Linux, no matter what they look like". "You can't really introduce new operating systems in the desktop and server space", he added.

In my previous post about last week’s Microsoft Technology Summit, I talked a little bit about the structure of the event and the overtures that Microsoft seems to be making towards the Open Source community. Some of my esteemed industry colleagues feel that Microsoft is never to be trusted, that they are a snake in the grass and a dangerous aggressor, and they are out to crush anyone who opposes them at any cost.

KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared office in Frankfurt, Germany. As two organizations that share similar goals and organizational challenges, they hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience and infrastructure.

Ubuntu Linux was the only system left unscathed in a multi-platform hacking competition last week, but does that mean it is more secure? Apple's Leopard OS lasted 30 second, Windows Vista Ultimate lasted until the third day, but Ubuntu's Linux distribution alone was left secure at the end of the "Pwn to Own contest" at CanSecWest security conference held in Vancouver. James Turner, a security analyst from IBRS said that "in this particular instance, which supports the conclusion that Ubuntu is more secure".

Ever since I wrote "It's Time to Get Over Microsoft," people have demanded in blogs and emails how I could ignore the obvious threat that Microsoft represents to free software. Usually, I ask them to read the article more carefully, and note that it suggests that free software has grown strong enough to take care of itself. The fact that so many free software supporters persist in a negative identity -- that is, one defined by not being a Microsoft user -- frankly puzzles me when the community has so much to be proud of in its own right.

When I thought Microsoft was going to extend XP's lifetime to better slug it out with Linux on Ultra Mobile PCs and Mobile Internet Devices, I was afraid Linux was going to have to fight hard for the low-end of the desktop. Now that we know that only XP Home is going to have a longer life and Microsoft is going to have to contort itself over what systems can and what systems can't get it, I'm much happier. XP Pro was much more troublesome in my mind.

Google's Android platform is designed to drive fragmentation of mobile operating systems, creating an industry in which Google's cross-platform applications will thrive. Why? The search-engine giant wants to ensure there's no equivalent of Microsoft Office in the mobile phone world. So says Sanjay Jha, chief operating officer of Qualcomm's chipset division QCT. "Google wants fragmentation in the industry [and] is putting a lot of resources behind Linux" he told us.

Ever run into the issue that you saw a cool new app on KDE-Apps.org and could not find a binary package for your favourite KDE version on your favourite KDE distro? The openSUSE Build Service allows creation of binary packages quite easily, so you can do the work yourself and help other KDE users who run into the same problem. If you are interested in learning how, the openSUSE community are organising Packaging Days II, which starts tomorrow.