Showing headlines posted by SamShazaam

Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

With its 4.1 release, KDE is taking few chances. While the 4.0 release's announcement emphasized excitement and significance, the tone of the announcement for 4.1 is more subdued. This time, the announcement talks about maturing technologies and underlying improvements, and the only claim is that the 4.1 desktop "can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users."

The "I have a dream" release.

After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate.

Many people don't realize the wealth of applications that are available for Linux. I am asked all the time about X and/or Y application on Windows and whether there's an equivalent on Linux. Most of the time the answer is yes. The arena of finance is no exception. Plenty of outstanding financial applications are available for the Linux operating system. From personal finance to business finance, there is an application for nearly every need. Let's take a look at the top Linux financial applications.

In all seriousness of being a linux user we sometimes forget the fun side of it all, here is an attempt to capture some of it.

Years ago I already played a bit with Linux (It was Redhat 5.0 on my 386). At that time I thought the operating system wasn't yet ready for the desktop and after a while I reinstalled Windows. Things changed when Ubuntu 5.04 was released. This was the first time I really enjoyed Linux; the most important things worked, it was easy and it was just great! Because I liked Ubuntu so much, I decided to install it on my laptop too and also this worked very good. However, these days Ubuntu is way to heavy to run on my laptop. Because I wanted to have a fast system I tried to install Gentoo Linux; the installation took 3 days but I ended up with a very fast and responsible system. However, every time I had to install a program it took ages to compile the software. So then I started searching to a nice and user-friendly lightweight distribution.

While we're all waiting for PCLOS 2008 to be released, we were treated to a kissing cousin yesterday with the release of TinyMe 2008.0. It's a small lightweight distro featuring the LXDE desktop with lots of handy apps. I thought I'd take it for a little test run this evening to see what it might be like.

In a recent post on his blog, Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical, has talked about synchronicity between Long Term Support releases from different Linux distributions. One of the arguments he brought to support this idea was that developers could focus more on the important role of component selection, integration, testing and patch management, instead of on the core component feature development.

Open source is said to be about scratching your particular itches - and I've been working my butt off for the last several months along with a small, select team of developers doing just that. All our hard work have so far resulted in a very experimental linux distribution that's definitely not ready for users yet (or even developers) but does have quite a few interesting ideas and features.

Puppy Linux 4.0 has been unleashed recently. It is a major distribution release version of this well-known mini-distro that is why I took some time to check it out. I have used Puppy Linux 3.01 before, and I have said that it was more than just a cute-named distro. So what are the improvements of this latest edition over its predecessor? Has it really learned new tricks?

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today. Coleman noted that the GSA does indeed use a wide variety of open source programs. The agency started using open source for information systems, though is increasingly using the software for transactional mission-critical systems.

Today at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, announced a new initiative to improve support for the Open Source development community. As the first step in this initiative, VIA will open its official VIA Linux website at http://linux.via.com.tw this month.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Adobe Systems Incorporated is joining the Foundation. Adobe is joining the LF to collaborate on the advancement of Linux as a leading platform for rich Internet applications (RIA) and Web 2.0 technologies.

Our database now contains over 2000 projects that are using the GPL v3. This is a large milestone for the license, and seems to still be the beginning of wider adoption. Nine months have passed since the release of the controversial license and it has already gained 2k projects. At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5000 projects by the end of the year.

We often hear from readers who want to track the development process of their favorite Linux distribution but don't know where to start. Budding Linux enthusiasts frequently ask how the release cycles work, what the version numbers mean, and what options are available for end-user testing prior to official releases. The answers to those questions differ depending on the distribution, but we are going to attempt to address those questions for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE—three of the most prominent desktop Linux distributions.

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

IPv6 is the future of IP, and it’s a good time to start learning about it. It’s very easy to put an IPv6 address on Linux. IPv6 addresses have 126 bits. This allows for an enormous address space.

Apple's much-touted new operating system, OS X Leopard, is in some ways worse than Windows Vista, says the founder of the Linux open source project, Linus Torvalds.

The Asterisk PBX platform has been around for nine years and has drawn interest from a wide range of end users as well as businesses looking to expand on the basic software or add peripherals to make it more attractive to potential users.