Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

What many may describe as a ludicrous decision by a US federal court of appeal has threatened the immediate future of Internet radio, with many smaller net broadcasters saying they will not be able to afford new fees imposed by the US Government's Copyright Royalty Board. The new fee structure has resulted from intense lobbying from SoundExchange, a group representing artists and record companies.

[Isn't it nice to know that when they really want something, they get it? - Scott]

The OpenTaal project (Dutch for"OpenLanguage") has published the first open source word list to be certified by the Dutch Language Union as corresponding to official spelling. Simon Brouwer, project leader of OpenTaal, says,"This is a milestone. Users of open source software can trust their Dutch spell checker now. They have the guarantee that their word list is consistent with the official spelling."

Nokia's Navigation Kit for the N800 Internet Tablet works great when used in a car in metropolitan outskirts. However, the unit seems a bit pricey for what you get, is ill-suited to outdoor use, and seems to struggle holding a fix when the battery gets low.

The 2007 [Ottawa] Linux Symposium has run its course. All of the casualties from the closing party (perhaps made more numerous by the new practice of sending around waiters with trays full of shots of tequila) should have found their way home by now. Your editor has returned from this year's event; here's his summary of what took place.

Included in Andrew Morton's potential 2.6.23 merge list were a series of patches to make the x86-64 architecture tickless. Andi Kleen, the x86-64 maintainer replied, "I'm sceptical about the dynticks code. It just rips out the x86-64 timing code completely, which needs a lot more review and testing. Probably not .23." Linus Torvalds agreed, "we are *not* going to do another 'rip everything out, and replace it with new code' again. Over my dead body. We're going to do this thing gradually, or not at all."

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, about Jabber servers. Quite a few of them seem to play nicely with LDAP; the trouble with the setup here is that we have LDAP + Kerberos, and it’s the Kerberos part that seems problematic.

I stumbled across an interesting and useful tool recently called dzen, a"general purpose messaging and notification program" written by Rob Manea. Basically, dzen provides an instant-on/instant-off pop-up terminal window, along with a multitude of options that allow you to run just about any command.

MEPIS on July 9 announced the "Spartacus" release of antiX, a community-built, ultralight derivative of the MEPIS Linux distribution. AntiX (pronounced "Antics") is the personal project of MEPIS community member "anticapitalista," who engineered it as a free version of MEPIS aimed at old 32-bit PC hardware. AntiX is built using the MEPIS Linux 6.5 core, but mostly it has a different set of default user applications.

Dell Ubuntu Linux buyers were recently outraged when a price comparison between identical Inspiron 1420 laptops showed that instead of the Ubuntu system being cheaper, it actually ended up costing $225 more than the same laptop with Vista Home Basic Edition. "Bottom line this was an oversight, pure and simple," a Dell spokesperson told DesktopLinux.com. The prices have been reset to the appropriate prices.

Lenovo seems to have a love/hate relationship with Linux. Last year, it began offering its high-end T60p ThinkPad laptop with SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). This year, the company is releasing its newest high-end laptop, the T61p ThinkPad, and once more, while it runs desktop Linux, the company isn't overly eager to let the world know about it.

LXer Feature: 12-Jul-2007

A look inside what makes KDE tick, a glimpse of what the future holds and more in The LXer Interview of Sebastian Kügler.

Another thread discussed potentially merging the swap prefetch patch into the mainline Linux kernel. Con Kolivas started the thread saying "I fixed all bugs I could find and improved it as much as I could last kernel cycle. Put me and the users out of our misery and merge it now or delete it forever please." Replying to an off-list message, Andrew Morton asked users of the patch, "please provide us more details on your usage and testing of that code. Amount of memory, workload, observed results, etc?"

Five years after the debut of its popular open-source drawing program for children, New Breed Software announced the release of Tux Paint 0.9.17.

If you want an adaptable window manager that doesn't drain your resources, try Openbox. Its latest version, 3.4.2, released this month, has several visual improvements and dozens of new usable features.

The Air Mozilla video webcast will return on Wednesday 11th July when Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker answers questions in a live interview. The broadcast will begin at 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (9:00pm UTC/GMT) and is scheduled to last one hour. Asa Dotzler, who will be hosting the segment, has posted some details about the relaunch of Air Mozilla. According to his post, Mitchell will talk about the state of the Mozilla project and answer questions from the audience.

Work the Shell - 007's Favorite Game:"Baccarat"?

Microsoft announced that Asian Linux distributor Turbolinux is the latest Linux company to join its Ecma Open XML-Open Document Format Translator Project. Unlike the earlier Microsoft/Linux partnerships—Novell, Xandros and Linspire—there's no patent agreement or any other technical partnerships. This project seeks to create tools to build a "technical bridge" between Microsoft's Open XML Formats and ODF (Open Document Format).

Ingo Molnar's Completely Fair Scheduler has been merged into the Linux kernel for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.23 release.

Canonical has announced the release of Storm, a open source object-relational mapping (ORM) tool for Python that can support simultaneous communication with multiple databases.

The final talk on Saturday at Akademy 2007 was from Patrick Harvie, a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Green Party. While not a technical wizard like most of the other talks of the day, Patrick was able to describe to us the attitudes to free software from the Government he is elected to keep an eye on, and how the work of KDE developers applies to more than just software.