LXer Weekly Roundup for 22-Nov-2009

LXer Feature: 23-Nov-2009

First look at openSUSE 11.2 (DistroWatch Weekly #329): When Ladislav asked me last week if I'd like to review the new release of openSUSE I jumped at the opportunity. After looking at much improved releases by Ubuntu and Mandriva over the past two weeks I had very high expectations for Novell's community distribution. The upstream problems with common Intel video and audio drivers, which created so much grief in releases from earlier in the year, seem to be solved. In my work I support Novell's enterprise operating system offerings, including both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell NetWare. The releases of Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10 both installed smoothly and work nearly flawlessly on my hardware. I had no reason to expect anything less than that from openSUSE.

Lunascape – The World’s First Triple Engine Browser: Web developers know the importance of testing web sites and blogs on the different web browsers available. A site/blog can look great on one browser, but if you try to access it on another one, it can probably look garbled. It’s a hassle checking a web site/blog on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. What if a browser combined the three main browser types, which removed the need to open up three separate browsers? There is one – Lunascape.

Microsoft donates .NET Micro Framework to open source: Microsoft has released part of its .NET Framework - the part for internet-connected smart devices - into the open-source community. The company said on Monday that it's releasing source code for the .NET Micro Framework under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft is also creating a community of "interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product." The community's web site was still under construction at time of the announcement.

The Linux consultant: The Maytag repairman of the IT world: I was enjoying football Sunday with a few fellow IT friends over the weekend. Naturally, between plays, the topics tended to veer towards that of IT. I was the lone Linux guy in the crowd, so my opinion was not the norm (I’m used to that, of course). During the course of the day I pieced a few bits of conversation together and was able to finally draw a conclusion to that age old question, “Why don’t more consultants roll out Linux?” The answer should have been obvious to me all along as I long had all of the information I needed. But after hearing what I heard from the collective mouths of an IT group with years of experience and a metro city’s worth of clients, it became all too clear why Windows is always rolled out.

Lack of Innovation a Commonality for Microsoft, Apple: Red faces all around at Redmond last week when Microsoft got caught distributing a utility to create bootable USB drives and DVD backup media from downloaded Windows 7 ISOs. There's nothing wrong with the company's USB/DVD Download Tool in and of itself, apart from the awkward fact (discovered by Rafael Rivera) that it contained code borrowed from an open source project originally made available under the GPLv2. As such, Microsoft should have made the source code for its tool available, and most certainly shouldn't have offered it under the license terms it did.

Why 'Free as in Freedom' is More Important Than Ever for Linux Users: Bruce Byfield wonders why isn't "free as in freedom" more important to more Linux users? Is it all about free as in free of cost, or "free as in freeloader"?

Linux Bug #1: Bad Documentation: The Internet and Google have made FOSS developers lazy because they have made it too easy to abdicate the job of proper documentation to "The community." Telling users and potential contributors to use Google, mailing lists, and forums is not documentation. It's a way to guarantee having fewer users, unhappy users, and fewer contributors.

Droid by Motorola sales hit 250K: Verizon Wireless sold 250,000 units of its Droid by Motorola phone, according to eWEEK, which has also given the Droid a rave review. Meanwhile, the rumor of a Google-branded Android phone refuses to die, Palm's CEO trash-talks the Droid, and tomorrow Google will unveil its Linux-based Chrome OS, say various reports.

Heard at the Ubuntu Developer Summit: Goodbye GIMP, hello ... nothing – and why every Linux user should consider gThumb over F-Spot: The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution. Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user. Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one.