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EEI Corporation, one of the Philippines' leading construction companies, has opted to shift to Linux for their operating system (OS), joining several other industry giants in the country who have already turned to open source. The firm initially used proprietary systems for both OS platforms and various application packages utilized in its operations. However, due to increasing costs of licensing, the company started considering open source applications in order to minimize expenses.

I’ve always wanted to install Ubuntu on my Mac. So I decided to give myself little christmas present and finally get it done. Here’s my experiences with running Linux on Intel Mac. Other than small inconveniences with Compiz/OpenGl games and sleep mode not working, everything works like a charm. According to Ubuntu wiki sleep should work with custom kernel but I decided to skip it. Ubuntu boots pretty fast so it’s not that big deal especially with machine that’s most of the time just a portable workstation. Installation with all configuration trial & errors took about three hours.

LXer Feature: 31-Dec-2007

A sizable number of humans have devoted their lives to erecting barriers to learning anything new. You can see it when you talk to them- when something as simple as "click this button" produces a glazed expression and drool, you know you've lost them forever. Of course they'll waste hours of your time complaining about how stupid computers are. But even though it's easy money to nod and pretend to listen, and then bill them for every minute wasted on empty complaining (I never had enough nerve to charge a whining penalty, and I wish I had), it's not how I want to spend my time. Life is too short.

Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite. Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that provides instant messaging capabilities based on the Jabber protocol.

Efforts to promote Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) have gathered momentum in the country, mainly due to emergence of "Linux User Groups" (LUGs) and recognition by academics and government. India's computing space is witnessing a shift towards free software as more and more people are drifting away from proprietary products due to their exorbitant prices, security issues and restrictions on usage, according to experts.

Matthew Szulik became the CEO of Red Hat in November of 1999, the same year that the company went public. Since then, Szulik has been a guiding force for Red Hat, pushing the company's open source offerings into server rooms with the help of Dell, IBM, and HP. Yesterday, Szulik announced plans to step down as president and CEO for personal and family reasons, but will remain involved as chairman of the board of directors. The board has elected Jim Whitehurst, former COO of Delta Airlines (and the man who guided the airline out of bankruptcy), to fill the role of Red Hat president and CEO.

How often has it happened that you either buy a new camera or you replace the battery in your existing camera and, after taking a hundred or so shots, you realise that you forgot to set the date? So now all your photos were seemingly taken in January 2000 instead of December 2007. Manually editing the creation date of each photo one by one is a daunting task, especially if you’re a prolific photographer. But doing them all with one single command using ExifTool is a much simpler process.

LXer Feature: 30-Dec-2007

In this week's LXer Roundup we have several OLPC articles, Carla Schroder gives a tutorial on building your own Linux music studio, Steven Rosenberg pits Debian Etch with Xfce and Damn Small Linux with JWM/Fluxbox against each other, SCO gets delisted, Why there's more to Linux than Ubuntu, Linus talks about Linux and a great review of the Chumby by our very own Sander Marechal.

SCALE has announced its speaker line up for 2008. Speakers will include Don Marti, Josh Berkus (Postgres), Bdale Garbee (HP), Jono Bacon, andothers. In addition to the recently announced speaker line up,registration is now open and available online.SCALE will be held Feb 8 -10, 2008 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin in Los Angeles California.

You probably think I am writing this to form some sort of action to battle this, right? No, I've learned that is all but a futile gesture. Most Linux users cannot see past the needs of their own cpu's. or the interests of their LUGs. Aptly, readers of this blog have proven to be different. No, that's not my intention here...at least not overtly.

After the "death" of Netscape and encouraging users to use Firefox. Let's take a look to the history of the long war between browsers and how did it lead to the vanishing of Netscape and the rise of Firefox!

The Debian GNU/Linux distribution is, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of free, open-source software. But figuring out what Debian is all about and what's happening in every inch of the Debian universe is difficult. I've always wondered how long a Debian release will be supported with security updates and bug fixes. I don't know if there's even a set length of time that a Stable version of Debian will be supported. The current Stable edition -- Etch -- received its "stable" designation in April of this year. And Debian has no set release schedule, preferring to go by the "it's ready when it's ready" dictum. I'm more than OK with that. I assumed that once a release is declared stable, the old stable release fades into unsupported oblivion. Not so.

Wings.. This is what Ulteo is offering to OOo. Ulteo will allow users to use OpenOffice desktop suite on line with no installation process required. May be it will give some lazy and curious users an opportunity to give it a try. It will also allow people who were making some economies to buy a MS office suite to give OOo a try and may be they will be convinced to download OOo.

It is the dilemma of every single FOSS developer. Sure, you want as many people as possible to use your software but you also want to acquaint them with the advantages of FOSS as well. But that puts us developers into an another painful dilemma. In order to provide these packages we have to have access to these platforms. Well, there is a solution but it has it's drawbacks too: cross compilation.

Lately, I have been looking into other distributions that, like Ubuntu, are working to make strides to attract new users. I still have Debian Etch burned to a CD, waiting for a test in our lab. Next up is going to be Fedora. In the past, I have never been too impressed with RPM-based distributions, but to be fair, most of this came from nightmare scenarios with Mandriva and SuSE. And the last time I really took Fedora for a solid run was with Fedora 5, so it has been a while since I tested the Red Hat supported distro.

Many people's current (and incorrect) perception of Linux is a geeky toy. If each distribution is considered an individual operating system with a Linux-based foundation, instead of talking about Linux as one operating system, those perceptions will go away.

PCLinuxOS is showing us things to come for 2008 and their long awaited release. The question that comes to mind is will Windows users find it as easy to use as PCLinuxOS 2007 and will PCLinuxOS fix their update issues?

AMD is on the heels of releasing the next set of GPU programming documentation to aide in the development of the open-source R500/600 drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd). It's already been discussed what this NDA-free documentation release will have, but one of the questions that have repeatedly come up is if/when AMD will release information on accelerated video playback. AMD's John Bridgman has now stated what they plan to release in the video realm as well as a new requirement for their future graphics processors: being open-source friendly while avoiding DRM.

Ken Dotson has announced the release of PCLinuxOS GNOME edition 2.21.2. Featuring kernel 2.6.22.15, GNOME 2.21.2, GNOME office applications, Firefox 2.0.0.11, Frostwire, Azureus, XMMS, Flash, JRE, a ton of multimedia apps, and much more. Almost 2 GB of software compressed on a single bootable live CD that can be installed to a hard drive. The Coding Studio has the screenshots.

We The People believe that anyone should have the right to play any Digital Media in the form of Music, Videos, or other content on any device in any format that we wish such as but not limited to DVD format using the libdvd codec, MP3 files with the lame codec, and Microsoft formated content using the win32 codecs..