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The developer formerly known as Celunite claims industry first with Mobile Linux platform based on LiMo Foundation software.

The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! -- possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place. So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

[This is not directly FOSS related but I believe it to be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Microsoft is constantly claiming that their products are more secure than the competition based on the same flawed argument over and over again. Filling in the data creates a very different picture.

LXer Feature: 3-Feb-2008

In the ramp up to SCALE next weekend we have a SCALE announcement, a concise history of Linux, Nokia acquires Trolltech. We have articles on VLAN's and Rootkit detectors on Linux, How to apply Unix philosophy to personal productivity, Eight interesting improvements in GNOME 2.22, Mythbusters- Vista gets BUSTED and the big news of the week, if not the month Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion dollars.

Recently Ubuntu/Canonical contacted me for the use of buntu in our domain name. I had emailed them long before any announcement of the site but with no reply until the site began to attract visitors/users. I understand that Ubuntu/Canonical has a job to do when it comes to protecting their best interest. But Ourbuntu is doing nothing more than giving users the ability to setup a Ubuntu/Linux based system and sell it at no cost. Which helps promote the use of opensource software.

The European Commission has approved the EUPL on 9 January 2007. The licence has then been made available in English, French and German. By a second Decision of 9 January 2008, the European Commission has validated the EUPL in all the other official languages, in respect of the principle of linguistic diversity of the European Union. EUPL has been approved as a licence to be used for the distribution of software developed in the framework of the IDA and IDABC programmes. Nevertheles, the licence text is drafted in general terms and could therefore be used for other software applications, as the case may be. At a conference organised by the European Commission in Brussels last Friday, lawyers and license experts who helped sorting out terminology and linguistics differences for all of the translations began discussing which changes and extensions would be useful in an eventual next version.

[ Note: This news hits the LXer frontpage for the third time, except this is the original press release - hkwint ]

Linux feature phone will accelerate 3G mass market penetration - Eindhoven, The Netherlands, January 31st, 2008, NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and Purple Labs, a leading supplier of embedded Linux solutions for mobile phones, jointly announced today the release of a 3G Linux reference feature phone offering video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming at a transfer price below US$100. The new Purple Magic phone serves as a reference design for phone manufacturers creating entry-level 3G handsets, including those targeting mobile markets such as Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

During the recent Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, former OLPC CTO (and XO challenger) Mary Lou Jepsen discussed the real-world difficulties with using the kid-friendly laptops, including the creation of an XO "hospital" used to repair broken computers. Apparently, in the crowded conditions of schools in places like Nigeria, the little green laptops have a tendency to be jostled around and even knocked on the floor from time to time. As there's typically no repair shops nearby, the kids have learned to fix the systems themselves, setting up a "laptop hospital" where they can repair what's broken using simple tools and cheap replacement parts.

Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter are the authors of Klik, a distro-neutral complement to the existing package managers where 1 app = 1 file which includes all dependencies in that file (!) and where you can install and run software with one 'Klik' from your browser using their online package-repository . Deleting an app is as simple as deleting its file, and (IIRC) root privileges are not needed to install new apps. At the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2008 - to be held in Bruxelles, BE the 23/24th of February, they will talk about the advantages of Klik, and the architecture of the upcoming Klik2. In this interview they talk Linux package management, Klik's future and their presence at FOSDEM.

[ Klik "version 1" already worked very well, it enabled me to use a CLI-program for which Gentoo didn't have a package and which I couldn't compile manually before some reason. It's by far the single best thing for Linux package management I saw since I use open source software, especially since it solves the dependency problem for one and all and my mother and grandmother could use it - hkwint ]

Summary taken from KDE.news:

As a longtime KDE user forced to use Windows, is the recent announcement and availability of a port of KDE for Windows a dream come true? "KDE 4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy. More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released." Blogger MrCopilot gives us a hands on review with 50+ screenshots of KDE in action on that other operating system and tries to answer that question. KDE on Windows is not yet ready for the masses but hopes to be declared stable for KDE 4.1.

[ Take a look at this article. It won't happen often you see such nice Windows screenshots being referred to from LXer! - hkwint ]

FlyBack is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the FlyBack project page: "FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync. It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you wish to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. This prevents wasting disk space while providing you with full access to all your files without any sort of recovery program. If your machine crashes, just move your external drive to your new machine and copy the latest backup using whatever file browser you normally use." This article shows how to install and use FlyBack on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

t only took me a few minutes to notice it. It would seem that the Freespire people have been given their marching orders and I would Like Eric Raymond to comment if he is allowed. I can understand why Linspire would have to bow to the Microsoft Collusion but why Freespire? Now I know that Linspire is expected to dance to Microsoft's tunes...If I calculate correctly, 5 top Linspire executives entered their employment with Linspire weighing 3 lbs less than they did when they left.

This article completes the LaTeX course on Polishlinux.org. In the previous article regarding writing a dissertation the problem of typography has been omitted. This one concentrates on things like spaces is text, enumerations, special chars, fonts, typefaces and styles.

In recent weeks I have banged on about Open Source, expending two articles on Firefox alone. Open Source applications make their code available to everyone. Disagreements and rabid balkanisation within the Open Source community aside, for our purposes the term might as well refer to free software whose licence allows you to share the source code, alter it, use it, do with it what you will.

"I re-ran some statistics the other day on our kernel development rate, and changed my formula after Andrew accused me of severely undercounting the rate of change," noted Greg KH during a discussion about the stability of the Linux kernel while undergoing significant changes. He continued, "turns out that as of 2.6.24-rc8 for the 2.6.24 kernel release we did: lines added per day, 4945; lines removed per day, 2006; lines modified per day, 1702"..

Should Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! go through, the combined company would face one very major infrastructure question - how far is it willing to go in the war against Google? According to some, Google enjoys a major cost savings advantage over its rivals through a series of bespoke data centers. The ad broker crafts its own servers, using cheap memory, cheap disk and cheap low-power chips. Such systems, destined for failure, cause little damage when they go down because Google's software spreads well across hundreds and thousands of machines. Google treats its clusters of machines as a single entity rather than worrying all much about individual boxes. Along the way, the company saves on energy and infrastructure costs by relying on components that many major companies would consider below their standards.

Sebastian Kuegler of KDE recently agreed to give an interview, the first in what I hope will be a series. His responses are well thought out and detailed. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release.

Last year, Dell began offering Ubuntu on non-corporate desktops and laptops, opening the door for other large computer companies to follow suit. With this offering came a lot of discussion over what Dell should include with each computer sold. In a recent iTWire article concerning Dell's inclusion of its re-worked Ubuntu 7.10 and LinDVD (a commercial Linux DVD player), comments ran the gamut from FOSS purity to legal questions to even questioning Dell's motives. Clearly the FOSS community is pulled in all directions trying to satisfy users. Is there any happy medium? Can the community balance the requests of purists and pragmatists and still release usable products?

Welcome to Hardy Heron Alpha-4, which will in time become Ubuntu 8.04. Alpha 4 includes several new features that are ready for large-scale testing. X.Org 7.3, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration with a minimal configuration file; Linux kernel 2.6.24 brings in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel. Screenshots