Showing all newswire headlines

I am loathe to offer real life suggestions based on Television and Movies...most often it indicates that one has less than a firm footing in their real world. In this case though, I am going to ask you to take the red pill. Together we will see how deep the Rabbit Hole goes.

Welcome to this year's third issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Continued efforts to resolve the leadership issues in Gentoo Linux, a controversy following the Manbo Labs deal between Mandriva and Turbolinux, and the unexpected purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems were the main headlines of the past week. But much has happened behind all the high-profile announcements too: openSUSE released the first prototype of its new, Qt4-based installer, Ubuntu published a free, 400-page desktop course, KDE continued to defend its decision to release version 4.0.0 in a seemingly unfinished state, and Dreamlinux announced the upcoming version 3.0 of its Mac OS X-like desktop distribution. Finally, don't miss our feature story, a hands-on report about Linux in Vietnam. Happy reading!

I suppose I have more than a casual interest in reviewing this book. The software development team I work with operates using agile development. Reviewing this book is for me, a way of becoming more familiar with the people I work with and how they work. I'm not a developer...not in the software sense anyway. They call me a developer of content and that's what I do...provide help files, white papers, and any other documentation to describe the products developed by the folks I work with. While I have had agile development explained to me and have seen it in action every workday of the week for the past two-and-a-half months, it will be interesting to see the "official" version presented by Shore and Warden.

The Everex Cloudbook, which seems like a compelling alternative to the Asus Eee PC, will be available in the US from around 25th of January, according to ZaReason, Inc.

Generally speaking it’s always nice if you can dedicate a few dozen minutes (around an hour I would say) to familiarize yourself with how bugs are reported in the project you’re participating with.

LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2008

With more computer manufacturers announcing their Linux pre-installed offerings and retailers announcing the availability Linux based computers in their stores, this week's Roundup should be called "Coming soon to a store near you". Lenovo is finally getting their Linux laptops to market, Acer makes a trial run of laptops with Ubuntu on them, Shuttle reveals a $200 Linux box, Sears has Freespire based PC's for $199 after rebate and Everex's 2 pound, $399 Cloudbook is coming to a Wal-Mart near you. Also, KDE 4.0 hits the streets and in a collection of Microsoft related articles McAfee "accidentally" forgets to read the license, Pamela Jones says goodbye to Mandriva and the EU opens two new investigations against Microsoft while Bill Gates offers free customized Windows Live services to Finland's primary and secondary public schools.

For all the linux users that saw the new OSx Leopard and the new backup utility called Time Machine and said “wow”! Now there is FlyBack.

Ohloh, the community site for developers, is making its tools open source, including the Web site itself. The Ohloh site collates information from public open-source version control systems, to create a database of the productivity of open source projects, and the developers working on them. A new "labs" section of the Ohloh site makes source code available, under the GPL version 2. This includes tools such as Ohcount, which counts lines of source code and can be used by companies to audit their software development teams.

GIMP is an open-source image editing program, one of the most popular image-editing programs. It is supported by a huge open-source community that is open in every aspect - development, source, sharing and participation. And what better way for me to admire GIMP than by presenting a list of some amazing, beautiful and stunning brushes?

I debated long and hard before deciding to take a stab at this article idea. Because KDE and GNOME users are so furiously loyal to their preferred desktop environment, I had to take into account that no matter how I stated my case, someone was going to come away feeling let down. Those concerns aside, I am writing this piece in hopes of sharing what each desktop offering has to provide and which of these options makes the most sense for your business.

[Get your asbestos undies ready! - Sander]

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has confirmed his commitment of giving 50,000 laptops to Ethiopia. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature - it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. Nicholas Negroponte has recently said in an Interview that a Give 1 Get 1 program for Italians to donate more laptops to Ethiopia was under consideration to be launched very soon. Perhaps the program could even provide a second donated laptop by the Italian government as a donation matching encitement.

The #1 item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD Patterns concerns its learning curve. This pattern is probably the most prevalent and primarily appeals to fear by attempting to convince you that Linux is too hard for the average person to use or that it is simply not user friendly. There are many variations of this pattern, from the straight-forward “Linux is for geeks” assault to more mature, logical arguments, such as “if Linux can do everything the fill-in-the-blank OS can do, why bother with the hassle of switching?”.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips. Note that AMOR will only work with some window managers. Both KWin (the KDE window manager) and Metacity (a GTK2 window manager) are supported.

HP released a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed, Over time HP will develop additional Agents that can be used to perform all sorts of useful analysis on software of all kinds.

Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we’ve managed to bundle up Patrick Michaud’s Rakudo (that’s the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next month’s release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress.

If you have a dual-boot Windows/Linux system, you probably know this problem: you can access files from your Windows installation while you are in Linux, but not the other way round. This tutorial shows three ways how you can access your Linux partitions (with ext2 or ext3 filesystem) from within Windows: Explore2fs, DiskInternals Linux Reader, and the Ext2 Installable File System For Windows.

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. The keynote was recorded, and is now available for streaming through Google Video.

I did a minor bump in etu (the enlightenment thumbnailing utility) when it occured to me that I have not made the good readers here aware of the fact that etu development was ongoing ... so yes development is ongoing. A lot of cool stuff has been added to it and for what it is worth development will soon come to and end and it will flip into maintenance mode. In any case - we appreciate the users and hope you enjoy. See systhread for details.

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with Networking 101. This installment, we take a look back at everything we covered in our series. We designed the series with the belief that everyone in networking should understand all of these concepts...

[This is not a new article, but it's such an excellent series I figured it was worth a re-run.-- TC]

I don't care whether or not you are thinking of using Vista, OS X or Linux. As a personal rule, I rarely upgrade until any release has been out for at least 6 months. Why is this?