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With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a sought-after fruit in the Java community: The porting of Java to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not made Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

LXer Feature: 11-Nov-2007

Some of the big stories this week include the Open Document Foundation, a call for papers for SCaLE 6x, four ways to extract the current directory name, the BBC admits a massive underestimate of its Linux users, Linux Backups For Real People, Part 2, a Linux game company opens its doors, Vista vs. desktop Linux: One year in and never use Babel Fish to talk to a foreign minister.

Every industry needs an old, crotchety curmudgeon. We have the always-entertaining John C. Dvorak who’s lately seemed to be slowly slipping into senility. That’s okay, though. That’s okay. He’s our grandpa and we love him and you don’t just cut people out of your life because they’ve started going crazy. His latest outburst is against the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. He thinks it won’t work. That’s a fine opinion but it needs to be backed up with a convincing argument. The reasons he gives are far from convincing, however.

Flyback is a backup and recovery tool loosley modified by Apple’s “Time Machine”.. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less.”

Linux desktop users looking for good financial software to run natively can forget about Quicken and Quickbooks. One glance at Intuit's website should be enough to convince even devout users of that company's products that despite Quickbooks for Linux servers showing strong growth, a port to Linux desktops is a long way off and a Linux version of Quicken is not even on the radar. So what are the alternatives?

After a much publicised spat between Mandriva and Microsoft over an 11,000 computer deal with the Nigerian government it seems Nigeria has decided to stick with Mandriva Linux, the original plan.

Microsoft Corp. on Friday introduced a new pilot program to encourage refurbishers to install legitimate copies of Windows XP on used PCs. The new Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program offers a discount off the retail price of Windows XP, along with deployment tools to help refurbishers reinstall Windows and all of the relevant drivers on renewed PCs in as little as 15 minutes, said Hani Shakeel, a senior product manager on the Genuine Windows product marketing team. When MAR is fully expanded, it will also help stem what Microsoft acknowledges as widespread flouting of Microsoft's XP licensing rules by price-pressured refurbishers.

For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products. Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free. So, I did a test drive, trying to level the field as much as possible. Here are the results.

So, you just delivered that new PC to your customer and gave them a quick tour of what's new and then watched their eyes glaze over with confusion. After a few seconds, the questions start. Questions that should be easy to answer, but turn out not to be! Where is my start button? Where are my programs? What happened to the Menu in Internet Explorer? Why is the system constantly asking for my permission to do simple things? Why does my system take so long to boot? Now your eyes glaze over, not with confusion, but with frustration and you have to ask yourself: What did I do to deserve this? It's simple; you sold your customer a computer with Windows Vista installed, when that customer was somewhat satisfied with Windows XP. The answer lies with the open-source community and more specifically, Linux.

Some years ago the idea came up to fork KWord and refurbish it to be more stripped down, and have simpler and bigger buttons. The effort was applauded by many but in the end didn’t really work out. It was a great heads up and I took it with me for the next generation of the applications. As I’ve been working on KOffice2 high-level design I had 2 user groups in mind, the lawyers office and the Kids “office”. The two extremes that I wanted to be able to both have a real use for KOffice. In the last days I finalized a plugin for KOffice that is targetted directly to the “kids office”. I reused the artwork that was created for the kids-office by Dannya well over 2 years ago and ended up with a simple replacement for the more complex standard interface. I hope that kids, and many parents, will appreciate this new user interface.

It's one thing to make a computer easy to use, but if you're going to do so, you must also make it secure. If you're not going to develop a secure OS, then at least give more thought to your emphasis on "Ease of Use".

Red Hat is partnering with Amazon to offer Linux-based computing power as an on-call computer resource, letting companies scale up applications without building a bigger data center. That Linux-on-demand idea has sizzle, but there are other interesting pieces in Red Hat's latest batch of products, including more virtualization support and one audacious goal. The Amazon partnership is part of Red Hat's Linux Automation initiative to make it easier for companies to deploy Linux applications. With it, Red Hat will have its version of Linux powering over half of the world's new servers by 2015 while doubling its current market share, says Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's VP of enterprise Linux business.

Gimmix, however, is not an ordinary audio player. It requires a lot more than running it and pressing the play button to listen to music. Gimmix is just a front-end to MPD (music player daemon), which will require to be installed, configured and started in order for Gimmix to run properly. MPD is basically a server which allows remote access for playing audio files, streams and managing playlists. What's really impressive about this design is that the client used for controlling the server doesn't need to run on the same machine MPD runs on. This enables you to play the music files on your home server from work, a friend's house or wherever, as long as you have Gimmix with you.

Now it’s finally official: the Asus EeePC (for Easy to Learn, Work, and Play) will be available from December in Germany and Austria for a recommended end user price of €299,- including tax. The good news? Debian developer Ben Armstrong has realized that this is the perfect text editing device for himself and his wife, bought two of them, and is currently porting Debian to it!

Renewed proceedings have been brought against the SCO Group GmbH [Ltd.] and its apparent managing director Mike Olson by the Bonn-based Tarent GmbH as well as the Bremen-based Univention after derogatory remarks about Linux had re-appeared at the URL http://www.sco.de/scosource/letter_to_partners.html. The German Linux companies had already successfully protested against statements made at the same URL in 2003. In case of recurrence, SCO's lawyers had already undertaken to refrain from repeating statements in the course of business that Linux would be an unauthorised derivative of Unix. The incriminating pages at SCO, which has become particularly known for its legal proceedings over alleged copyright infringements in Linux and the copyrights to Unix in the past, cannot be accessed any more since yesterday.

Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, will get another chance this holiday season at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The chain was taking orders online Wednesday for a computer called the "Green gPC" that is made by Everex of Taiwan, costs $199 and runs Linux. A comparable Everex PC that comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and more memory costs $99 more, or $298, partly because the manufacturer has to pay Microsoft Corp. for a software license. Both computers come with keyboard, mouse and speakers, but no monitor. It will be available in about 600 stores, as well as online, Wal-Mart said.

[Not news anymore, but fun to see it's even made Fox News - Sander]

For any parent, myself included, setting your kids loose on the net is a daunting prospect. We have to do it because the net is a fact of life - it's in our schools, the workplace, public libraries and in many if not most homes of the developed world. Therefore, do we really have any option but to give them Linux?

Many companies could successfully partake in open source projects without adversely affecting their business, according to open source activist Bruce Perens. Perens told delegates at the Open Source Summit in London that companies need to hold on to their business differentiators in order to remain competitive. But he insisted that they can effectively share software development with the rest of the world without affecting their company in a negative way.

Manufactum, a German web retailer, has released a portable PC that is sure to delight Linux users. Weighing in at only 2 pounds, with dimensions of 7.1x4.4 x1.9 inches (180 x 112 x 48 mm), the "Manuscriptum" comes pre-loaded with Debian Linux with a KDE desktop environment, and other essential software like Firefox, Open Office and the Foxit PDF reader. Available for around $650.

Over the past two weeks there has been a number of new developments in regards to the open-source NVIDIA driver, Nouveau. In fact, the Nouveau team is preparing for the first stable release! This stable open-source NVIDIA driver will support 2D, X-Video, and EXA acceleration with all graphics cards from the NV05 to NV40 (GeForce 7) series. Read more in the 30th edition of the Nouveau Companion.