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LXer Feature: 22-Jul-2007

This week we have the launching of a new Linux Hardware site, cool videos of PhotoSynth and SeaDragon and MPX or Multi-Pointer X being demonstrated and a Firefox user bangs his head against a wall. All these and more plus I have to create a FUD article section just to contain them all.

As Kermit the infuriating frog puppet once said "It's not easy bein' green" - especially as a software developer. OK you can do all things that everyone else does - buy a Toyota Prius hybrid or even cycle to work (as long as you avoid Lycra and silly helmets). You can scribble notes on recycled paper with a pencil (made of wood from managed forests) and turn your machine off standby. You can even diligently recycle your printer ink cartridges and offset your energy consumption by planting a few trees.

This page aims to facilitate the installation of the newsreader slrn amongst the users of Ubuntu Linux. I will be describing in some detail the setup and configuration of the newsreader while mostly leaving the actual use of the program untouched. Explore and learn!

Now a days, when one installs Linux on ones machine, in more cases than one, there is a trend to create a logical volume and create the file system on this volume rather than creating the file system in individual partitions. I have myself created logical volumes on one of my machines running Linux.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.2.1 saying, "GCC 4.2.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.0 relative to previous GCC releases."

BusinessWeek reports that a high court adviser in the EU has decided that ISPs are not required to reveal information to authorities

If you need a compact, streamlined distro capable of running on an aging machine, take a look at Puppy Linux 2.17, a fresh release containing a number of new features, including seriously upgraded printing capabilities and enhanced modem detection and configuration. New features in this release include CUPS, soft-modem support, full automatic support for MultiMediaCards (MMC) and Secure Digital (SD) cards, better image file and drive mounting, enhanced boot configuration management, Linux kernel upgrade to 2.6.21.5, and a better PDF viewer -- ePDFView, which replaces Gsview.

I recently received a new MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.4 from our corporate headquarters. The choice of platform was deliberate, driven by professional requirements for applications not available on Linux. Still, it has been a long time since I've run anything but Linux, and starting to use a different platform after all this time made me curious. I decided to conduct an informal poll among Linux users -- including notables like Linus Torvalds -- to see how their platform usage compared with mine.

For quite a few pundits out there, the fact that there are so many Linux distributions is a bit troubling to them. I am not sure why this argument keeps coming up, but it goes something like this: there are X Linux distros out there, which is too many to choose from for users, and creates a strain on developer resources.

John Newton, CTO and chairman of open source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Alfresco, is certainly no stranger to the industry. Two years after cashing out of Documentum, Newton started Alfresco with John Powell, former COO of Business Objects. Activity has ramped up this year with a license change to the GPL and earlier this month a new release that adds a Web-oriented architecture on top of SOA. Newton recently discussed his challenges and outlook for Alfresco with internetnews.com.

Like the Terminator – just when the monster machine seems defeated, it always somehow rises again – Microsoft's push for international standards status for its Office document formats refuses to die. Just last week, a committee charged with deciding whether or not to recommend that the U.S. vote in favor of adopting Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) considers them in September, deadlocked, leaving the formats' future as an ISO standard cloudy at best. Not so, said Microsoft (Quote) officials. Indeed, since the technical committee was unable to hand up a recommendation, the executive committee with responsibility to determine the U.S.'s response has decided to move forward on its own. So Microsoft's aspirations remain alive.

Yesterday's release of OpenSuSE 10.3 Alpha 6 marks the first time there is a single installation CD for OpenSuSE, but also added in this development build is the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, GCC 4.2, and other updated packages. The single CD was possible by splitting packages and also introduced was 64-bit CDs for KDE and GNOME. While this isn't the final build of OpenSuSE 10.3, we have enclosed new screenshots of the OpenSuSE 10.3 Alpha 6 GNOME edition.

Robert Kaiser wrote in to inform us of the release of SeaMonkey 1.1.3, which contains fixes for several security vulnerabilities and several smaller problems found in previous versions. The SeaMonkey team strongly urges users of the old Mozilla Suite and Netscape 4, 6 or 7 to upgrade to SeaMonkey 1.1.3, as those software packages suffer from an increasing number of security vulnerabilities and are no longer being maintained.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 has been released and is currently being distributed to Thunderbird 2 users via the application's built-in software update system. The upgrade fixes security bugs, which are detailed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page.

Mandriva & Intel presented and demonstrated the Intel-powered classmatePC to KDE developers at the aKademy 2007 conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Intel's Latin America Linux Strategic Program Manager Sulamita Garcia and Mandriva's KDE developer Helio de Castro were participating at aKademy 2007, KDE's annual meeting of the KDE community, demonstrating the flexibility and the specialized educational interface of Mandriva Linux on the Intel-powered classmate PC in the "Edu and School" presentation sessions.

Without question, OOXML falls far short of being a universal office document exchange format. Considering Microsoft's enormous backward-compatibility commitments, I'd go so far as to say OOXML's own authors would probably agree ODF would be a superior format on which to base a new application. But with or without the ISO's blessing, OOXML is substantially more open than are Microsoft's legacy binary formats. As a user of OpenOffice.org on Linux who works in a mostly Microsoft-formatted world, I'm somewhat of a stakeholder in the ODF-vs.-OOXML horse race, and I'd like to see OpenOffice.org take advantage of this marginal boost in openness

Take charge of your editing session within Emacs and use it to your advantage. This tutorial is the fourth in a series, and shows you three areas of Emacs that control some aspect of the editing session: various command-line options, the register, and bookmark facilities for setting and saving positions and data. Knowing how and when to use these features, and what tricks are possible with them, are important topics in power editing.

It's tax time in Australia. Three weeks into the new financial year, now is about the time when people have all their documentation ready to give the government its yearly pound of flesh. But for Linux users there's no joy again. What greets me at the ATO's website is this information: To lodge tax returns online, one needs a PC running Windows 2000 or XP. And the ATO advises further, "...because Windows uses security components of Internet Explorer, use any version of Internet Explorer 6."

On July 5, Microsoft quietly released a "Covenant to Customers" to clear up how it is handling its patent deal with Linux distributor Linspire. Instead, it did little but puzzle and annoy members of the Linux community. If you read Microsoft's memo, you'll find that Microsoft's patent protection only applies only to "Linspire Five-0 and successor offerings" on a desktop. Server use is specifically forbidden. Microsoft also categorically rules out "Freespire and any other software offerings that include the Linux operating system for which Linspire receives no revenue."

The staging site for the new Firefox Support knowledge base is now up and running, and we’re looking for people to help contribute content. We have an initial list of articles we would like created for the alpha version, so feel free to create an account, assign yourself to an article, and create it.