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LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2006

Opinion - August 2004, Microsofts Steve Ballmer warned Asian governments that Linux infringes 283 patents, some of which belong to Microsoft, and that those countries might experience trouble as a member of the WTO. However, nothing happened ever since (except more threats). Why doesn't Microsoft sue 'us', the users? Here are some more reasons you might not have thought of before.

Graphics software vendor Xara says its open source vector illustration project Xara LX is far from dead, even though work on it has slowed to a crawl in recent months.

Shares of Red Hat Inc. soared Friday on strong earnings results from the Linux operating system developer. But stocks of larger competitors barely budged, and some analysts saw a limited threat to Red Hat from software makers Oracle Corp. and Novell Inc.

Among the most respected vendor-neutral certifications in the industry are those from the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). LPI Level 1 certification (LPIC-1) is the junior-level certification intended to verify the very basic skills needed by a beginning administrator to work with Linux. There are two exams that you must pass, and they consist of questions that are multiple-choice as well as fill-in-the-blank -- the latter question type making the exams much more difficult than those from many other vendors. LPIC-2 certification also requires passing two exams with the same question types, but now the topics are much more advanced and you need to be a knowledgeable administrator to pass.

MEPIS LLC today announced that Beta1 of SimplyMEPIS-32 Version 6.0-4, aka SystemUpdate1, is currently available for download by MEPIS "subscribers" and is working its way onto public mirrors. Earlier versions of this KDE-based Linux desktop distribution have been well received by users.

If Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison thought Linux purveyor Red Hat would go down easily, he was wrong.

Linux vendor Red Hat posted solid results Thursday amid rising competitive pressure from Oracle, Novell and Microsoft. During the earnings call with analysts, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik was asked about Microsoft's announcement of three joint customers with Novell this week. Old news, he said.

German software vendor SoftMaker has released SoftMaker Office 2006 for Linux and FreeBSD, an office suite for computers running Linux or FreeBSD that reads and writes all Microsoft Word and Excel files.

[Not to fear - there's still OpenOffice.org and KOffice. They're truly free. - dcparris]

Here, we take a look at a wide variety of interesting Linux-powered gadgets that don't fit into the other categories of this guide -- everything from web-enabled digital cameras, to automobile telematics systems, to IBM's Linux wrist watch, to . . .

I recently reported on my good results with migrating an old server from RH7 to Debian Sarge, beginning with the network-install CD. Responding to my comments that an install of a Sarge desktop on my old Thinkpad left me less than impressed, several readers admonished me for not installing Etch.

[Yep, I'm pretty sold on Debian Etch myself. - dcparris]

LINUX PROGRAMMER Hans Reiser, who is facing a charge that he murdered his estranged wife, is flogging his open sauce outfit Namesys to pay his legal bills.

BURBANK – 12/22/06 – Media production software developer Linux Media Arts Inc. (LMA) has formed a partnership with the Government of Manitoba, Canada, to open a new Open Source product research and development center in Winnipeg that will assist California-based global media companies wanting to penetrate Canadian and international markets.

Access's open-source "application framework" for Linux devices, released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), is now available for download. The Hiker Application Framework -- a set of libraries and utilities for GTK+ application installation, management, security, and inter-communication -- aims to enable the commercialization of applications targeting mobile Linux devices.

Hoping to do for internet photo searches what Yahoo did for text searches, Swedish company Polar Rose AB has announced a web browser plug-in that allows users to find photographic facial matches through any search engine.

[Posted for your reading pleasure - looks interesting! - dcparris]

Can a game company make a profit producing commercial offerings for Linux? Two cross-platform offerings that run on Linux are hoping to show that it can be done.

After lots of feedback, bug fixing and testing of the beta live CD announced 3 weeks ago, The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the first official Fedora live CD. This live CD is based on packages from the Fedora Core 6 (codenamed "Zod") and Fedora Extras package collections and is such 100% free software.

Rich Internet Applications is the new buzz-phrase for Web 2.0, and a key component of the substance behind Web 2.0 is Adobe Flash. Take a break and have some fun with learning how to create Rich Internet Applications, integrate Adobe Flash movies into your applications and generate Flash movies dynamically with the Ming library.

If you have been using MySQL for a while, you have a knowledge investment that may discourage you from exploring other databases. This short guide shows how common tasks in MySQL are accomplished in PostgreSQL. It also highlights some unique features of each database.

I'm an extremely visual learner. If you introduce yourself to me, chances are that I'll forget your name after a few minutes. If I see your name in print, it's locked in my brain for all time (ok, I'm exaggerating, but not by much). Codin' for the Web (like, Singin' in the Rain) is a very visual book. Peachpit Press seems to specialize in producing their texts using high quality paper, fonts, colors, and images. Even without reading the content, it's just a pleasure to look at the pages. However, without good content, the "eye candy" effect doesn't mean much.

What does an anti-slavery pamphlet, a graph of French losses during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and a PowerPoint slide presentation have in common? The answer, according to Edward Tufte's latest collection of essays, Beautiful Evidence , is that all of them combine words and graphics to convey information -- although not with the same success. This is a subject with which readers of Tufte's previous books will be already familiar, and some of the essays in the book have been available online in slightly different forms for several years. Yet, for all this familiarity, in Beautiful Evidence, Tufte still manages to offer readers a combination of practical advice and theory in a style that manages to be both leisurely and challenging at the same time.