Showing all newswire headlines

When I first let the world in on our "little" project to create an open tablet there were some who wondered openly about the licensing of the software. It's an important question that deserves a clarifying answer:

We are not using the OS (Android, in this case) provided by the hardware manufacturer. We are also well aware that some of the people in the hardware supply chain are violating the terms of the GPL. This was amazingly frustrating for us and caused significant delays as we went in search of GPL friendly vendors. We found that in the market of affordable device makers in China, they just don't exist. There's a cultural as well as legal hurdles that have led to this unfortunate situation, and I personally think Google has a lot to answer for when they allow such companies open access to their app store while they must be aware of the license violations that are going on. So it's an unfortunate situation, but we're problem solvers, we're bad-ass Free software developers who see a problem and bang on it until it falls over, right?

Nokia CEO is a coward to not give the exact count of Lumia sales in his Q4 results, the launch quarter for Lumia. So lets do some math based on the available info, to count exactly how many it was. When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone - even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of 'the third ecosystem' kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft's best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.

Not directly related to FOSS but of interest I think - Scott

Version 3 of ownCloud, the open source, cloud application that enables you to run your own cloud server from your computer, has been released. This comes roughly 47 days before the launch of a commercial entity that would provide products and services for ownCloud.

Motorola users are ready for a revolt. Furious Motorola users have started a petition pressurizing the company to unlock the bootloaders of their devices "Motorola Mobility Inc: Unlock all smartphone bootloaders."

Miro, a new application for Internet video has been designed to be an easy app that will give users an amazing full-screen show. With over thousands of free videos that can be viewed from the Internet, Miro gives the user the ability to download all the chosen videos they enjoy as soon as they are released. Miro, first launched in 2005 then revamped in 2007 (it was first launched as Democracy Player), is written in Python. Miro has an embedded WebKit for Linux and(Mozilla Gecko/XUL until 3.0.2). With the updated version of 3.0, Miro offers GTK for new Windows and Linux systems.

One of the best Turn Based Strategy games for Linux The Battle for Wesnoth has been updated to version 1.10. This release brings massive new features and updates to the game. If you haven't tried the game yet, give it a shot and you will surprised at the level of polish and depth of gameplay. The open source project is extremely popular among Linux gamers. Thanks to the developers, contributors and maintainers for updating it regularly. This release includes new features by developers who contributed to the game via Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

The recently released Linux Mint 12 offers a two pronged approach to supporting those who prefer the traditional Gnome desktop. Firstly, the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE) transform Gnome 3 into something resembling Gnome 2. Secondly it ships with Mate, the Gnome 2.0 fork project.

Steven Shiau proudly announced today, January 30th, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 4.1.2) on a CentOS 6.2 (x86_64) system. Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other, but still use the same hardware.

GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of Health 1.4.3. This version contains many enhancements and fixes. Check at the end of this article for some important links. For more detailed information, please check the Changelog at: http://health.gnu.org/Changelog

Fantasy Author and Open Source advocate Thomas A. Knight shares a little about himself, and celebrates the official launch date of his first published novel.

I'm not easily impressed by 'new' ideas in the Linux desktop space, which is why the Ubuntu HUD is even more interesting to me. The HUD is based on a concept that I really believe in and supported (though my own usage and newb attempt at script) when Mozilla tried the same idea a few years ago with Ubiquity. Mozilla however has this obnoxious habit of killing projects that I like (or in there parlance - putting them on the backburner - ubiquity, prism, skywriter just to name a few). Ubiquity was supposed to become something called Taskfox in Firefox 3.6 but that never happened

Who says Linux doesn't do audio production well? This article outlines how I used Linux to create a quick and (relatively) easy-to-implement digital studio. Home recording enthusiasts now have another great production option in Linux.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from February 8th - 10th, 2012.

People like stuff that is free. People like lists of things. Today I am going to put these two things together with the following list of my favourite FOSS (free open source software) applications.

I must admit, I'm a command line geek. Whenever I have the chance, regardless of desktop environment or distribution, I open a terminal and start fiddling something. This does not mean everyone must be like me, of course. If you're the person who is mouse and GUI-oriented, no problems. However, there are situations when all you have at your disposal for a while is the command line. One of those situations might be an upgrade of your kernel/graphics drivers that leave you high and dry until the bug is reported and the developers look at the issue. You have to send a very important e-mail or you have to check the evolution of prices of your favorite laptop. All the essential desktop tasks (with some exceptions, though) that you do on a GUI-enabled machine can be done on a CLI-only machine as well, so if you're interested...

Razor-qt is a new desktop environment based on the QT toolkit. I installed it from the PPA and gave it a quick go. It’s early days for the project, but it might eventually become a refuge for lovers of KDE 3 in the same way that Xfce has become popular with people who want to recreate the Gnome 2.x experience.

Learn how to easily create beautiful and detailed photomosaics in Linux using the command line tool metapixel. With plenty of command line options, you can build a photomosaic precisely the way you want it. Installation instructions for Ubuntu and openSUSE are included, as well as a large image collection to build the photomosaic with. If you are more comfortable with a GUI, a link to one is also available.

This piece did not set out to re-define the term, "computer bulletin board," but that is the easiest way to describe Wboard, a window that provides a background for text notes and allows you to manage and save groups of notes easily.

For why does weatherman hate penguins? Something in the AIR Linux users face increased inconvenience getting a weather forecast from March onwards when the Met Office will withdraw its web-based weather gadgets and replace them with desktop widgets – for Windows and Mac only.…