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LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2010

A new test version of Youtube offers HTML 5 video support, meaning watching videos without Adobe Flash, but only when browsing with Chrome or Safari. While this might seem strange at first, and might sound like Google is abandoning its Firefox users, things are a little bit more complicated.

Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on "integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS".

The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM's Ubuntu/Lotus "Smart Work" cloud distribution.

It is very hard to manage thousands of users manually, so a user-provisioning tool becomes very important in our process. In this article by Flavio E.Goncalves, we are going to see two of these tools—SerMyAdmin and OpenSIPS Control Panel (OpenSIPS-CP). SerMyAdmin is more focused on the administration of the users, while OpenSIPS-CP is excellent for monitoring and provisioning parameters to the system.

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany. LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks.

YouTube and Vimeo is kicking Adobe's Flash to the curb in favor of the sharp new HTML5. Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it's no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn't require Adobe's software to stream content to viewers.

Shortly after the European Union approved Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems (and MySQL), I interviewed Ingres President and CEO Roger Burkhardt about his views on the Oracle-MySQL combo. Here are his thoughts.

Firefox 3.6 was released yesterday, after over six months since the last major release, version 3.5. Firefox 3.6 ships with versions for over 70 languages, support for Personas, an add-on allowing you to change the appearance of the tab bar and choose from thousands of themes, improvements to the open video support (like the fullscreen mode), improved JavaScript performance and start-up time, support for the new DOM and HTML5 specs.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

Obviously, I've spent a good amount of time trying to think of a suitable intro to this column. But I couldn't find anything appropriate to express my disgust and disappointment at Ubuntu's missed opportunity. So I'll state it plainly – Ubuntu, you got us this far and then, just when it mattered, you blew it for all of us. Unlike many, I'm not ranting about Karmic Koala's technical glitches. In fact, it's still one of the best options for the desktop, and it's technically superior to the new Windows OS that its release coincided with. But this is where it hurts. For the first time ever, the mainstream tech press mentioned an upcoming Linux release in a Windows preview article. And what did Ubuntu do to capitalise on this new-found exposure? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Except for those operating systems that are still gaining their foothold (Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS), it seems as though we are becoming increasingly platform independent.

What's happened to innovation for KDE and GNOME? Would the developers prefer that we use the command line?

A few members of the GNOME Foundation have submitted a petition to the board, asking for a referendum to be held on making the Foundation's mailing list archives private and limited to its members only.

User interfaces are the last great Linux problem. What really makes Linux user-friendly-- is it limited options and loads of eye candy? What about functionality, and depths of riches to explore?

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux. If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by looking at existing shipping device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you sometimes have to guess at what is happening down below.

This document describes how to install Ailurus on Fedora 10, 11 or 12. Ailurus is an application which aims at making Linux easier to use. It provides these features: install some software which is not provided in official repository; enable/disable some third-party repositories; change some system settings; help you study Linux skills.

Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.

Firefox 3.6 final is out in the wild and yet again, most Ubuntu users are not able to upgrade their resident Firefox 3.5 to this latest release. Let's cut the chase. All you need to do is to get the latest version of Ubuntuzilla, a python script which pretty much gets the job done without any hassles.

(English summary by hkwint:)

Quick stats for period between July / Dec '09:
IE loses the most in Ireland (7%), Greece, UK and the Czech Republic.
FF still around 30%, Chrome from 2 to 4%, Opera stable at ~2%, Safari from 4 to 5%.
Follow the link 'Full story' to see the full report.

English translation of the entire article will probably follow later.

Skype for Linux 2.1.0.81 Beta 2 is released. This popular instant message & voice/video-chat software makes it possible to communicate with a wide variety of platforms (including MS Windows & Apple OSX).