07.31.08

Links 31/07/2008: Big Win for Ogg, Microsoft Vista Site Powered by GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Lenovo to Enter Netbook [with GNU/Linux] Market by Late September
The more things change

The latest Linux products, in contrast, are obviously better than their predecessors – it’s mostly with respect to installation procedures and oddball hardware support, but essentially every new distribution is genuinely preferable to what came before.
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Headers For: http://mojaveexperiment.com

Connection: close
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:53:51 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: “27b85b4-bfc-62838080″
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Content-Length: 3068
Content-Type: text/html, text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Last-Modified: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:30:58 GMT
Client-Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:53:51 GMT
Client-Peer: 72.47.200.149:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Title: The “Mojave Experiment”
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So I downloaded it to work alongside KDE 3.5 and wow, is it awesome! It’s almost like an entirely different program, making my darling Ubuntu Gnome desktop look a little boring itself. I may even do a fresh install of Kubuntu in this partition with KDE 4, then upgrade to KDE 4.1. In any case, I’m sure I’ll report back with more to say!
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When it comes to picking the right e-mail client, Linux users have tons of choices. I have here a list of 8 of the best free and open source e-mail clients that are available for Linux.
Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5r1 has been released

An updated version of Parsix GNU/Linux 1.5 code name `Viola` is available now. Viola r1 is synchronized with Parsix and Debian testing repositories as of July 24, 2008. This version contains several bug fixes, updated kernel drivers, updated documentation and updated X.Org. Highlights: GNOME 2.22.3, GNU Iceweasel 3.0.1, Pidgin 2.4.3 and OpenOffice.org 2.4.1. Viola officially supports Compiz-Fusion, VirtualBox-OSE and GNU Flash Player.
5 Reasons to Choose Debian Linux Over Ubuntu Linux

For those rare people who don’t know, Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution is basically Debian Sid (the unstable version) plus a few GUI apps and modifications. Debian is one of the most successful community-based distributions.
Linux Sea, an online book on Gentoo Linux

Kernel

Telecom

SAMP and Sun Virtualisation

F/OSS

Ogg/Firefox Victory

Linux (or Linux-based) Media Players

Roku’s Netflix Player: a hands-on review
Review: The Sandisk Sansa View

Thanks go out again to Sandisk for creating such a great PMP product, and for supporting the FOSS and Linux communities by powering their hardware with Linux.
amaroK: Music App for Linux Reviewed

Apple

Microsoft

Freedom and Rights

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5 Comments

David Gerard said,

July 31, 2008 at 6:22 pm

The Ogg Theora thing is a big win for FOSS. Particularly as Wikimedia has been desperately waiting for this – remember, we only allow Theora videos. The WMF installation of MediaWiki does allow the <video> tag if supported by the browser, but it’s presently the last option as browser support is still really crappy. But with people beating on the Firefox nightlies and generating bug reports and crash reports, it may be in better shape by 3.1-final than the current option, which is Cortado under Java!

(WMF does allow a little bit of Java into the system software. That’s because so far Sun have been making good on everything they promised with freeing Java, so we think it unlikely they’ll embarrass us at this stage.)
Roy Schestowitz said,

July 31, 2008 at 11:31 pm

I believe that Firefox (Mozilla) did this because it realised the threat of a proprietary Web. Opera too recently started Ajax/standards seminars because it sees it under threat by lazy developer that champion the binary SDKs and binary page content/viewer (which Google and Yahoo now encourage by indexing!).
aaaa bbbb said,

August 1, 2008 at 1:00 am

Wasn’t there a screenshot (ages ago) of a WinUpdate-server running on GNU/Linux?
Roy Schestowitz said,

August 1, 2008 at 1:13 am

IIRC. Microsoft.com had it Flash preloader running fedora. Hotmail might still run on FOSS.
David Gerard said,

August 1, 2008 at 5:41 am

“I believe that Firefox (Mozilla) did this because it realised the threat of a proprietary Web” – very likely. But it’s worth noting the <video> element was proposed by Apple for use in Safari! It’s just Firefox and Opera (in a labs experimental build, not in actual release-line stuff) have been the first to implement it with Ogg in place.

The main vector of attack for Apple would be to put up a metric buttload of H.264 or similar encumbered-format content themselves.

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