The biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing. True, this does build from the spread of virtualization and use of VMs on Linux, but cloud computing has meant deeper changes in the players, uses and communities that matter most. There is now a very different presence for various distributions, some of which might surprise those who would have you believe the OS market is boring right now.
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Despite all of these previous, significant changes, the biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing. True, this does build from the spread of virtualization and use of VMs on Linux, but cloud computing has meant deeper changes in the players, uses and communities that matter most. We now see a very different presence for various distributions, some of which might surprise those who would have you believe the operating system market is boring right now.
Out of pure curiosity, I plugged the scanner into my Linux laptop. A few clicks in "System - Administration - Add/Remove Software" and I had installed Sane and the plugins for Gimp. So about 2 or 3 minutes.
Sure enough, the scanner works! I scanned a few test images, whatever I had around the office, and loaded them directly into Gimp. Works great! Another example where Linux support is ahead of the competition.
I'm simply not going to rub their afflictions in their face by offering them a program called The GIMP within the menus.
And yeah, sure...In Spanish, or Russian or most any other language you can dredge up, it will not hold the same negative connotation as it does in English....but it's English I have to deal with so for me it is an issue.
Linux Game Publishing fell off a cliff last year when their main (and only) server crashed and was offline for about two months time causing their DRM server to go with it, etc. It was at a time that LGP wasn't also publicly announcing any future work or other projects, which led many to wonder whether LGP was finally being laid to rest in a similar manner to Loki Software. However, even once they came back online, no new announcements were made. They've now only finally commented about the future.
Personally, I use GNOME 3 on my Desktop and Netbook for some weeks now, both with Fedora 15 Alpha/Beta. It took me some minutes to get used to the concept and reorganize my workflow a bit but overall the experience was quite good. I especially like the way multiple monitors work, so I can always have empathy with IRC and chat on my secondary monitor. This is particularly useful as I definitely use much more work-spaces now than before to organize my tasks. There are still some rough edges, especially when it comes to all the “Finding and Reminding” stuff and the chat integration. Actually, I really don’t want to have both empathy and the shell displaying my chat messages and I don’t want to have the “Contact List” around all the time. But luckily some discussion started on desktop-devel-list to improve the situation. The point annoying me most is that I always have to press Alt/Meta key to switch off my computer as I have connected it to a plugbar to save the energy consumed in standby normally by the computer and the monitors and my secondary monitor doesn’t go into sleep mode when connected via HDMI. Another reason for not using standby is that I cannot sleep when the blinking “Standby-LED” of my desktop is lighting the room. I want a “Power Off” menu item – Period!
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The rest was a lot of noise in the style “I don’t like it”, “Fedora vs. Ubuntu”, “GNOME vs. Unity vs. KDE”
Not long ago has been released Ubuntu version 11.04, someone loves it, others dislike the new graphical environment or something else that has been changed in this release, but at the moment it seem that everyone is talking about Ubuntu.
So let me say clearly: Gnu/Linux is NOT only Ubuntu, there are many good distributions that can be perfect for some computers or goals, let me introduce you some uncommon distributions, for uncommon i means not in the top 15 of distrowatch.com.
OpenRC, the replacement for Gentoo's current services system (known as baselayout), will be stabilized on May 8. It replaces the previous bash-only rc system in baselayout with an rc system that has a C-based core and uses only POSIX-compliant shell code.
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Failure to follow all of these steps will result in an unbootable system.
1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player. It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.
Then there’s Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which, Red Hat said, will support Java, Python, PHP and Ruby languages and Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Zend, Django, Java EE and other frameworks.
Red Hat is trying to differentiate itself among other cloud computing choices by flexing its flexibility muscle—something it says it can do because of its foundations in open source.
So far, I’ve had very good experiences with Fedora 15, and Gnome Shell has been a dream.
I contend that it's not necessary nor even desirable to upgrade an entire Linux distribution or BSD installation just to get some shiny newness like Firefox 4.
It's still a "selling" point for free operating systems: "Upgrade and you'll get the new Firefox/OpenOffice/Thunderbird, etc."
The patch is also reported to improve web page load times with a busy CPU, by non other than... Linus Torvalds. Now if only I weren't such a slacker my CPU might be busy enough to test this, but no.... CPU usage at about 5%.
Many thanks to Robin (podcast) Catling for creating these with his PDF magick.
I love the LoCo Directory. The site provides a fantastic way to browse the global list of Ubuntu LoCo Teams, organize events and more. What is more, it is almost entirely a community-driven project; the site has a series of developers who actively work to improve and refine it.
Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28 with a brand new interface and a couple default application changes. But all the talk is about Unity, that brand new interface. As one might predict, reactions are all over the spectrum.
The Unity interface has taken design cues from popular mobile systems with the focus being on saving screen space and making everything readily accessible from within that limited space. It appears designers were shooting for easy and beautiful, but some users are finding adjustment during these early days a bit challenging.
First off, let me tell you something before I start my rant on kubuntu: I've been a kubuntu user for 6 years now... and I don't intend to switch to gnome (ubuntu) or xfce (xubuntu) or any other of the other variants anytime soon. I like KDE and I'm willing to put up with the nag that I have to go through in order to continue using it
Linux Mint today published a preview of the upcoming release of its popular Ubuntu derivative, a move not often shared by other distributions. For those not enjoying Ubuntu's Unity or looking forward to Fedora's GNOME 3, Linux Mint offers a comfortable old blanket of security.
One of the most noteable features of version 11 will be the retention of GNOME 2.32. It will be the foundation for the same desktop layout users know and love, including Compiz and Metacity.
Despite that, version 11 will contain a few changes. Like in many of Mint's counterparts, OpenOffice.org will be replaced with LibreOffice. Rhythmbox will be replaced by Banshee and gThumb will replace F-Spot.
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A release candidate should be released about mid-month...
€· Linux kernel 2.6.38.4; €· XOrg Server 1.10.0; €· Mesa 7.10.1; €· Intel IPS (Intelligent Power Sharing) support; €· Btrfs, EXT4 and XFS filesystem optimizations; €· XInput 2.1 (a multitouch input extension); €· Preload.
Some of my collegues at Red Hat have been working for some time now on a book/wiki titled The Open Source Way. It is aimed at answering the very important questions of "How?" for a given set of Whats, and its a very important resource for those who are ready to roll up their sleeves and to start putting open source principles to work. But, why would anybody want to do that?
The European Legal Network Conference was held last month in Amsterdam. Organized by the FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe), it is designed “to allow legal experts to discuss the future of Free Software licenses and associated best practice in this field.”
SOS Open Source few days ago completed its first year of life, a good time to look back and and see where we have been and to recognize methods and technologies that have helped us on our journey.
I was at the Red Hat Summit in Boston yesterday and while I was sitting in a session about “Open Source” I started thinking about some of the terms the community uses.
Words are very powerful, of course, and many marketing campaigns have been based on a catchy phrase, or a turn of words.
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Most importantly, no one really likes constantly being reminded that the software they are using is “legacy software”, and that it should be replaced with “Free Software”.
Today, rising food prices are wreaking havoc in the developing world. While some blame overpopulation, and others ethanol, another culprit has emerged of late: banks and the role of speculative commodity indexes.
The primary danger of the indexes, according to a new article by Frederick Kaufman in Foreign Policy, is that they fundamentally alter the food market by transforming key stapes into a financial asset that performs more or less like a stock. So while billions worldwide scramble to find money pay for food, food prices are often subject to intensified distortions of supply and demand from speculative markets.
Since 1999, when the government first deregulated the commodities market, Kaufmann explains, investors have flocked to investing in food. The basis for that excitement is a Goldman Sachs-developed innovation known as the commodity index. Today, Kaufmann says, it's a tool that has been replicated throughout the banking industry.
On its DefectiveByDesign.org campaign page, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that 4 May (today) will be this year's "Day Against DRM". With this day of action, the organisation wants to focus the public's attention on the risks of what it considers to be an anti-social technology. The FSF has created a wiki page which allows users to swap campaign banners and event ideas.