After his release in 2007, Scott was fitted with a monitoring ankle bracelet which restricted his freedom, but the government hadn’t finished limiting his life. Scott had to have special software installed on his computer to monitor his online activities, but since it was Windows only, he had to give up his beloved Ubuntu.
In a world of full of standards creating Cross Platform applications ought to be simple, right? Well the important word there is full: you can't walk down the street these days without tripping over somebody's standard. As always it's Open Source to the rescue. This month we highlight a few of the tools available for doing Cross Platform Development: Lazurus, Qt, and Titanium. We also have an interview with the developers of Google Chrome, the newest cross platform browser. Along with our features we have our usual spate of articles on Linux and Open Source: Shoulda (a favorite tool of Hillary Clinton), AppArmor, ImageMagick, Openfire, SocNetV, Linux-MiniDisc, Open Source Compliance, and in the slow but never ending evolution of our own Kyle Rankin, he gets one step closer to being a fan of Twitter by using tircd.
Earcandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, which for me is probably the first thing that i ever liked about pulse audio. This volume manager could mute music in your amarok or rhythombox or literally any music player when you play some video in youtube(i am not lying) or VLC or other video players. Mute is not the right word, but instead the music slowly fades away, and the sound from video player fades in. Sounds promising eh? But it is much better than you think.
I have made contact with Bob Moore, the guy who helped me "scam" thousands of dollars out of the Linux community for the Tux 500 project. He is working on his end in Indiana to see if we can find someone to secure the stuff until we can make arrangements to pick it up...but that's a lot to ask of someone on short notice...
It’s only a little more than a month from now, the seventh Ohio LinuxFest. This year we will be celebrating 40 years of Unix!
There's one other way to address this problem, but we imagine most people won't want to go down that particular road: switch to Linux. Adobe recently released an alpha version of the 64-bit Flash player for that OS, but Windows users still have to wait.
Gary's response was straightforward. Although he's had some exposure to free software such as Linux and Open Office -- and so wasn't phased by that aspect of things -- he felt uneasy at opening up computers and performing tasks such as adding memory. Could I help him?
Using computers doesn't require any kind of special geek talents, just study and a mind open to letting some actual knowledge in. Anyone can learn anything, despite the anti-Linux FUD that insists Linux is not ready for "the masses" because it's not magically simple; these fictional moronic masses who exist only in the mind of FUDsters and astroturfers. It's a shame to waste so many electrons on such dumb stuff.
Logical Volume Management (LVM) on Linux: A great tool for creating pools of storage hardware that can be divided, resized, or used for snapshots.
According to the report, which ranks the top 10 worldwide and U.S. IT consulting vendors according to IT consulting revenue, IBM continues to own the top position worldwide for 2008. This is the second consecutive year that IBM has ranked first in this category, increasing market share year-over-year.
With the official documentation for the Gallium3D driver architecture being a bit dated, Corbin Simpson (a student X.Org developer that has largely been working on the Gallium3D driver for ATI R300 class hardware) set out to improve the situation.
This afternoon though there is RS780 Chipset documents for the CoreBoot developers and the general public.
Linux 2.6.31 will offer Kernel-Based Mode-Setting for Radeon graphics cards up to model X1950. The developers have included new drivers for X-Fi sound cards and for Intel's "Next-Generation Graphics Device". Many further improvements affect the drivers for webcams and TV hardware.
Despite the summer holiday season in the northern hemisphere, the development of the kernel has continued without interruption, and the fifth release candidate of Linux 2.6.31 has already become available. This version contains the gspca/sn9c20x webcam driver, which still managed to sneak in although the merge window has long been closed. However, this is only one of many changes in the audio and video area of Linux 2.6.31.
For its part, Moblin is not an office suite but an entire software environment, specifically tailored to netbooks and other embedded devices. Over the past few months, both Novell and Phoenix Technologies have issued promising announcements around Moblin.
For many people, a simple audio editor like Audacity is fine for recording, splitting, converting and manipulating audio files. Some folks, though, need an app that can handle more involved projects. Ardour is a digital audio workstation that's designed for musicians, podcasters, voice actors, editors, and anyone who needs full-blown professional software with all the bells and whistles.
Most of you are of the notion that Linux stands nowhere in entertainment when compared to Windows. Especially, people complain Linux has no cool games. Well, Windows Vista somewhat changed the scenario, as the content played in it gets locked by DRM. Linux has no such issue. On the contrary, Linux has added up a number of cool multimedia entertainment software to its support. We assorted the 10 best multimedia entertainment software to make your experience with Linux richer than every before.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - New version of the Gecko engine. - New GSM 06.10 codec support. - Improved support for the disk volume APIs. - Support for XShm pixmaps for better performance. - Various bug fixes.
Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.
The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.
In the development front, support for multiple background images, gradients, rem units (root font size) in CSS. It scores 94 in Acid3 (the web standards compliance test), one point more than Firefox 3.5.
On the 4th of August, 2009, the KDE community released KDE 4.3.0, delivering its user base the first iteration of this next-generation KDE desktop environment. It boasts a modern and beautiful desktop, with over 10,000 bugs fixed and close to 2,000 features implemented over the older versions, such as the more buggy KDE 4.2.
I decided to try out the Lancelot launcher. And I like it. I've even replaced the default KDE launcher with it. As I've limited needs to have a menu, I know what I want and I want it fast. And that's what Lancelot provides.
I have an old pc, it's from 2005. (2.4 Ghz P4, 512MB RAM, 80GByte HDD and an 64MB nvidia graphics card. I mostly use Linux mint, on all my PC's. At school via a USB stick, and at work via mint4win.
[...]
Overall Antix is a very good distribution, and on the same PC Mint used about 230-270 mb RAM 5 min after boot, and Antix uses not more dan 80-120. A whole lot better.
After almost two weeks in the Spanish province of Extremadura, the free project Debian appears satisfied with the outcome and promises the next release “Squeeze” will benefit from the meeting.
And the Arch Linux Magazine is born: * The PDF version * The HTML version * Discuss this Magazine
In the last few months, numerous Linux distros (Ubuntu NBR, EEEbuntu 3.0) have been released for the netbooks. Here is another one, but unlike the two distros mentioned above, it is based on highly sophisticated Arch Linux, which is generally considered for the pro users.
[...]
Its install size is 559MB which is significantly smaller than the Ubuntu NBR. However, it still manager to pack in all the basic apps like web-browser, Open Office, Skype and GIMP (for image editing). Also, everything works out of box (including Wi-Fi).
Ecommerce, a global web hosting and e-commerce services provider has worked with Red Hat specialist Vizuri to develop an Intelligent Data Centre web services hosting platform that aims to improve customer service, reduce customer turnover and cut operational costs.
Fedora 12 is also picking up a number of new features including new virtualization capabilities, improved power management, and many other features. The first alpha release for Fedora 12 is coming in just under two weeks.
For those interested in a non-Linuxer point of view, Bruno Dieter Chan offers his thoughts in a July 28 review on TopTechNews, and they are, well, luke-warm. After praising the distro for playing all his multimedia files, for offering a good web-browsing experience, and for providing reasonably fast 30-second boots, the complaints kick in.
The reviewer was disappointed in the lack of QuickTime support, as well as some movie "shudder" effects when he tried to use "restricted drivers for my ATI 4850 graphics card." He also groused over having to download a driver for his Creative X-Fi card, and then noted that it output audio through the motherboard instead of the X-Fi's jack. Also, apparently, Mint 7 didn't support plug-and-play with his Canon A400 or fully support his Sansa player.
"Overall, Mint 7 offers most of the software that an average user needs," concludes Chan. "Though I have issues with the OS, it still can be used as a 'light' desktop OS. But if you're going to do more than just Web browsing, then it would be better to stick with Mac OS or Windows."
All in all, Linux Mint is a fusion between the usability and tools of Linux Mint with the elegance of the KDE desktop. I’m not a great fan of KDE, but the Linux Mint tools certainly help to put this distro above the rest.
Longer term, Canonical is working on a Landscape configuration that service providers (ISPs, MSPs, VARs, etc.) can leverage to remotely manage their customer networks, according to Ken Drachnick, Landscape manager at Canonical. It sounds like the potential Landscape service provider edition will debut sometime in 2010.
From what I have seen, heard, and experienced, Edubuntu is almost brutally easy to set up and administer. It is hardly the only choice for this, however. OpenSUSE has kiwi-ltsp, Revolution Linux has a version of K12Linux, and K12Linux, of course, has its own version running on Fedora. Point is, there is a lot of traction growing in the Linux community for thin computing solutions. This will be a very interesting space to watch in the next year or so.
Conclusions: Ease Of Installation & Use: 3/5 Stability: 4/5 Speed: 5/5 Community & Documentation: 4/5 Features: 4/5 Overall: 4/5
The emu itself isn't even optimised for the Pandora, being an 'off-the-shelf' piece of Linux software. The sound is therefore a bit choppy, but the team are apparently working on refining it into a dedicated version.
Plaszma is a Linux-based OS, and it seems that Creative has selected Opera due to its compatibility with web-based apps. Basically, Creative is hoping that developers will be quick to start rustling up interesting apps and widgets for the Zii Egg due to its use of Opera.
So far, about 1,800 developers have signed up for the PreDevCamps, which are intended to stimulate the creative juices of attendees by exploring what's involved in writing applications for Palm's innovative webOS, migrating mobile and Linux applications to the new platform, and testing and optimizing them.
As you might expect, the Elonex Onet+ uses Linux, but its Debian distro has been crafted specifically for this processor.
After Updating my Dell Mini 9 to the alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala last night and running all the updates, I was treated to a completely new UI for netbook-launcher. It's still unstable, but personally I think its an improvement to the last version which is high praise considering I think the current UI of the Netbook Remix in 9.04 is the most usable netbook interface on the market today.
Today, I proposed OOo4Kids to become a part of OpenOffice.org Project.
Starting today, we're going to try and create semi-regular updates on what is going on in the fast moving world of Samba development, what we're all up to, and where the code is going in the future. This will be a technical blog, with details on the internal changes in Samba code. We hope you enjoy it !
Barracuda quietly unveiled CudaTel this week, with a Web site offering a glimpse into the company, which promises cheap and easy open source VoIP. CudaTel is a collaboration between Barracuda and FreeSwitch, an open source telephony platform.
Short answer - yes.
Free and open source software is legal for both personal and business use. FOSS comes with a free license such as GPL (e.g. Linux kernel). Other application software comes with a slightly different license. You will find license information on projects website itself.
Topics for this podcast:
*Open source as an on-ramp to the clouds *Struggle, death and life for CentOS Linux *Linux, open source part of embedded sw shake up
In summary, my overall impression of openSolaris, when I consider it only as a stand-alone system, and look at the installation and desktop, is not bad. Obviously its big advantage is that it is in use at a lot of large companies, in a lot of large data centers, so knowing it and being able to work with it and manage it, would be a plus. Its big disadvantage, though, is that its configuration and management are dramatically different from any other Linux (or Unix) distribution (at least that I am familiar with), so even experienced Linux administrators will have a pretty good sized learning curve to really become proficient with it. From what I have seen of the desktop, the difference at the user level is probably not as large, but I can't be sure yet. The place that it really falls down for me, though, is in co-existance and co-operation with other Linux distributions. It just doesn't do that at all well, and that makes it a royal pain on a multi-boot system.
Via Sugree (and many others on Twitter) it has come to our attention that the Prime Minister of Thailand, Abhisit Vejjajiva, uses Firefox. It’s also pretty cool that the Thai government is using Flickr too.
Open-Xchange, the leading provider of open source groupware, today announced the first Open-Xchange Partner Summit taking place October 8 at the RheinEnergie Stadion in Cologne, Germany. The Summit provides the partner community with a unique forum to learn how to advance their business with e-mail and collaboration services.
Open source CRM consultant firm Intelestream has announced that the company is reaching out to its partners and contacts through Twitter.
Continuing on my journey of discovery of free, open source software I ran across this gem by complete accident. Let's just say that after about 5 minutes I was completely hooked!
This article is about writing a book with the help of the free software community. The book in question is Sakai Courseware Management with the main authors being Alan Berg (Me myself and I) and Michael Korcuska, the executive director of the Sakai Foundation. In reality, around forty community members delivered valuable content, which the authors distributed strategically throughout the book.
As a standalone hypervisor on processors with virtualisation features, Xen can run any x86 operating system. Xen can only support paravirtualised guests when the processor has no virtualisation features.
The long-term plan is to move away from Solaris on Sparc to Red Hat Linux on Intel for cost and support reasons.
If you are considering trying Linux and don’t want to mess with your exiting Windows installation in any way I can’t recommend VirtualBox enough. It gives you so much freedom to experiment and if you mess up or crash the OS you are trying out it doesn’t matter as its only running in a window just like an application.
A new site, UKGovOSS.org, has been launched by Public Sector Forums to encourage discussion about open source and open standards in government. The UKGovOSS.org was created to continue the discussion which started at PSF's Local Government Open Source Conference in April 2009.
Colosa, developer of open source business process management (BPM) software, ProcessMaker (www.processmaker.com), has joined Open Source for America, a broad cross-section of more than 70 companies, academic institutions, communities, related groups and individuals that serve as a unified voice for the promotion of open source in the U.S. Federal government sector.
Next week I'll be participating in the inaugural Military Open Source Software Working Group Conference in Atlanta Georgia. Open source conferences that focus on the defense market are often salesy, have a dearth of actual developers, and tend toward sartorial blandness - a sea of dark blue suits worn by open source vendor sales people so they can convince hesitant buyers that their wares are just like the other guys. Look, we even license it by the seat!
Another key factor in the FAA’s decision to select Progress Software, other than the technical and economic reasons, was Progress' ability to deliver open source solutions backed by a comprehensive support services division. Open Source and SOA are both relatively new concepts to large parts of the FAA’s IT organization, and the FAA will rely on Progress Professional Services to assist with this formidable education challenge. The Progress Education Department is currently delivering a variety of training measures at various FAA locations, tailored to the specific needs of the participating SIPs.
I’m very excited to announce today that we are launching an angel fund to help Open Education projects.
The Talis Incubator for Open Education provides funding of up to €£15,000 to help individuals or small groups who have big ideas about furthering the cause of Open Education. All we ask in return is that you ‘open source’ the results and return the intellectual property back to the community. We won’t, and never will, exert any rights whatsoever as to the intellectual property or ideas that we fund.
Nanotechnology is one of those subjects that seem to veer between hope and hype. DNA-based solutions look among the most promising, because of the fact that the material has evolved to solve many of the same problems as nanotechnology; more subtly, it is inherently digital, which makes its manipulation much easier - and promises structures of almost infinite complexity under computer control.
Sage, as we first described back in March, is attempting to do for biology what Facebook and Twitter have done for social networking, and Linux has for open-source software. Sage is needed because biologists are beginning to see how vast networks of genes get perturbed in complex diseases like cancer, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
The project is fully open sourced on a BSD-license and consists of two components, an SDK and a debugger. The SDK provides a Java API that enables communication with Google Chrome over TCP/IP. The debugger is an Eclipse plugin that uses the SDK and enables you to debug JavaScript running in Google Chrome from the Eclipse IDE.
The UK National Identity Card can be cloned and altered by IT security experts.
Colour me unsurprised.
An entrepreneur whose fledgling business was ruined by a false entry in a court database has had his claim for compensation rejected by a High Court judge.
What these standards have in common is that they are patent-free. You do not need to pay a royalty to develop with them and, crucially, they do not reflect or favor the commercial interests of a single vendor or organization.
A standard such as HTML 5 is developed with input from all the browser manufacturers, mobile handset vendors, authoring tool creators and hundreds of Web developers worldwide.
Such open standards take longer to develop than single-vendor proprietary formats, and are likely to be a mess of compromises to please everybody--and that is the beauty of them. No single company or technology can own the Web.
Internet firms have condemned the government’s “Big Brother” surveillance plans as an “unwarranted” intrusion into people’s privacy.
The companies, which ministers are relying on to implement the scheme, also say the government has misled the public about how far it plans to go in monitoring internet use.
It is quite understandable why they might see it as darn handy if the US retains a special role in the management of domain names, but this completely fails to take into account what the other 200 countries around the globe who are also online might think.
This is a new blog, designed to provide feedback to and discussion about the issues raised in my just published book "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars," available here and here. In terms of feedback, I am interested in obvious things like printing errors caught (I have caught 10 that I am happy to point out and did to the publisher already), arguments people think were wrong or overstated, things I missed, as well as good old fashioned disagreements.
This is the first of a four part series examining the way in which people who should know better maintain and reinforce the con against the US citizen that copyright and patent are sanctioned by the US Constitution.
As should be increasingly obvious in these days of instantaneous diffusion, the US Constitution is being abusively cited in ever more desperate attempts by the incumbent monopolists to demonstrate a solid foundation for copyright and patent. Naturally, the constitution can do nothing of the sort, so the corporate lackeys who resort to such abuse in pretending otherwise are attempting a con. In this way, it is solely a matter of confidence that anyone is able to persuade their audience that copyright and patent are natural rights of the individual and properly recognised by the US Constitution as deserving of protection by a necessarily empowered government.
My dad is a professional musician; he plays blues and jazz and original piano music, and has made five records. For professional musicians outside of pop music (and often in in pop as well), copyright law is already simply a burden to the point that it is almost universal ignored. Gigging blues and jazz musicians have long used "fake books", unauthorized charts of the melodies, lyrics and chord structure of jazz standards. No one is worried about other musicians infringing on their copyrights, because jazz and blues (among other genres) are rooted in a culture of borrowing and adaptation. It's inimical to creativity to draw sharp lines between what can and can't be borrowed or adapted, and indeed in academic jazz programs one learns to improvise by practicing the great "licks" on classic recordings.
This month Ireland’s largest ISP will assist with an anti-piracy campaign against its own customers. After making a deal with IRMA, Ireland’s answer to the RIAA, Eircom will first warn alleged copyright infringers before ultimately disconnecting them. Now, in what appears to be a leaked document, the entire groundbreaking deal is outlined.
I just got an automated email from iCopyright, the flunkies who handle the AP’s insane blog licenses. It turns out that my “license” to quote Thomas Jefferson has just been “revoked” and my money refunded. When I saw that word, all I could think of was Danny Glover’s response to the bad guy’s claim of diplomatic immunity Lethal Weapon 2: a bullet and the quip, “Just been revoked.”
Oh, noes! Does this mean I need to take the Jefferson line down? Will they sue me for infringement and cattle rustling if I don’t? Whatever will I do now that the all-knowing AP won’t permit me to use twenty-six words by a man who’s been dead for a hundred and eighty-three years?
While many journalists are attached to long-form stories delivered in a traditionally detached and serious tone, that doesn't necessarily align with how more and more people actually consume media and news.
So why not offer both approaches on a news site? Rather than wait for (or actively solicit) popular venues such as Gawker or "The Daily Show" to imbue labor-intensive, in-depth reporting with mass appeal, news organizations could instead present their own briefer, more lighthearted takes on longer stories and increase the chances of driving traffic and engagement to the original stories.
I think it's interesting that I almost never quote from or link to News International titles: there's simply too little there of interest. By contrast, I *do* link quite often to New York Times and Guardian stories, both of which offer stuff not covered elsewhere. So I don't think I'm going to miss Mr Murdoch's titles when they suddenly fall off the digital radar...
My hunch is that the game is up for the carpet-bombing approach. The era of the all-things-to-all-readers newspaper is ending. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that there isn’t a future for some kinds of print newspaper/periodical. Just looking at my own behaviour, I’m happy to pay for certain kinds of high-quality, generalist, content: it’s why I subscribe to the Economist, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, for example. And why I buy the Guardian. (Full disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is owned by the Guardian.) I’d also pay to read a select number of columnists and reporters — names that come to mind are Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Vic Keegan, Charles Arthur, Andrew Brown, Martin Kettle, George Monbiot, Robert Peston, Nick Robinson, Rory Cellan-Jones, Bill Thompson, John Kelly. But I wouldn’t pay for any generalist, middle-of-the-road newspaper, online or off.