Finally, I find the hardware support in Linux is actually better than in Windows. Having said that, I really think hardware developers and marketers need to reevaluate the sometimes excessive costing when selling preinstalled Linux systems. And... Software developers, like Steam, Adobe, etc. quite frankly should be aware enough to realize the long term growth of Linux (including the migration to it), and develop Linux based versions of their products. Again, the thinking needs to be LONG TERM, not a quick buck in the short term.
"Take a netbook, Wiimotes, Nunchuks, and hemispherical speakers (which were once IKEA salad bowls), toss it up with some Ubuntu goodness and what you get is Virginia Tech's L2Ork, the world's first Linux-based laptop orchestra..."
What if your desktop could be available to you on any machine, anywhere in the world?
That's the promise of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, a promise that's been heard for quite a while. But networking constraints and software compatibility have proven to be formidable obstacles to the goal of portable desktop interfaces.
Recent announcements from Google and IBM have breathed new life into the potential of VDI, with mentions of "cloud desktops" and "persistent user interfaces" as the underlying technology for Google's new Chrome OS and IBM's Client for Smart Work. Chrome OS will deliver a portable desktop for users with web-based applications in a browser framework. But IBM's Smart Work system will truly be VDI technology, thanks to Virtual Bridge's VERDE platform.
Linux is a great operating system. It's open source, stable, fast, etc. But it isn't really very much adopted. Besides FUD and advertising against Linux by companies that don't want Linux to succeed, there's a valid reason not to adopt Linux – application availability.
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In conclusion, Linux has a bright future ahead of it. When it comes to browsers, the best are supported in Linux. And if web apps increase in availability and quality, we may see an exponential growth of Linux adoption, because of all it's other qualities! The way I see it, the future is bright for Linux, as apps move from the Desktop to the cloud, and internet is becoming increasingly available.
As more and more computers find their way to the garbage, we generate e-waste. Everyday the e-waste heap grows, and many of the computers within can be re-purposed and recycled. Re-purposing and recycling computers is extremely beneficial to our environment and light on the check book. After examining why computers typically fail, you will learn how you old desktop PC can become a “new” thin client, allowing you to work with documents, browse the web, and more.
Android OS is about to make the migration from mobile phone to netbook PC (most likely thanks to Asus). If you’ve not seen an Android-based phone, you most likely are not aware just what the possibilities are. Although Android won’t take the desktop or standard laptop landscape by storm, the netbook landscape COULD be totally retooled when Android becomes a viable solution for those small portable devices.
The fervor over Google's new web-oriented operating system is surprising, even for ardent Linux supporters. After all, it's only been a couple of weeks since Chrome OS was open sourced and after personally test-driving it on a virtual machine, I can tell you that while very interesting, this is still a very young system.
None other than the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, announced last night, on December 2nd, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 2.6.32, a release that brings lots of improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, support for ACPI 4.0 and the S+core architecture, 3D and KMS support for the ATI Radeon R600/R700 graphics cards, support for Intel Moorestown, and many other goodies for all Linux users around the world.
For many, the first thing you’ll want is a place to write, store, and play tabs or notation. Many Windows users enjoy PowerTab and Guitar Pro, each with their own collection of downloadable tabs. For Linux, we’ve got TuxGuitar. It’s a very similar program, gives almost all of the same features, and best of all it’s compatible with Guitar Pro tabs.
Digital photographs can be something of a pain. With the storage capacities available today, it is easy to take thousands of pictures, with no regard for the cost. With film cameras, there was an incremental cost for each shot taken and each print made, which tended to reduce—but not eliminate—the problem of organizing a photo collection. With digital photos, though, there are programs like digiKam that can assist in this task. As digiKam approaches its 1.0 release it seems like a good time to see what it can do.
Our ace webmaster, Kubuntiac has been telling me he warned me this had happened to others, but I simply hadn't expected so many people -- 89 already -- to care enough about Krita that they wanted to help us!
Following the release of KOffice 2.1, developers of the free office suite met last weekend in Norway's Oslo. Among them were the five strong team from Krita.
There has always been an argument between distro users of linux ,which distro is the best.
Mandriva One Excellent Version for Wireless and Media Use For Linux Users. Whether multimedia, codecs assistance and wireless connection, it has become obvious to me that Mandriva 2010 is the best. Now I haven’t used the latest Fedora or Open Suse. Most other Debian or Red Hat versions and distros open or otherwise I have used.
Then I thought of Opera Unite. Now Opera v10.10 had just been released which was the new Opera Browser which included Opera Unite. I run PCLinuxOS2009 so I checked my repositories and there it was, newly included. A few minutes later and it was installed and running.
Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.
Klaus Knopper teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences where he lectures in software engineering and software technology and occasionally gives seminars and talks about open source in various parts of the IT industry. Klaus received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology, which in German is die Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. He co-founded LinuxTag in 1996, a Linux exhibition which has not really seen any competition from anywhere. He has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998. As well as all of this he started the Knoppix GNU/Linux distribution. Knoppix is something of a legend as far as system administrators and computer repair technicians are concerned. Most people who know about it have a healthy respect for it. Linux User & Developer was able to catch up with Klaus in the middle of his busy schedule and ask him some questions about himself….
Next Ubuntu version 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" will be a Long Term Support(LTS) version and will receive 5 years of support for servers and 3 years for all other editions. Since it will be an LTS version, the primary goal will be maximum stability, which will make it a good choice for OEMs to include in their products. The artwork design will once again improve, as well as the usability with another launch of the "100 papercuts" project. Currently, no radical new features have been announced and there probably won't be any, since ext4 is already the default file system and the next generation BTRFS is still under heavy development. Gnome 3.0 with the totally redisigned Gnome-shell won't make it for the same reason(not mature enough for an LTS version) but it will be available in the repositories. In the netbook field, Ubuntu Moblin remix will be released as well as the awesome (I have used awesome too many times, haven't I? But it's worth it ) looking Kubuntu Netbook Remix, which will be the best looking netbook OS by a long shot.
Christmas is arriving and now is the time to gear up your freshly installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala system with a Christmas theme for Ubuntu. As always, I am providing a wallpaper, a login screen, an icon pack and a theme for the window manager.
Other features include 5.1-channel audio, Wi-Fi, four USB 2.0 ports, and choice between Windows 7 Professional, Windows XP Home with SP3, Ubuntu Linux 8.04, or "other operating systems" that you choose to install on your own.
The Fit-PC2i will start shipping in January for an as-yet undetermined price.
Next, the humble XO laptop which was once ridiculed by the titans of technology, spawned the netbook. And the netbook is eating the computer market at a stunning growth rate. From essentially $0 sales in 2nd Quarter 2007 to $3 billion in sales - 20% of the entire portable computer market - in 2nd Quarter of 2009, netbook sales show no signs of slowing.
Usually these lists of open source software start with statistics or general observations on current trends in the open source community. This one starts with a personal story.
I used to use a thumb drive to backup my budget software, and I also kept a copy of our tax returns on the same drive. While the files were password protected, I didn't encrypt them because the drive never left the house, and we don't exactly live in a high crime area.
Patents and copyrights don't mix beautifully, either. If I own a copyright on a gel box design, I can release the design and "make the source code available" - but if my neighbor owns a patent on it, that neighbor can sue anyone who tries to actually build the gel box. This is something of a problem in software. But it's a massive problem in science. Especially life sciences, which are built on patents as proxies for economic value and create enormous employment opportunities for attorneys as a result.
Data and databases are another place where the underlying property regimes don't work as well for open source as in software. But that's difficult enough to merit its own post. Suffice to say if Open Data had a facebook page, its relationship status with the law would be "It's Complicated."
I’m currently working on putting together a draft plan for Mozilla Education activities in 2010. I’m a bit blocked on coming up with a coherent plan, so I thought I’d try to unblock myself by blogging my thoughts on the subject. These are informed by the recent feedback on Mozilla Education I solicited from several Mozilla folks, as well as the Mozilla Education 2009 report I wrote earlier. Note that I’m thinking out loud here, so this will be somewhat long and rambling.
Isn't that disgusting? Blow his own horn much? Moglen "unimportant in a GPL context"?
Moglen is the lawyer who has been enforcing the GPL since 1994. He served *without fee* as General Counsel for the FSF during that time, until he founded the Software Freedom Law Center. He led the revision process for GPLv3. Yes, that means he *wrote* it, with input from the world. There is literally no one who understands the GPL legally any better than he does. Guess who Richard Stallman contacts if he has a legal question about it? Yes. Exactly.
The website of the Russian Forbes magazine was recently redesigned using Drupal.
The free software movement is one the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing.
The idea is to dispel lingering misconceptions about open source and misinterpretations of the rules around procurement and community licenses that it feels have hampered government's broader use of open source in public projects.
The administration of the Italian city of Bologna has almost completed its move to OpenOffice. Most of the 3600 PCs now run this open source suite of office applications. The administration is planning to move more applications to open source, aiming to become less dependent on specific IT vendors.
This municipality started its first open source pilot in 2004. It now plans to include free and open source software in all parts of its IT infrastructure, and says this will result in significant cost savings.
"We spent 570,000 euro on proprietary office licences in 2006. Next year, however, we expect to save some 160,000 euro ", says Massimo Carnevali, IT manager of the municipality.
Open access and the Google book settlement
Google and the groups suing it --the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers-- released a revised version of their settlement agreement on November 13. Judge Denny Chin gave it preliminary approval six days later. (For the major documents, see the links at the end.)
Free and Open Source software has been attributed to many things, such as applications, operating systems, books, and even beer. How would music be if it was developed by following the open source methodology? To find the answer to that, we turn to Tryad, which is a group effort currently preparing for their third album. I was lucky enough to speak to the group’s lead vocalist, Vavrek, and ask him about Tryad’s music and what it means to be musically open.
Similarly, you can think of the strict aliasing problem: GCC 4.4 introduced further optimisations that can make use of strict aliasing assumption on x86 as well; before, this feature was mostly used by other architectures. Interestingly enough, the amount of strict-aliasing bug is definitely not trivial, and will cause some spurious bugs at runtime. Again, this is something that you can only fix by properly testing, and debugging, on different architectures. Even though some failures now happen on x86 too, this does not mean that the same problems happen, no more no less, on anything else. And you need to add your compiler’s bug to the mix, which is also not so simple.
THE US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been chatting with Nvidia as part of its probe into Intel's business practices.
The Green Goblin has been moaning like a banshee over Chipzilla's business practices ever since the two companies fell out last year.
No explosives were found, and Caldwell finally got his picture taken (right) by Clayton County Sheriff's Office as they booked him on charges including "possessing hoax devices and making terrorist threats".
The government’s own anti-terror advisor, Lord Carlile of Berriew, believes that the police are over-using and misusing anti-terror laws to crack down on photographers.
And, of course, those computers controlling the computers will be accessible - and vulnerable - from the Internet. Which means that at some point terrorists will have the perfect way to take down an entire city from the comfort of their own homes on the other side of the world.
Smart thinking, lads. Not.
While the politicians fiddle, the world keeps warming. The Arctic may be down to its last few summers of being white. Johann Hari, in Greenland, asks hunters and scientists how climate change really feels ...
for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."
The overwhelming majority of EU citizens consider climate change as a serious problem and call for more action against global warming. More than one third of Americans say instead that climate change is not an issue, and only a minor percentage think that it is the consequence of human activity, international polls reveal.
All around the world, blue whales aren’t singing like they used to, and scientists have no idea why.
The largest animals on Earth are singing in ever-deeper voices every year. Among the suggested explanations are ocean noise pollution, changing population dynamics and new mating strategies. But none of them is entirely convincing.
It's disaster in the desert. Late last week, Dubai World quasi-defaulted — and took the Emirate's credibility with it. Will Dubai meet its obligations? It's the question the beancounters of the universe are nervously asking. As usual, it's the wrong question.
Despite all the problems with the Kindle -- poor PDF support, low-contrast screen, Orwellian fears -- it makes for a mighty-fine reading experience for users. From a publisher's perspective it stinks, with Amazon reportedly sucking down 70% of a sale's proceeds.
Digital downloads have broken apart the album and decimated major label music revenues. So movies will also get cheap and DRM-free as they increasingly migrate to the 'Net, right? Think again.
Much of the coverage of the UK's proposed Digital Economy bill has centered, and rightly so, on the damaging consequences to civil liberties for Britons caused by its Internet termination provisions. Less documented is quite how damaging these regulations are for the bill's own namesake: Britain's present and future digital economy.
The history of Net businesses shows that an integral feature of the digital economy is decentralized innovation and the creation of generative new markets by individuals or small, loosely-affiliated groups. These generators of wealth often begin as end-users of the Net, unconnected with established companies. When they start, they don't have lobbyists, and their entrepreneurship is not yet recognized as part of the country's vital digital infrastructure or core creative industries — or even a business interest at all.
By reissuing classic albums on vinyl, the industry has convinced fans to purchase music that they've already bought on CD
We are also in discussions with the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and Office for National Statistics (ONS) about the re-use of some of their charged publications. We will clarify the situation as soon as possible. In the meantime anyone wanting to re-use any DCLG or ONS priced publications should contact us directly.
The most draconian law on copyright since the time of Henry VIII. Mandates infrastructure for wide-scale censorship. Removes Parliamentary scrutiny.
In other words, it is more than 3-strikes.
The Digital Economy Bill, which gets its second reading in the House of Lords today, is the most draconian law to regulate access to information and cultural works since the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century. It threatens to re-introduce a regime of censorship not seen since the time when England was ruled by Kings and Queens. The only difference is that then it was religious censorship, now it is commercial.
People are beginning to recognize the growing conflict between individual rights and "intellectual property"--and, if forced to choose, are choosing real, individual rights over IP. Hopefully it won't stop here.
Clearly Lily Allen’s embarrassing slip up in her campaign against illegal downloading has had rather severe personal consequences.
The British singer songwriter, launched a public campaign again unauthorised file sharing, but then stabbed herself in the foot when she wrote a blog post detailing her arguments which then, ironically, turned out to be someone else’s blog post she’d copied herself.
The proposed Digital Economy Bill has, perhaps unsurprisingly, garnered a lot of attention in the blogosphere and occasionally beyond.
It had all started so differently; Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report was by no means perfect, but the discussion was broad – on universal broadband provision, opening up the wireless spectrum and looking at reforming traditional media, as well as the inevitable protections against copyright infringement.
The House of Lords debated yesterday the Digital Economy Bill, and I use the phrase “debate” in the loosest possible sense. What we got was a depressingly one-sided affair replete with misrepresentation, misunderstanding of the core issues, swallowing the industry’s figures without question, and corroboration that the House of Lords is an anachronistic, anti-democratic institution replete with sickening back-slapping, old-boy cronyism and undeserved deference.