I have great respect for Digitimes. They have their finger on the pulse of IT, particularly in China, but they are out to lunch with the story that Apple will overtake HP in personal computing even if tablets are considered in the mix. Digitimes’ story assumes that Apple will continue with a huge share of tablets. That will fall apart because Android/Linux is being pushed by more than a dozen players large and small, each with some variation on the basic OS developed by Google. What this will mean is that consumers will be faced with many choices. While Apple has a large and growing following, the world is much bigger than Apple and consumers, particularly in the hot emerging markets will love small cheap Android/Linux tablets and smart phones.
All in all I am very impressed and I would recommend Linux Mint to anyone who want to save money and not buy the Windows alternative. It is fairly lightweight, responsive and easy to run and configure. 9 out of 10 in my eyes.
Here in Brazil, Linux usage is gaining more and more adoption for the past decade, and it is quite common to find Linux-based computers in supermarkets, computer shops, and so on. Of course, they are not that widely available as their Windows counterparts, but still, it is hard to find any computer store which wouldn’t have at least some computers running a Linux-based OS, and it is usually enough to do a web search on any Internet shop to find several compatible models which come with Linux pre-installed. Be it Mandriva, Ubuntu, or any other distribution – they all have the common open-source foundation and all the benefits of free software. And yes, they are ready for desktop and casual users to use!
It is great to know that the Open-Source movement is gaining more and more spread world-wide. I truly believe that it has the power to change the world, and I am really happy to know that it does it.
Then I grabbed the mini-VGA to VGA adapter, a 24 inch HP monitor, and got it plugged in. Now I have a Chromebook workstation that makes me sing.
I mentioned that my computer does not freeze. It darn well shouldn't. It has a 64 bit dual core quad processor with 4 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 infuriated me just as much as Windows XP did with it's intermittent stalls for no obvious reason. To be fair, a few Linux distros had momentary freezes with a slight darkening of the screen but after a bit of research, I turned Compiz off and it stopped doing it. Personally, I don't see the point as I didn't find it useful, just wobbly and shiny.
While the FreeBSD Foundation is now paying for Linux kernel mode-setting and GEM/TTM memory management to be ported to BSD -- and they are making some progress -- this isn't the first attempt at moving major parts of the graphics stack into the kernel. Pre-dating Linux KMS/DRM is the KGI Project, which still is technically around, but it's pretty much dead in terms of new development and any hope of the Kernel Graphics Interface reaching its goals.
Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they're onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.
While the 280.04 beta driver marks the introduction of a new series, the official change-log is shockingly small. All that's officially mentioned for being fixed-up in the 280.04 beta is incremental bug-fixes and preliminary support for the X.Org X Server ABI 11. This is the video ABI that's being used by X.Org Server 1.11 RC1. It's good to see NVIDIA still at the top of their game in supporting new kernel and X.Org releases, while AMD continues to lag behind with their Catalyst driver. It will still be several months before AMD Catalyst is expected to support X.Org Server 1.11.
While Intel's OSTC (Portland) team is busy at work on Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support for this next-generation hardware due out by year's end, the same team doesn't play with Intel's Poulsbo or other graphics IP that isn't an in-house Intel creation and part of their open-source driver. It seems, however, that Alan Cox is personally working on early "Cedar Trail" support for the open-source GMA500 driver.
There's a number of open-source non-linear video editor programs that have been going for a few years, including Cinelerra, OpenShot, and PiTiVi, among others. None of these projects have been particularly promising and yet comparable to the proprietary competition in the video editing world. Lightworks is an option since it's a professional software product that was then open-sourced, but it's Linux client isn't expected until late 2011. There is though another new option coming in the Linux video world and that's Novacut. Novacut is an open-source video editor, but at least it's taking a slightly different approach than the other projects.
Skype is without doubt one of the best proprietary software available to Linux users. However, ever since Microsoft acquired it, some people have started looking for free and open-source alternatives to the popular communication (Voice over Internet Protocol, instant messaging, videoconferencing) software.
Let's take a close look at some of the best choices you have if you were to quit using Skype today. So without further delay, here are some of the best free and open-source Skype replacements (in no particular order) especially for those of you who are using Linux...
Valve Software has announced they'll be making the Source Engine's Software Development Kit (SDK) available free of charge to the community and their gaming customers.
Details can be found on the Valve Software web-site. They also have information on their Wiki as making free access to the Source SDK should allow their "modding" community to further flourish.
Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !
If you believe that you are not yet ready for Gnome 3 or if your hardware can’t handle the heavy desktop environments then you can always enjoy Fedora 15 Lovelock with your old hardware using light desktop shells like LXDE or XFCE.
If you do a lot of work on a Linux computer, continuously switching between many windows, the right window manager can make you much faster and more productive than an extra 2GB of RAM.
I love the idea behind LXDM: provide a lightweight, NOT freakingly bloated (in terms of dependencies, == doesn’t pull in half GNOME) Login Manager. If it only worked properly. Until yesterday night at least.
Besides we all know that LXDM (the LXDE Login Manager) is in its early stage of development (kudos to its devs), it doesn’t mean that XDG specifications don’t deserve proper attention, and implementation.
Until yesterday, in Sabayon land, LXDM wasn’t able to load Desktop Environments correctly, for this reason (lxdm.c): the lxdm_do_login() is in charge of reading user configuration ($HOME/.dmrc or whatever) and fork() the DE loader away.
As part of the Quality Assurance commitment I am making for compiz, one of the biggest parts of this is unit and regression testing. Previously, compiz has had no such infrastructure for doing so and this has allowed for subtle regressions to be introduced into earlier revisions and then not become noticable until much later ones, making the regression very difficult to track down. One of the more annoying ones is one I have just finished debugging at 3:45AM, bug 804683, where due to the way that clock_gettime () works, it can return time values which are less than what it previously would have returned a few nanoseconds ago. Luckily, I have a fix for this. However, it was difficult to find and a lot of time was wasted debugging one of the problems that came out of it (wallpaper plugin auto-cycling not being called accurately).
The design of the default GNOME 3 theme Adwaita has been optimized for the GNOME Shell where it really shines but it’s not really meant to be used in the Fallback Mode.
Gnome shell may have started its bull run but the good old Gtk themes still don't fail to pack a punch. Have a look at our choice of Gtk 3 themes sourced from the Mecca of all Gnome themes - gnome-look.org
Ask every Gnome user. Every Gnome release, developers take away features, while giving us a proverbial carrot, but Gnome 3? They decided to just give us a stick.
For starters, the GDM, The screen where you log in? There used to be a way to select your keyboard language and other settings. That’s gone in 3.0. (Psst, some people use áccénts on their passwords but I guess Gnome isn’t designed for people)
Well its almost a week since I upgraded to Fedora 15 and started using gnome-shell. The good news is I’m still using it and generally really like it, although admittedly there’s quite a few bugs, and quite a few regressions that I really dislike. Fortunately a lot of those are fixed in the short tern with a few extensions and gnome-tweak-tools. I’ve also filed quite a few bugs, updated others where I felt I could add useful information, or just added myself onto the bug for easier tracking. There’s a lot of fixes that are being worked on for gnome 3.2 and I appreciate that the gnome team is working hard to balance their vision and design with a workable desktop.
After playing with Lightweight Portable Security for a few days, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed.
ISO image of Porteus 1.0 is quite small, well below 300Mb. Of course, it can be burned to CD and ran from there. And also you can put Porteus onto USB drive and run from there. I wanted to use second option. Documentation says that I need to copy files from iso-image when it is mounted as loop device or via archive manager. Then script has to change Master Boot Record on the drive.
€· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6 €· Announced Distro: Vinux 3.2 €· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC €· Announced Distro: Mandriva 2011 RC1
I think users are going to like Mandriva Desktop 2011 plenty. Check the main website for a full review when the stable version is released.
The Sabayon developers have done a good job at making Gentoo accessible for less technical users. However, this distro is in need of some software management improvements as I noted in the problems section. The Entropy Store needs to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and it could also use a name change.
Overall though my experience with Sabayon was pretty positive and there’s not a whole lot to dislike about it. It’s a solid desktop distro that should get the job done for most people.
I was the first Massachusetts employee - early 2001. At the time we were a completely retail, boxed product. We decided that there was a need to bring Linux to the [business] enterprise, to make Linux enterprise-class. I did a job fair up here. I had 1,500 people show up, 400 of which had some kind of kernel expertise. I did job fairs in other parts of the country, and I would get one or two.
Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! :D).
When installing Fedora , we can send hardware profile to Fedora Team.
Our local Linux Users Group in my home town of Osijek has started workshops called knowledge exchange in partnership with our public library. So first step was to install Fusion Linux Fedora Remix on their PCs.
Are there other examples with Fedora being rolled out in public libraries or in some other public institutions? I would be really interested with their experiences.
Firstly, sorry about the lack of posts recently. I kind of function on a post-when-I’m-not-doing-anything-else schedule. Recently, doing anything else has involved, at least computer wise, breaking yet another Ubuntu based installation. This time it was Netrunner, which is a shame as it looked quite nice from what I saw. It was probably my fault. Anyway, I have never actually given KDE a fair shot. I like GTK a bit more, particularly because it is used in more than one environment. Netrunner’s implementation showed me that KDE 4 could actually be quite simple to use and of course, nice to look at.
So I wanted to keep trying out KDE, but also to escape an Ubuntu base and the instability it brings (at least in my experience, yours may very well be different). This left me with many options. Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuse, Sabayon, Calculate and Salix all offer KDE desktops, among others. MEPIS, Chakra and Pardus are also great devoted KDE distributions. Still, I wanted stability without losing the package variety I am accustomed to from Ubuntu so I opted for the only Debian stable based distro out of those, MEPIS 11.
[...]
Having used MEPIS for a few days now I can officially say that it is as stable, nice looking, and easy to use as it is said to be.
According to a recent update to the Ubuntu Wiki Messaging Menu page, the MeMenu will be integrated into the Messaging Menu. Further more, the MeMenu Ubuntu wiki page now says it's obsolete and will be replaced "by an IM status section in the messaging menu", which makes it pretty clear that the MeMenu and Messaging Menu unification is about to happen.
It has been two full months since Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released with the new Unity user interface. With Unity, Canonical has taken a very drastic step and cut down on a lot of customizability that many power users would want. Understandably, many proclaimed that Unity is the best thing that Canonical has ever done. There was even an article claiming that Ubuntu is on a decline due to Unity.
The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system has been modified last week by Canonical. The second Alpha version was supposed to arrive for testing last Thursday, June 30th, but it was rescheduled for July 7th.
Recently I've found that I have a problem with Ubuntu, but it's not a simple one to explain.
You don't expect a distribution at the top of the popularity charts to risk its user base and its wider community standing by making big changes in a single release, yet this is exactly what Canonical has done with Ubuntu 11.04.
The latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal, isn't just another release of the iconic distribution. We take a comprehensive look at the new interface.
[...]
Natty is nice. It boots fast, is slick to use, and Unity is the visual upgrade Ubuntu badly needs to compete in this age of Mac OS X and Windows 7. It's also bold enough to go out on its own limb and not emulate either competing OSs (though it does clearly borrow from Mac OS X). And this is a good thing, because we need fresh ideas every now and then to see if there's a better way of doing things.
Second, everyone talks about this bad relationship Ubuntu has with Gnome. This I personally find amusing. If Ubuntu has upset Gnome, and the Gnome foundation so much, why do they accept financial support for them? Canonical sits on the Gnome Advisory Board because they support (donate money to) Gnome. This position allows them to help ‘guide’ the Directors of the Gnome Foundation in the overall direction of Gnome and the Gnome Foundation. Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of bad feelings there, or neither of the two would be together is my guess.
If you have used Bodhi before then you may be aware that one of the profiles we offer by default is one that is optimized for touch screen devices.
Hewlett-Packard, which makes and sells its own phones and tablets that run the WebOS operating system, rose 1.3 percent to a three-week high of $35.55 in New York trading yesterday.
Android and Ubuntu are cousins, they share the same blood stream and DNA code. However, there seems to be some problem between the two brothers (or sisters). Honeycomb uses MTP as the file transfer protocol instead of Mass Storage Device (non-Android OS such as iOS for iPad are even worse as you can't do anything without risky iTunes.)
While we can mount and see folders on Honeycomb tablets, we can't see content inside those folders or take back-up of images or files that we downloaded.
Well, it turns out they both love that other OS more than freedom but at least in China, Android and Linux get equal time.
At 7 inches I found tablets as cheap as $86 CDN. So it’s not the latest and greatest – 4 hours battery life, 800MHz ARM11, Android 2.1, 256MB RAM and resistive touch screen.
Each comes with a set of pros and cons and will almost certainly influence your tablet buying decision, so here's our guide to every major system.
We have written before about the International Free and Open Source Law Review, but it's worth getting an update as to what was in the last issue. I also want to make you aware of the latest publication coming out of the community of lawyers interested in free and open source software, the IFOSS Law Book.
Mantra is an open source, browser-based framework for penetration testing and security assessments. It's based on Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, so it's cross-platform, and it's part of the Open Web Application Security Project — OWASP. Techworld Australia recently caught up with project leader Abhi M. Balakrishnan to talk about Mantra and its goals
Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France :-( Travel costs are not light either.
The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer-oriented conferences to workshops for users and wannabe developers. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.
From June 27 to July 3, during Campus Party 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia, Debian Colombia invites all to join the special event "Lleva un paquetico en tu corazón (Keep a Little Package in Your Heart)" during which attendees will work on bugs and will create Debian packages. It will also be possible to participate via IRC by joining the channel debian-co on irc.debian.org. Further information (in Spanish) is available on the wiki page.
One reason I had for awhile considered cmake so strongly in GNU Telephony is that I choose to experiment with using Qt to build applications, and at the time I thought it rather difficult to build QT applications under autconf/automake. A week ago I revisited this question on my own, and found I was actually wrong about this.
Besides releasing libgcrypt 1.5 this week, another GNU project has been updated. Gawk 4.0.0 has been officially released as a major update to this popular free software utility. Gawk 4.0.0 presents several new end-user features along with revamped internals.
Minitunes 1.0 has been released, The new release added a new search box that allow you to search music in your collection , added drag'n'drop, which let us to add songs or entire albums simply by dragging them within the application, adding new translations. Fixed some bugs found in previous versions to improve stability. and more.
Includes procurement guidelines and open source software policy.
The Federal Government has issued version 2.0 of its Guide to Open Source Software, after seeking public comments on a draft guide in March.
The new, 67-page document (pdf) replaced a guide that was issued by former special minister of state Eric Abetz in April 2005.
Australian Government CIO Ann Steward said on Friday that she was “very pleased with the response” to the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)’s call for comments on the draft.
Hey all i am sorry for the last post i have many posts drafted to be posted within the next 2-3 weeks where i am going to discuss my project GccPy as there has been alot happening with it recently, i am working on a paper which shows everything about it so far but i want to have some posts demonstrating the basic principles of compilers and in deed creating an Ahead of Time version of Python on top of GCC and how this actually works. I personally find it a pretty cool topic but first i will am just in a bit of rant mood and its about whats happened since my last blog post:
Well anyway i’m currently in an awkward position i feel i may leave university but i will see because its simply causing me so much problems in my day to day life, I’ve got onto Google summer of code 2011 yet again to work on Gccpy with Ian lance Taylor but i may focus a little more on working on the Gcc middle-end to make some of my work a little easier. But the problem i am having at the moment with university is i actually failed all my modules last semester which may sound awful. Esp the one in compiler development i am writing a complaint about this at the moment due to the fact i actually took my own time to create a compiler specificity for this language they developed which works i cant emphasize this enough it actually works and demonstrates an IR properly designed and works well and doesn’t segv if you put in a syntax/grammar error i didnt even have to do this for the module.
As open source usage has entered the mainstream, are users contributing less time and money to open source projects, thereby putting the future of the project at risk? One CEO of a leading open-source-based company thinks so.
The GNU Awk developers have announced version 4.0.0 of Gawk, aka GNU Awk, the GNU Project's free software implementation of AWK, the data-driven scripting language for extracting data and creating reports. Gawk 4.0.0 is the result of two years' work in which the developers made a number of major changes.
For example, they have added BEGINFILE/ENDFILE allowing Gawk programs to execute rules when they begin or end processing a file and support for indirect function calls and "arrays of arrays" (including an isarray function). There is a new --sandbox option which disables the system() call and redirects input/output and extensions, allowing for "scripts from questionable sources" to be run with minimal access to the system.
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn first mulled over the idea of running for president of France, he professed concern that his vulnerabilities in the coming election would be the trifecta of “money, women, his being Jewish.” In the week since a housekeeper at New York’s Sofitel Hotel alleged that he assaulted and attempted to rape her, all three of those elements have converged to render any thought of a political future for Strauss-Kahn entirely beside the point.
More than six months have passed since Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others cut WikiLeaks’ purse strings. And if that blockade lasts six more days, the secret-spilling group plans to take its financial fight to the courtroom.
WikiLeaks and Datacell (a service provider assisting WikiLeaks) are to sue Visa & MasterCard for engaging in an unlawful, U.S. influenced, financial blockade.
On June 9th a the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission. Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe, and Teller (a Danish company licensed to process transactions on behalf of the card companies) are the subjects of the complaint.
It was pointed out to these companies that their coordinated action on December 7th last year to block all credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell constituted a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102). Furthermore, that the actions of these companies have violated Danish merchant laws when they terminated the payment services and by refused to reinstate them.
Creative Commons' chief of staff, Lisa Green said that the campaign was partly aimed at combating the myth that it supported "giving everything away for free".
Sky P2P, aka Skype, is a peer to peer network service. Putting it in a browser so that it can pretend to be a client is silly. Facebook is now one of the most hated companies in the US, along with other Microsoft partners such as cable monopolies, airlines and big banks.
This is basically the worst of ACTA done privately.
Thanks to the PAT RIOT act, law enforcement does not have to ask a court for permission, so the rise in asking is just a drop in the bucket. People who want privacy should only free software and encrypted communications.
Microsoft regularly inserts laugh tracks and applause into embarrassing media, so I would not trust this clip for crowd response.
Indivo X has almost all of the same benefits as HealthVault (they are little behind on the Direct implementation and beta deployment), but if you actually want to avoid a repeat of the Google Health fiasco, this is the way to go.
People should only use this kind of storage if they can use their own crypto and the site acts as a public key broker for doctors and patients. No one should use any Microsoft software for medical records because Microsoft's executives are convicted anti-trust felons.
in 1989, the vast majority of Americans -- well over two-thirds of the population -- got their coverage through employers. ... the share of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance declined from 64.2 percent in 2000 to 58.5 percent in 2008. Most of that decline occurred during the Bush Administration, and before the most recent recession began. ... The reason more and more small employers are no longer offering coverage is because many of them have been "purged" by their insurance carriers. ... All it takes is one employee of a small business -- or the spouse or child of one employee -- to get critically ill for the company's insurer to jack up rates so high that the business owner has no choice but to drop coverage for everyone.
The cost of healthcare is escalated because of the claims of these unfortunate employees. Their claims raise your rates. That shouldn't be the only reason to support the smoke free workplace - but it's at least one major one.
Bans on public smoking usually half the number of hospital admissions for heart attacks.
We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear.
The same people plan to build eight new reactors in the UK.
the 2005 report of the IAEA-dominated Chernobyl Forum, which estimates a total death toll from the accident of only several thousand, is widely regarded as a whitewash as it ignores a host of peer-reviewed epidemiological studies indicating far higher mortality and widespread genomic damage. ... [radiation biologist Keith Baverstock was fired by the WHO for] new epidemiological evidence from nuclear test veterans and from soldiers exposed to depleted uranium indicated that current risk models for nuclear radiation were understating the real hazards.
the party responsible for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history now has the power to dictate the course of restoration efforts.
Promises to privately compensate businesses in the region were not honored and the "clean up" effort is mostly a cover up.
"Buybacks don't improve operations, make the health system run more efficiently or reduce premiums. Their sole purpose is to boost stock prices" for the benefit of investors and executives. ... The buybacks slowed after that year [2007] as a result of the economic downturn but are back in favor. ... between 2003 and 2010, the five largest for-profit insurance firms spent $64.1 billion on share buybacks.
The Scottsdale, Arizona based company which has built its marketing around scantly-clad women, manages more than 48 million domain names.
"as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television," Schmidt reasoned. "If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,"
This is true everywhere and most people are unaware of it. The rich and powerful people who govern broadcast will censor the web if we let them.
Mayo and its backers, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Medical Genetics, claim Prometheus is staking exclusive rights over the body's natural response to illness and medical treatment. They say that such sweeping patents could make it harder to practice medicine, limit access to care and increase treatment costs. The patent, Mayo argues, even covers a physician's thought processes.
While the majority of these submissions were critical of the proposed exclusion of software what was notable by it's absence was a single submission by a New Zealand owned commercial software development company.
The objections were filled by multinational companies and lawyers. The same result would happen anywhere because no one really wants sostware patents.
Some hypothesise this is because of complaints to the IRS from large corporations accusing open source non-profits of actually being tax avoidance devices for their competitors. ... there are many non-profits in this predicament ... the IRS position is "we're still reviewing"
The organizations have been silent because they don't want to be punished. This left them divided and helpless but that's at an end now and contacts for complaints are given in the article.
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