Currently, Linux systems take the very high end machines (any machine more powerful than a fully tricked out MacPro {read supercomputers and mainframes}) and the very low end machines (phones, routers, palm-tops, PVRs).
There’s almost nothing that desktop Linux can’t do. A modern Linux desktop is probably a better choice for 95% of the heavy Internet service using population than the big commercial behemoth that dominates the desktop. I’m not saying Windows doesn’t have its place or that it doesn’t do the job for a lot of people, but Linux is better, faster, stronger, safer, and sexier than anything else out there. It’s cool. It rocks. It dramatically increases your sex appeal. And if you’ve got a 64 bit processor instead of 32, that goes double. What more do you want?
You’ve seen the wobbly windows, you’ve seen the cube, you’ve seen the raindrops. Compiz is just a bunch of useless eye candy right? Wrong. While the flashy effects get most of the attention, Compiz is a top-notch window manager in its own right. In fact, it’s got so many workspace and window management tools that many people use Compiz for years without ever knowing about some of the most useful features. This guide will cover each of the best window management plugins for Compiz and explain how each can be used to create a more productive desktop, with or without wobbly windows.
Linux, which I’m using at the moment, comes with a pretty standard blue-themed Gnome desktop common to several distros- Debian, Mandriva and Fedora- distinguished only by a branded wallpaper.
It’s a simple and elegant theme, but over the last few days I’ve been customising my desktop, changing the theme and icons. The new theme is a dark one which I think suits my laptop with its grey-bordered screen.
Even I have done it. I don’t think you can be a Linux blogger without having done at least one post about how this year is the year the Linux desktop will take over the world. However, no matter how many people seem to write about it. The year the Linux desktop takes over the world always seems to fall through the cracks. Sometimes I think that there must be some Pinky foiling the Linux Brains plans
But! The pundits cry, Linux is gaining market share every year. Surely it will win the Linux desktop prize soon. Nay! Say the naysayers, at the rate Linux is gaining desktop market share even those not born yet will have one foot in the grave before Linux has any significant rating. Which one is right?
GNU/Linux has the answer to these annoyances, and it is this: they are simply not there. Why? Because the software is written by developers that are not trying to sell you something.
It’s an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop – just like last year, and the year before that. But now there’s a new twist: that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux smartphone – with the difference that it’s really happening.
That’s mainly being driven by the huge success of the Linux-based Android system, but it’s not the only open source system here. There’s also webOS and MeeGo, both of which have their loyal fans. What that means is that whichever of these takes off, the open source world will benefit.
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If Baidu does come out with its own Android rival, that could help to achieve two things. It would finally take open source into the Chinese mainstream, and help to ensure that Linux unequivocally becomes the world’s leading operating system for smartphones – if not on the desktop.
Almost all school children in Portugal are becoming familiar with using open source, including the Linux operating system, says Paulo Trezentos, founder of Caixa Mágica Software.
By the end of this year, the company’s eponymous Linux-based operating system will have been installed on 890,000 school PCs and school laptops, he says. “In a country with a population of 10 million, this means that Linux is reaching the majority of the young people.”
In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.
One incredibly useful way that Linux has been adapted to the needs of modern computer users is as a “live CD,” a version of the operating system that can be booted from a CD (or a DVD or, in some cases, a USB drive) without actually being installed on the computer’s hard drive. Given the massive RAM and fast CPUs available on even the lowest-end computers today, along with Linux’s generally lower system requirements compared to Windows and Mac OS X, you can run Linux quite comfortably from a CD drive.
Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.
The free appliance, which features Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04, also can be deployed in private cloud configurations.
Summary: New anonymised paper is produced to make a case against GNU/Linux in schools and government corruption is said to influence decisions on operating systems
ON MANY occasions in the past we explained how Microsoft was preventing Russian schools from moving to GNU/Linux as planned. We last summarised this in March and one year ago we wrote about the "manuals" trick. Someone dropped some information and links for us last night. It concurs with what we learned before, but there is new evidence which is concrete. Below we have the raw logs. █
Summary: Microsoft captures a laptops flag in South Africa after lobbying and dumping
LAST MONTH we shared a Tectonic interview (ish) where the editor of the site explained how proprietary software vendors can take over, sometimes by getting rid of the Free software proponents. We saw that happening in several countries before. According to this latest report, the acquisition or removal of Free software advocates in South Africa is paying off for Microsoft:
Government Gazette 32077 (PDF), which details the approved specifications says that the laptops must run “Windows XP or higher”, include Microsoft Office as well as use Windows Live. Other approved software includes a range of Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Digital Literacy and Microsoft Partners In Learning.
The department does not specify any open source alternatives to the Microsoft software for the initiative.
How typical. Let’s go back exactly 2 years ago and remember how Microsoft derailed GNU/Linux/ODF in South African schools. Shame on Microsoft and on Bill Gates for pretending to be doing “charity” when this so-called ‘charity’ is actually an anti-competitive software dump. █
“By May of 1994, Gates’s patience was growing so thin that not even a public relations pro like Pam Edstrom could muzzle him.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed by Pam’s daughter
There are hundreds of press release distribution companies. Most exist with little to no interaction with each other in their industry. That ends today.
The new clients include global electronics companies NEC Corporation and Hitachi, Ltd.; infrastructure software provider Novell, Inc.; semiconductor manufacturer Nanya Technology Corporation; software developer Lawson Software, Inc.; wireless voice and data solutions provider Leap Wireless International Inc.; speech-recognition leader Nuance Communications, Inc.; and the world’s largest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
There’s a very interesting case, Media Queue v. Netflix, where Netflix is asking the Federal Circuit to revisit the standard for awarding attorneys’ fees. Here’s their appeal brief [PDF]. It would like the court to create parity between plaintiffs and defendants. Right now, the system tilts to help plaintiffs recover their fees if willful infringement is demonstrated, which is fairly easy to demonstrate. But defendants wrongfully sued have little hope of success when asking that their legal fees be covered, unless they can prove the claims were objectively baseless or brought in bad faith, a mighty high bar to get over. Netflix would like to change that to allow district courts to have discretion to award attorneys fees when folks bring litigation unlikely to succeed.
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Netflix, in short, is asking the court to think about defendants who are attacked with very weak patents, and who then are more or less pragmatically forced to settle rather than fight, just because it’s cheaper. If they can’t get their attorneys’ fees paid, what in the world makes them whole? Netflix says Media Queue is “a non-practicing entity,” which is the polite way to call such entities. Setting an “objectively reckless” standard is a lower bar than proving frivolity or bad faith, and Netflix seems to be of the opinion that patent holders with weak patents are over-incentivized to bring questionable and very costly litigation, knowing they are unlikely to have to pay their victim’s attorneys’ fees, which can typically be in the millions.
Another day, another major lawsuit. This time, a company called XPRT Ventures LLC has sued eBay for allegedly stealing “the idea and method of payment used in eBay’s PayPal and similar electronic payment systems” according to the press release put out by the XPRT’s lawyers Kelley Drye & Warren LLP.
Write Brothers currently holds three software patents. It holds two for the Dramatica® story assistant, and one for the timeline-based presentation of text used in the StoryView™ outlining software. Streamline is the fourth technology patent Write Brothers has filed.
Microsoft biggest competitor in this arena is Salesforce.com, which sells a Web-based software service for customer relationship management. The two companies are currently suing each other over software patents.
There is still a lot of new coverage about the Bilski case:
About two weeks ago the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) handed down its opinion in re Bilski, a business method patent case. The patent application was rejected, but in a way that didn’t draw any kind of line that would affect patents on software technology.
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Let’s better face this fact: there isn’t a single killer argument against software patents that will convince a non-programmer if that same counterpart has also heard the pro-patent argument. If you can ever convince a majority of decision-makers, you’ll have to do it indirectly. The direct approach has been tried by many people for many years — to no avail (except, as I mentioned before, in a defensive situation).
Moglen’s position on the subject of software patents—that they should be banned—is, to say the least, outside the mainstream in legal circles. It has, however, garnered support among software developers and other techies, especially those who work in the world of open-source and free software.
Moglen’s critique of the patent system extends well beyond the software issues he writes about, however. He suggests, for instance, that the 20-year monopoly granted by a patent is the product of a bygone era. And though he rejects the notion that he is “anti-patent,” he says that the patent monopoly grant should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, not simply handed out at the “monopoly window” that he believes the current Patent and Trademark Office represents.
Look at this, will you? The first decision from the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences post-Bilski to reference that US Supreme Court decision, in In Re Proudler [PDF], a ruling rejecting HP’s application for a software patent, setting forth a rule stating, as I read it, as saying software is not patentable because it’s an abstraction:
Laws of nature, abstract ideas, and natural phenomena are excluded from patent protection. Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. at 185. A claim that recites no more than software, logic or a data structure (i.e., an abstraction) does not fall within any statutory category. In re Warmerdam, 33 F.3d 1354, 1361 (Fed. Cir. 1994). Significantly, “Abstract software code is an idea without physical embodiment.” Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 550 U.S. 437, 449 (2007). The unpatentability of abstract ideas was confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bilski v. Kappos, No. 08-964, 2010 WL 2555192 (June 28, 2010).
This is not the last word, I’m sure, as HP can certainly try to reword. But don’t you find this encouraging? I do. And that’s why I wanted it in our permanent record of the Bilski case and its aftermath.
Well, well, well. Following the rather ridiculously vague Bilski ruling, that doesn’t actually say what the right test should be for whether or not business methods or software should be patentable, many people have been wondering what it really means. While some of the justices have hinted at the idea that most software really isn’t patentable, that’s not at all clear from the ruling. Instead, the ruling suggests that the courts come up with a new test, and then the Supreme Court will tell them whether or not that new test is okay. Many software patent system supporters have interpreted this to mean that software patents are perfectly okay. But perhaps they shouldn’t go that far just yet.
One of the first decisions post-Bilski has shot down an appeal of a rejected patent application by HP. The patent-examiner had rejected the patent on the grounds of prior art (It’s mostly AND applied to rules for passing data…) but the appeal-board rejected the claims on the grounds of non-patentability
It seems to me that the concept of certain generic sorts of software patents could well be made redundant thanks to the growth of open source, while remaining for specialist applications that have a technical purpose.
When the Supreme Court ruled last month on the Bilksi case, denying Bilski’s patent claim that Bilksi’s patent but not making any real statements on the overall patentability of business methods or software, several opponents of software patents, including VCs Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld expressed their disappointment.
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The study surveyed over 11,000 professors, and of the 1948 who responded who had started businesses, only 682 – about a third – had established them to exploit the patents obtained via the university intellectual-property systems. The remaining 1266 respondents had started businesses based on non-patentable knowledge.
Software patent advocates are praising the said decision of the Supreme Court like Tom Syndor saying that the Supreme Court was sensible in rejecting the said idea. A new layer and era of patent decade will help in requiring patent applicants to present plaintiffs to prove that their ideas are not abstract.
Summary: Proponent of food monopoly (using controversial patents on misunderstood seeds) remarks on the lack of disclosure, namely his paychecks from Monsanto
The scientist in charge of a taxpayer-funded trial that may determine whether genetically modified crops will be grown in the UK has been attacked for his close links to the US biotech giant Monsanto.
Professor Jonathan Jones, head of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre, the UK’s leading plant research centre, has shrugged off the controversy, insisting he has never tried to hide his business relationship with Monsanto or the GM industry.
“Never tried to hide” is not the same as disclosure. It is important that conflicts of interests are not left as “an exercise for the reader” to find. This is a failure both for the MSBBC and for Jones. █
Update: GM Watch has also just responded to this. “Jones backs down over Monsanto connection” says the headline and the author points out that “an article appeared in The Observer newspaper detailing Prof Jonathan Jones’s failure to make clear his busines links to Monsanto in a recent article for the BBC.”
Jones said: “It is not true to suggest I have attempted to hide my role as co-founder and science advisory board member of Mendel Biotechnology, which has contracts with Monsanto, Bayer and BP.”
GM Watch also quotes a comment which says: “I found out about Prof Jones’ involvement in an American based biotech firm back in 2001 when someone told me there were jobs going there. I was quite surprised to find Prof Jones, and if my memory serves me correctly a couple of other leading British plant scientists on the directorial board. The thing that surprised me back then was that having worked in their field for over ten years and having heard them speak on numerous occasions at conferences etc that I had never heard them mentioned their clearly relevant commercial interests. If my memory serves me correctly they always stuck to their wholly impartial for ‘the public good’ scientist persona.
“Now following the thieving banks [and] the thieving politicians, I am not surprised at all. Our leading lights are all the same, out for number one.”
According to Jan Wildeboer, Dr. Kurt Blind from Fraunhofer says that a software patent “reduces transaction costs”.
Wildeboer asks: “In what galaxy does he live?”
This pattern of patent maximisation over at Fraunhofer is at least a consistent one. Fraunhofer is a true proponent of monopolies.
Interestingly enough, the following new interview with Van Quickenborne reveals that they (Belgian government) plan to enable software patents through the back door. “Comment of Hartmut Pilch on the EU Patent video removed by Euractiv,” says the Belgian president of the FFII, which was founded by Pilch himself. Are dissenting views about this video being suppressed by deletion? Apparently so. Here is another new video of Van Quickenborne, who talks about the same subject.
At a later stage, the president of the FFII pointed out that according to Horns, “Mr Marco Schulze of BIKT had argued that patent law obstructs proper use of copyright.” These are some serious misconceptions that even Horns is opposing in his blog. Horns is not a hardliner.
Politicians ought to be educated about the technical matters involved. A lot of them remain gullible enough to rush through anything that lawyers and monopolies they work for are proposing. “Very soon, the progress bar will finally be legal to use in software in the EU,” wrote Rui Seabra. The patent is due to expire on October 24th. Why was it patented in the first place? It’s just a digital metaphor for something like an hourglass. And why was in patented in Europe, which claims to be against software patents? █
Summary: As Apple’s monopoly on a certain font rendering method expires, FreeType enables BCI by default, but Microsoft still has patents in this area of subpixel rendering
Jan Wildeboer, Rui Seabra, and Carlo Piana pass the message that “MSFT has ClearType patents for subpixel rendering on LCD screens” (details in this page).
This was said in reference to the news that “FreeType 2.4 [is] now free from patent restrictions”:
The FreeType development team has released version 2.4 of the rendering library for TrueType and PostScript fonts. FreeType is used in almost all Linux and open source Unix systems. The latest version is also much more stabile when dealing with broken or damaged font files.
“Now that is good news,” Oiaohm wrote in IRC. “Font rendering on Linux will come up to everything else.”
Jan Wildeboer wrote: “Truetype hinting #swpat (Apple owns them) have expired. So now the BCI is enabled by default in FreeType” (see this page)
Florian Müller wrote about it too, but the news was mostly covered in short messages. This fine example of the harms of software patents (making products poorer than they ought to be) did not receive the attention it truly deserved. We previously covered the ill effects of software patents on font rendering and mentioned Apple in this context. Below we add some older articles for background and future reference. █
The font subsystem on Linux evolved a lot in the last years, from an old naming, handling and option of fonts, to the support of True Type, Bistream Vera, etc. As of release time of Fedora Core 2, components like Xft, FreeType and FontConfig, and higher level software usage of them has stabilized and is now considered mature.
The story of how Microsoft used its monopoly in operating systems to acquire a dominant position in office applications and browsers has often been told. But there’s another Microsoft monopoly that’s rarely mentioned, even though most of us see it every day.
Microsoft’s fonts are used to display most Web pages on the planet. Even Linux and Mac users, who often have fled Windows to avoid dependence on Microsoft, read most of their content using Microsoft fonts.
Currently, Linux Libertine consists of more than 1,750 glyphs for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets and their derivatives, including ligatures and kerning tables. Some work remains to be done on the italics, but the roman or ordinary weight is complete, as well as the bold and underlined weights. A set of small caps is in development, and a grotesque or sans serif font (one without serifs) is planned, but not yet available.
The PC Spy is trying to make people aware of the worst software that is out there, and to no surprise Norton Internet Security 2006 is at the top.
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It is pretty obvious that having a large number of fonts degrades performance in Windows. I think that I’ll be going through and deleting some of the ones that came with Vista because I really don’t need 400+ fonts.
Up until the last few years, typefaces were a neglected aspect in FOSS. However, the increased popularity of the GNU/Linux desktop and the emergence of software for designers is changing that. “The whole vectorization of the desktop with Inkscape is really doing a beautification of the desktop,” Phillips says. In such an atmosphere, the OFL looks like an idea whose time has come.
So, although this story illustrates just how software patent issues can wind their way into open-source software, it doesn’t appear to have any direct link to the Microsoft/Novell partnership or the issues, such as the GPLv3 revision, that surround it.
The first release is a set of fully usable fonts, but they will lack the fully hinting capability (hinting adjusts font pixelization so that the fonts render with high quality at large and small sizes) provided by TrueType/FreeType technology. That release is now ready. The second release will provide full hinting of the fonts, and that release will be available by the end of the calendar year.
If the patent owner of hinting gives the Freetype project a free license, would you accept it?
David Turner: It really depends on the terms of this “free license”. Basically if it means the patent can not be freely re-licensed to other people, I really don’t see why I would find that useful. If you absolutely need the bytecode interpreter, you can be patient and wait for October 9, 2009, when the patents expire.
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There is no clear answer as to what is best. Personally, I can’t stand native TrueType hinted fonts anymore, they look too distorted to me, even if their contrast is better. My favorite Linux distribution is Ubuntu at the moment, and the first thing I do after installing it is to wipe the version of FreeType provided with it to get rid of the bytecode interpreter :o)
Also, I still don’t understand why Debian and Ubuntu keep distributing patent-infringing code in FreeType, while they keep MP3 and DVD playback out of their normal installs. I’m not even sure it’s DFSG compliant…
While the discussion continues it looks like that in the long term the major toolkits have to get together to talk about implementing the mentioned techniques. Or, as suggested by David, a initiative dedicated to bringing patches upstream is launched. It could try to work with upstream on the one hand, but with the distributors on the other hand – if the users see the results because the distributions include the patches it might help influencing the decision of upstream.
But there is no way of reaching perfect font rasterization with changes in FreeType only.
From the makers of Arial, here are three examples of bad typography in Microsoft Word. Bad typesetting in Word finds its way into résumés, business plans, research papers, government documents, even published books. These small inconsistencies and imperfections may be un-noticible in small doses, but paragraph-after-paragraph they stack up—resulting in ugly, visually-incohesive documents. Word isn’t for professional typography work, but that’s no excuse for these typography sins.
Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.said Thursday they have renewed their font licensing agreement. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Under the agreement, Apple users will have ongoing use of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows core fonts, the companies said.
If you’ve ever gone looking for legitimately free fonts, you’ve probably found that there are a lot of really bad ones. But there’s also a lot of discussion out there about “open source fonts.”
Some who post about open source fonts are really just talking about free-as-in-beer typefaces. Some, however, have embraced the open source philosophy as applied to typography.
In this short tutorial i discuss some handy fonts related tips that could improve user’s desktop experience . The tips include installing Microsoft True type fonts enabling one to render documents and web pages created in Microsoft Windows properly in Ubuntu Linux, Installing a set of cool looking fonts released by RedHat – Liberation fonts package , making fonts look good on your LCD Display by turning on subpixel smoothing , installing some cool and free fonts on your Ubuntu Desktop and finally how to install any font if you have it’s ttf file .
A recent update came through for liberation fonts. It wasn’t clear, but it looks as if there is now full hinting available. Looks very nice! Might have to add this to my Win XP work laptop as well.
Most problems when opening Word documents under GNU/Linux are due to missing fonts. Therefore, Red Hat published a set of fonts metric-compatible with the Windows core fonts last year.
If you are a graphic and web designer, the default fonts that came with Ubuntu will surely be not enough for your needs. However, if you know where to look, you can find plenty of additional fonts that can help get the job done.
Like it or not, the Arial font looks good on Windows just as Helvetica looks good on a Mac (unless you’re some typography nerd that insists on arguing which looks better/worse/etc.)
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