KDE Forum Klassroom Kourse 1 is in progress! This kourse is being led by msoeken & the topic for this is “Fixing KSnapshot bugs”. The Kourse started with 5 bugs as aim. Students would be required to fix them and will be guided by msoeken while doing so.
Linux Mint is a bit of a dark horse when compared with the big distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat or Gentoo. Don’t overlook it – it provides a great deal of polish that the Linux world has been looking for for a long time. I just put it my old desktop system, so here’s my impression.
So, here you go, TomTom. Get your PR department out of the Service department, and start thinking of where you get your money. Do you REALLY want to forego the income you could make by supporting the very operating system that you use?
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TomTom uses Linux. But TomTom doesn’t want to acknowledge that, and therefore ignores potential customers. Or, perhaps it’s more than ignoring potential customers. For example, there is the publically demonstrated behavior of Microsoft. Microsoft is noted for its anti-competative contracts with companies, its “buying off” companies, organizations and even political entities, and its subversion of even standards organizations. (Oh, don’t believe me. Go see for yourself. Search for the lawsuit by the DOJ [such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft] and the record of what happened at ISO with their “Office Open XML”, or their behavior in third world countries with the advent of the XO computer.) Such behavior in an individual would be considered unethical at best and criminal at worst. But because Microsoft has money they manage to get away with it. If some combination of the above is the reason that TomTom has so ignored Linux as an operating system then their shame is complete, and they deserve to be known as “that navigation company that USED to be a contender in the market”.
It also isn’t a speed demon, but so far with web browsing and using OpenOffice, I haven’t found myself waiting for anything. One thing to note is that I requested a Linux version of the netbook. It runs “Linpus Lite Linux”, a customized version of Fedora with a very useful dashboard for everyday applications.
The figure of less than 60% for Internet Explorer is certainly impressive, given the fact that it held close to 100% of the market a few years ago. One question is: what is the breakthrough point for Firefox? The current 30%? 50%? Something else? For me, an important psychological moment will be when Internet Explorer dips below 50%, and Firefox above 40%. At that point, both will be in the 40-50% range, and it will be clear that they are essentially on a par.
So we get to wonder: why won’t the Linux-based Android OS attract as many consumers as the Ubuntu-EEE operating system on ASUS does? Rogers added that Google will lead the deals for the release of computer OEMs for Chrome. In addition, he said that Chrome will experience some little problems with a “significant chunk of the browser market.”
I have a quad-core CPU, super-fast hard disks and heaps of RAM – Linux is already pretty darn nippy if you ask me!
Perhaps. But, let’s face it: if it takes more than 30 seconds to get from pressing the power button to you reading your email, that’s 30 seconds you could have spent chatting to the pretty lady in the cubicle next to you, reading the latest XKCD comic or – most importantly of all – basking in the glow of the most recent issue of Linux Format magazine.
I just stumbled upon some screenshots of RedHat’s oVirt project. I hadn’t heard of it before, but now I can’t wait to see the finished product. oVirt is a new frontend for KVM which provides libvirt service and hosts virtual machines and a web-based virtual machine management console.
The ability to balance the business with the community, the ambition with the empathy, the determination with the acceptance and the hope with the realism is what, personally, strikes me as amazing and vital to our little community of people.
I wait with excitement in my soul to just how far we will be able to take KDE in 2009. All I know is: world, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
John McCreesh noted that OpenOffice.org 3.0 reached its 25 millionth download on Christmas Day, December 25. (See the bouncer statistics for the latest number, which is already well above 25 million, though it’s just a few days later.)
Demand for Linux server skills grew by only 18 percent — but as you’d expect, that segment has far more postings than any other. Similarly, JavaScript and Perl, which have been popular for some time, grew slowly but from a large base.
I am pleased to announce the availability of LSB 4.0 Release Candidate 1.
This version of LSB 4.0 has been put in the normal release directories, but IS ONLY A RELEASE CANDIDATE! In particular, certification is not yet open for LSB 4.0.
Kochi: The Indian Linux Users’ Group (ILUG), Kochi chapter, will discuss various aspects of free software education in schools in the State at its monthly meeting at the Internet Club in Broadway Enclave on Sunday.
The thrust of the meeting will be to bridge the gap between the teaching community and the free software fraternity.
The concepts in Windows are really messed up. You need to press Start to shut it down! Where is the logic? You open My Computer and instead of information about your computer you see drives. What if I want my drive to be mounted in some other location? What if I do not wish to install an anti-virus? We are paying for absolute horse****. Bulky and useless.
I made a small KDE 4.2 counter. The small icons in the counter indicate (left to right) a great interface, security (good ol’ *nix), ease of usage, customizability and support that KDE offers.
IMHO a distribution like Mint is essential if the Linux community wants to move more people from Windows to Linux. The geeks have long ago adopted Linux as their OS of choice. What we need to do now is convert those people who regard their computer as an appliance. Tools like mint4win and having all the codecs working out of the box is necessary for these folks trying out Linux for the first time. I fear anything less will convince them that Linux is shoddy or somehow inferior in quality to Windows. I think the “it works better” arguement has to come before the “it’s free” argument. Otherwise people will buy the Microsoft bull and Windows will continue to garner it’s 90 percent share of the desktop market. As people gain some experience with Linux I think they will come to appreciate the difference between free and proprietary software.
Marcich cited progress ODF made in the year and outlined in the ODF Alliance’s annual report as proof that ODF will eventually beat OOXML. Governments around the world are currently setting interoperability guidelines for the technology used in their agencies, and are standardizing file formats a part of that decision.
Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day
Markos Moulitsas, creator of the Daily Kos on-line political magazine 06 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
A short while ago, I installed Windows XP on one of my computers. *horror*. It’s not so bad. It does some things quite well. Even after bloating it up with about 50 open source apps, it still seems to chug away quite merrily. I gor rid of the antivirus software, as it slowed the system down. What is this ‘virus’ thing that everyone keeps talking about anyway? Today, a win to Linux and a win to Windows XP.
The 0.10.4 release of Google Gadgets for Linux is out, with optimized performance and memory consumption, as well as many bug fixes. To install or upgrade your copy of Google Gadgets for Linux, just download and install the binaries for your platform.
The g.Micro is available as an ISO image of the CD, you just need to download and burn it with your favorite cd-writing software and then boot from cd-rom. For USB is distributed as a ZIP archive. Simply unzip it to your USB device and run bootinst.bat (for Windows users) or bootinst.sh (for Linux users) to make it bootable.
E-Swecha is based on the Debian OS which is a variant of Linux, the most popular open source OS. Unlike proprietary software like Microsoft Windows, open source software allows the original source code to be modified and distributed.
LeanXcam is an intelligent color camera that combines a CMOS sensor, 500-MHz Blackfin ADSP-BF537 digital signal processor, tailored Linux-based operating system, and OSCAR image-processing framework. Memory includes 54-Mbyte internal SDRAM and 2 x 4 Mbyte flash; microSD cards up to 2 Gbytes are optional.
TED followed Nicholas Negroponte into Colombia to deliver 650 GNU/Linux-powered OLPC XO laptops to kids there. Interesting story with deployment numbers scattered all over.The video also addresses other areas in the world and ends with a Give 1 Get 1 plug.
First there was Compiz, a compositing window manager that brought very interesting desktop effects to Linux, and then Beryl came about as a fork of Compiz before it ultimately turned into Compiz Fusion. Today though, on Christmas eve, the world can now meet Compiz++.
Compiz++ is a branch of Compiz that brings several new features to the table and there are huge changes. First off, the Composite and OpenGL layers to Compiz have been separated so that Compiz++ no longer is just a compositing window manager. If your graphics hardware or drivers don’t support Composite, you can now run Compiz++ as a normal window manager without compositing effects. Other rendering back-ends could be introduced to Compiz++ so that the windowing manager could render to say X Render or Clutter. Compiz++ also provides re-parented decorations.
One of the advantage of using Linux is that you can choose the graphic environment you want to use and you can customize it as you want. This article offers you a list of the 25 best screenshots, found on the Internet, and which will give you inspiration to customize your desktop.
These were the exact words from my wife’s mouth when she saw my Mandriva 2009 install. I choose the KDE 4 desktop which is eye-candy in itself, but Mandriva devs have put in a lot of effort and made KDE look much more adoring. Every look is pleasing and speaks of the attention to details paid by devs.
Fricke cited a Red Hat customer, a passenger railway company with 100,000 daily passengers and $1 billion in revenue, that deployed JBoss applications server, reaping 700 per cent performance gain. Following that, ticket sales were integrated with eBay auctions to improve utilization of trains. “One of the beauties of SOA is it’s not a static deployment. It can be expanded to solve other business problems,” said Fricke, while stressing that as SOA deployment expands across an organization, governance becomes increasingly important.
I’ve talked about a lot of pros for Fedora. What Ubuntu has going for it is that it is a bit simpler to get installed and working for a basic setup on common hardware and getting common software packages installed is much easier. If you know what you are doing (aka you are a geek seeking fun and entertainment), Fedora is more efficient, can be hacked around with a bit more, and in my opinion is a better distro, but not by very much.
Above all – you can’t really go wrong with either one of these fine software systems. They are easily better than MS Vista…I can’t comment on what Apple and BSD has to offer yet. Now I’m onto getting Eclipse 3.4, Seam, MySQL, and JBoss AS/Portal installed on my shiny new Fedora laptop. That should provide hours of geeky fun”.
Do you play now, and if so, what games and on what systems? I play occasionally, most often choosing a game at random from the selection available for the Fedora Linux distro. I tend to stick to variations on the classics but have to admit that Blob Wars is amusing.
There’s no way around it: the longer you run a Windows installation, the slower and less responsive it gets. On my year-old dual-boot laptop, I wait longer and longer for Windows to boot, and longer and longer for programs to do what I ask. Meanwhile, my Ubuntu Linux installation, on exactly the same hardware, installed almost as long ago, is as snappy as the day I set it up— faster, in fact, as I’ve tweaked it and geeked it.
Linux Professional Association on Kenya, a group of local software developers, has embarked on a sensitisation programme among government bodies with the aim of wooing them to use Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
Linux has been 64-bit for eight years, and Apple’s operating system for five. But compatibility problems have dogged the 64-bit versions of Windows since its introduction in Windows XP.
Last week our annual Linux Graphics Survey ended. There were over 14,000 submissions this year to the eleven questions we asked pertaining to X.Org, Linux desktop usage, and graphics hardware. In this article are all of the results from this year’s survey.
I’ve implemented a sort of Mac OS X ’sheets’ animation in the simple-animations plugin. It is designed to work with dialog boxes so that they appear to ‘roll out’ of the top of the window. The animation is there, I just haven’t got parent window detection to work with dialogs yet and haven’t put window placement code in. Once that is done it should look (somewhat) realistic without violating the hidden patent I probably don’t know about.
Wow we are so late this time — probably some Debian blood is still flowing through my veins — but this is really worth it, 2.25.3 is here and there is goodness overflowing.
This is my first post on these forums. It’s going to be a happy one. For happy is the state I ended up in tonight. Because, you see, I made “The Switch”. Bye Windows, hello Linux-world. Ubuntu. I am amazed. I am astonished. I feel like a total idiot for not having done this transfer before.
No doubt, Ubuntu will spill over from college IT departments out to student populations as more and more Netbooks (preloaded with Ubuntu) arrive on college campuses.
Garmin’s first cellphone, the nüvifone, has yet to see the light of the day. But the personal navigation devices maker is already working on its second handset–a Google Android mobile operating system-powered device.
OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE: Tux Paint is a computer drawing program that is great for kids. You can give open-source software for adults, such as Linux operating system or Gimp, an image-manipulation program.
My mom is smart, but no computer expert. She’s a teacher, and of course uses Windows. We’re on an international cell phone call. I’ve mentioned Ubuntu to her before – specifically Edubuntu as she is interested in kids and computing. We’re talking about getting Skype set up and she asks me why I don’t use Windows.
If I were Microsoft, I’d be worried. And I drank the Redmond Kool-Aid many years ago when Steve Balmer gave me a free copy of all of Microsoft’s business-related software in order to help my fledgling book publishing company. In return, I helpd convert 2 companies into Microsoft shops. I still love Microsoft, but with an almost or actual depression staring the world in the eyes, I’m not sure I can afford their stuff any longer.
One of the most powerful aspects of free software is that its entire approach and mindset is orthogonal to proprietary software. It’s not just better, it’s profoundly different. That’s one of the most important reasons that *everything* Microsoft has thrown against free software has not just failed, but failed dismally. The company can fight and win against more or less any conventional rival, since it has spent years honing its attack methods. But the latter are simply inappropriate when trying to compete against projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the community cannot be bought off or out; nor can it be undercut by selling goods at a loss against it. In fact, it is striking that along with undeniable strengths, the increasing commercialisation of open source has also brought with it vulnerabilities – notably legal ones – as some of free software’s angularity has been smoothed down to make it more “acceptable” to enterprises.
If you’ve never used KDE on your PC before, it will take some time to load all the way to the desktop on the very first run. I believe it sets up all the menus and shortcuts for all the installed software. If you log off and log back into KDE, all the logins (and the splash screen) will load a lot faster…
A lot has happened in trunk since the release of KDE 4.1 in July. With 4.2 final just a little over one month away, now is the perfect time to look back and see if we have achieved our goals. I would like to try and start something here by writing an overview of what has happened in KWin over these past six months, if the developers of all the other KDE sub-teams also write one for their own projects we can have a nice little series produced.
Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 2 was originally scheduled to be released yesterday, December 18th, but I guess the developers encountered some issues with it. Anyway, this second alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope), which is scheduled for release in late April next year, was uploaded a couple of hours ago on the official mirrors and, as usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.04 development.
Linux-powered and budget-priced, the ASUS Eee PC and its successors proved that you didn’t need a full-blown notebook computer to get work done. A netbook gets you Internet connectivity, word processing, and a slew of other common tasks — all in a machine that cost around $350 or so. Even if later models of the Eee and other netbooks came with Windows XP as an option, that wasn’t enough to kill the buzz for inexpensive Linux-powered devices. Netbooks also proved to be a better bet than Linux-powered desktop PCs at the same price point: why pay the same for a machine that doesn’t even come with a display?
The Internet can prove complex to some, especially copyright holders. Recently, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) notified the webhosting company of a BitTorrent tracker dedicated to Open Source Software, that it was infringing copyright of one of their clients. Without any notice, the webhosting company pulled the tracker offline, not realizing that the tracker had done nothing wrong.
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