Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE 11 Beta 1 and Linspire's CNR

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2008-04-26 06:40:31 UTC
Modified: 2008-04-26 06:40:31 UTC

The past week has been a pleasant one because there were many positive announcements for GNU/Linux, despite the Intel- and Microsoft-imposed OLPC disaster, which was rather predictable anyway (to those tracking the inhumane and systematic abuses).

Looking at OpenSUSE over the past week, here is what we have. From the company which planned to install Ubuntu, then dropped it for Foresight on KPC, now comes OpenSUSE.

PERSONAL computers with Linux pre-installed have been springing up all over the place in recent months. Now Shuttle, the Taiwanese company famous for making small but perfectly formed PCs, have gotten in on the act. I’ve been spending some time in the company of their LinuXPC SD3002Q, which is sold with openSUSE 10.3 Linux pre-installed.

Moving on to the development builds, here comes the announcement of beta 1 of OpenSUSE. The announcement is about a week old by now, but we post these roundups periodically.

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

There is a very nice new post from Zonker, who discusses ways of giving equal and fair chances to GNOME and the two KDEs (KDE4 might not satisfy everyone's needs at this early stage).

Of course, it really matters very little what order the desktop choices are ordered in — the majority of users are going to pick the desktop that they’re familiar with, and it won’t matter if that choice is placed first, second, or third. The users who have no idea which desktop is which are probably going to pick the desktop that has the most appealing (for them) description — not the desktop that happens to be placed first.

Screenshots extracted from the latest beta can be found at GNUMAN.COM. Beineri is the one posting a summary of the news this week

In this week’s issue:

* OpenOffice_org 2.4 available * 11.0 feature by feature: All you ever wanted to know!

[...]

That's about all from OpenSUSE this week, other than the breakdown of projects sponsored by Google's Summer of Code (SoC).

Linspire

'CNR factory', sometimes known as ~~Debian derivative~~ ~~Ubuntu derivative~~ Linspire, has had another CNR press release published. This time it's Google Earth, which is free (gratis) and typically very trivial to install.

Linspire, Inc., developer of CNR.com, the free and easy to use one-click digital software delivery service for desktop Linux software, today announced the immediate availability of Google Earth for Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 & 7.10 (32 bit) desktop Linux users.

Just like last week, the only ones to pay attention are at DesktopLinux.com (eWeek).

Ubuntu, Linspire, and Freespire users can now install "Google Earth" with a single click, says Linspire. The desktop Linux distributor has added support for the free mapping application to its CNR ("click-n-run") installer, a user-friendly tool currently beta-testing for a wide variety of desktop Linux distributions.

Nothing from Xandros recently, other than some articles about Asustek's derivative of Xandros. Turbolinux got mentioned a few times in articles about Novell in China. Samsung has meanwhile posted good results despite the corruptions and the departure of the CEO. ⬆

Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software: Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More: Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards: This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family: Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware: They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up): There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware: There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site: This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation): Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism: There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back: We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links: There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging: We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site: We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding: some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows): The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies: SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux: It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025): We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered: Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products: Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window): They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash: Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful: We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware): Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot: Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either: the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers: In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME is Worse Today (in 2023) Than When I Did GTK Development 20+ Years Ago: To me it seems like GNOME is moving backward, not forward, mostly removing features and functionality rather than adding any
HowTos Are Moving to Tux Machines: HowTos (or howtos) are very important in their own right, but they can easily distract from the news and howtos are usually quite timeless or time-insensitive
Proprietary Panda: Don't Be Misled by the Innocent Looks of Ubuntu (and Microsoft Canonical): Given the number of disgruntled employees who leave Canonical and given Ubuntu's trend of just copying whatever IBM does in Fedora, is there still a good reason to choose Ubuntu?
Debian GNU/Linux is a Fine Operating System, But What if People Die Making It for Somebody's Corporate/Personal Gain?: Will companies that exploited unpaid volunteers ever be held accountable for loss of life, caused by burnout, excessive work, or poverty?
Links 24/09/2023: 5 Days' Worth of News (Catchup): Links for the day
Leftover Links 24/09/2023: Russia, COVID, and More: Links for the day
Forty Years of GNU and the Free Software Movement: by FSF
Gemini and Web in Tandem: We're already learning, over IRC, that out new site is fully compatible with simple command line- and ncurses-based Web browsers. Failing that, there's Gemini.
Red Hat Pretends to Have "Community Commitment to Open Source" While Scuttling the Fedora Community (Among Others): RHEL is becoming more proprietary over time and community seems to boil down to unpaid volunteers (at least that's how IBM see the "community")
IBM Neglecting Users of GNU/Linux on Laptops and Desktops: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Personal Identification on the 'Modern' Net: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Not Your Daily Driver: Don't Build With Rust or Adopt Rust-based Software If You Value Long-Term Reliance: Rust is a whole bunch of hype.
The Future of the Web is Not the Web: The supposedly "modern" stuff ought to occupy some other protocol, maybe "app://"
YouTube Has Just Become Even More Sinister: The way Google has been treating the Web (and Web browsers) sheds a clue about future plans and prospects
Initial Announcement of GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix) on September 27, 1983: History matters
Upgrade and Migration Status: Git is working, IPFS is working, IRC is working, Gemini is working
Yesterday in the 'Sister Site', Tux Machines (10 More Stories): Scope-wise, many stories fit neatly into both sites, but posting the same twice makes no sense logistically
The New Techrights Will be Much Faster: A prompt response to FUD is important. It's time-sensitive.

Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE 11 Beta 1 and Linspire's CNR

Linspire

Recent Techrights' Posts