● 08.23.09

● Links 23/08/2009: SLAMPP 2.0, Nokia May Enter Sub-notebooks with Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Until his junior year of high school, McLean, 18, was an “average computer user.” That’s when a friend turned him on to Linux, a type of open-source software, where programmers can modify the underlying code.

• Next week, he starts his freshman year at Duke University and plans to study computer science and religion. His college costs will be partly paid with a 2009 Fedora scholarship, which recognizes students for their contributions to free, open-source software.

• The deadline is fast approaching for open source developers to participate in Open Source Software Challenge 2009 contest, hosted by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy of South Korea.

• Until August 30, students and any other developer who wants to participate, can register for the Challenge, which is aimed at giving international competitors a chance to contribute to projects from around the world, fostering information exchange and the growth of a network of worldwide open source developers.

• This year I decided to go to Froscon. I had planned to go the last couple of years, but I never actually did it. And I must admit that I like it very much. The differences with for example Fosdem are huge. The developer tracks are really of the level of Getting Things Done instead of talking about it. Also the location is quite ok. The rooms are tidy, I can sit perfectly (something I can’t say about Fosdem), the heat in the rooms is bearable and also the acoustic is very good. Most tracks are in German, but some are in English. Just the right ones.

• See what I mean? I will make a rough cut and say that Apple people develop frontend and Linux folks develop backend. But what unites them is that they both have a personal vested interest that the software succeeds, because they personally care about it. Which is opposed to the view of “professional designer” and “the user is not like me”.

• Many have marked the 22nd of October on their calendars,but they seem to have forgotten the presence of the penguin.Mind you my friend the penguin is everywhere.Here are some of the Linux distributions releasing around that date

• Ubuntu Karmic : October 29th

• Fedora 12 : November 3rd

• OpenSuse 11.2 : November 12th

Kernel Space

• As the report notes, the Linux kernel remains one of the largest and most successful open-source projects, able to sustain both rapid growth and rapid change. And, importantly, the distributed development efforts mean that development can continue on even if certain companies opt out of future efforts.

• Perhaps Linux is the only truly future proof technology?

• You know the drill, so all together now: “Another week, another -rc kernel”.

• Most of the changes are small one-liners, but the dirstat shows the areas that got a bit more tender loving care:

• 17.4% arch/arm/mach-omap2/ 2.2% arch/arm/mm/ [...]

Applications

• World of Padman is an open-source, cartoon-style first-person shooter game available for Linux too, besides Windows and Mac. It is a wonderful standalone game based upon the Quake 3 engine.

• Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn’t include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below.

• Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

• Formely known as Xara LX, it is based on Xara Xtreme for Windows, which is the fastest graphics program available, period. The Xara Xtreme source code was made available open-source in early 2006, and is being ported to Linux.

Simon

• Every once in a while, the KDE community stumbles across a third party application that is well integrated into KDE, but has somehow managed to fly completely beneath the radar. One such application is called simon (small ‘s’ intentional), a speech recognition program that integrates well with KDE and provides a means of interacting with KDE using voice recognition.

• Simon is a very nice KDE4 project with the goal of developing a speech recognition application and it currently works pretty well by letting the user record certain words and execute various commands given via a microphone. Since currently it is not included in the Ubuntu repositories, here are instructions on getting it up and running in Jaunty.

Distributions

• Dear Mandriva fans, the time has come to announce the Beta release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Linux distribution, due for launch in November this year. The features of this release are exactly what everyone was expecting, the KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28 Beta desktop environments, as well as Linux kernel 2.6.31 RC6 and X.Org Server 1.6.2.

• Latest stable release

• SLAMPP Live CD/DVD 2.0.1 (Kalinda) – August 21, 2009

• Download the latest SLAMPP here. What powers up SLAMPP 2.0.x?

• SLAMPP 2.0.x is built using Zenwalk 6.0 as its base and Slackware Linux for packages. To compile everything into a working live CD, Linux Live scripts are used.

• Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that Hilti has migrated its systems running SAP applications.

Ubuntu Family

• Canonical have been hard at work redesigning the Ubuntu installer ‘Ubiquity’ into something more user-friendly in time for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

• Long time no see; I’ve been away from the Linux community for a year focusing on other avenues. Yesterday I closed distro-review.com down and ported the Linux reviews over to this blog again. Having been away from the scene for a long while it seems fitting to review Ubuntu 9.04 and see how the situation has changed.

• All in all, PC-OS is a good distro, with points to place it above Ubuntu, but the fact that it is based upon 8.04 is disappointing as it misses out on many of the improvements made in later editions. While it is lighter than Ultimate Edition, I still think Ultimate Edition has the edge over it when it comes to ease of use.

• Launched in February 2008, Buntfu is located at http://www.buntfu.com. It enables anyone or company to list their inventory of GNU/Linux based computers on their auction style store. The site is completely free with no site fees, store fees, or closing cost fees.

Devices/Embedded

• The last peep we heard about Fennec was in late June, when Mozilla updated its mobile edition of the Firefox browser for Windows Mobile phones. This week, the Firefox browser maker has released an updated version for the platform powering Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets: Fennec 1.0 Beta 3.

• With the market for converged devices growing, the world’s largest cell phone maker, Nokia, on Wednesday said it is exploring various opportunities in this market and may enter the netbook segment. ( Watch )

• “…the PC and the mobile will continue to come closer and merge. A lot of opportunity can be seen in this converged area.

Free Software/Open Source

• It is often said that open source software wins because it is cheaper.

• However, the bigger factor in the success of open source software in industry has been performance.

• [...]

• Here’s our top ten reasons to consider using open source and Linux in your business.

• “In the heart of any open source project there is a circle of copying, modifying and sharing, all of which takes place without having to go through a central process,” he explains. “That is what drives the diversity of ideas.”

• I’ve given $10, which may not be much, but if just a few dozen Linux Journal readers did the same, his hospital bills would be covered, and there might even be some money left over for the HeliOS Project too.

• The Brussels-based European Commission has scheduled an antitrust review date of Sept. 3 to discuss the multinational companies’ proposed deal. It will look closely at two main areas of concern: Sun’s Java networking software franchise and the enterprise parallel database market—two sectors in which Oracle stands to greatly increase its market share.

• Dave Boggs, CEO of SyberWorks, states, “This week’s episode of the e-Learning Lingo Podcast describes software for which the original program instructions are widely available.”

• All of it is open-source – and free – saving an estimated $200,000 over the equivalent proprietary software from the likes of Microsoft. Yet, says Mark Osborne, Albany Senior High’s deputy principal and IT co-ordinator, the money’s only part of it.

• “The financial benefits of open-source are quite secondary to our overall goal, which is to be an open, collaborative community where nobody is shut out of the learning process; nobody is beyond our community.”

• In the GPL case, you’ve spent $50,000 on features you find valuable. Indeed your competitors can now use that product and those features, but they can in the proprietary route.

• There are additional benefits to the GPL products that seem to get overlooked. We have full access to the source code. We usually have a community full of examples and solutions to any problems we may encounter, which are only a Google search away.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla Labs has released a new version of Bespin, a Web-based integrated development environment. The new version introduces support for collaborative editing.

• Firefox’s extendibility is one of its great advantages, and there are thousands of plugins to choose from.

• But having so much choice can be confusing, and it’s often hard to tell which add-ons are worth installing and which are best left alone. So look no further – here’s our 12 essential Firefox extensions. Download them now!

• Stuck in a ‘Net surfing rut? Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera have all been refreshed recently, and newbies Google Chrome and Microsoft IE 8 have joined the fray. Here’s how to choose.

Misc.

• DISA, which provide IT services to the Department of Defense, made the decision to share its applications after other agencies expressed interest in them, said Dick Nelson, chief of personnel systems support at DISA’s manpower, personnel and security directorate. “Federal agencies discovered that the applications we have could be of benefit more widely,” he said. Interest is coming from states and counties, as well.

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