● 06.07.10

● Links 7/6/2010: KDE SC 4.5, OpenOffice.org Signals Over 154 Million Downloads

Posted in News Roundup at 2:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Cutting costs is at or near the top of every IT manager’s priority list. Moving your enterprise from proprietary to Linux-based systems may be one of the best ways to increase efficiency while reducing your overall expenses. Here is a glimpse at just three cost-cutting perspectives you may not have considered before.

Desktop

• It Just Works (TM)

• I switched on the printer and plugged in the USB cable. Immediately I started to click through to the printer setup area to see if I could set it up. Suddenly my eye caught a little dialog popup next to my network monitor.

• Most people probably have never heard of an operating system different than Windows. Most of them are not as widely advertised as Windows either. I have completely switched to Ubuntu about a month ago and I must say I do not regret one single bit of doing so.

• I was using Windows Vista as my main operating system and I couldn’t help but notice how slow it was at times. Especially when I had all the needed applications installed. It was so frustrating to wait for it to boot up in the mornings when I needed it to boot up fast, because all I needed was Firefox. Right then I found out about Ubuntu.

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• Ubuntu is free, fast, functional, customizable and user friendly!

• If we want to fix bug number one, get rid of the Microsoft monopoly that’s been plaguing the world for 20 years, and actually bring free software to the masses, we need to hit the gym and get in shape. Not only our product, Ubuntu, but our collaboration and our protocol, our infrastructure and our people.

• We’re all working towards the same thing, so don’t get all defensive if I criticize your work – I’m trying to help. Don’t work in secrecy when you’ve got an entire community of intelligent and talented people at your disposal literally asking for stuff to do, and don’t skimp out on the minor details, because it’s all those minor details put together that make a good product into a great one. Work out where to draw the line between forcing something that’s unpolished into a release because you’re stuck on a schedule, or perhaps giving it another six months before incorporating it.

Server

• “With Linux, the operating system is effectively free,” says Phil Cox, principal consultant with SystemExperts. “With Microsoft, there are licensing fees for any version, so cost is a factor.” And relative to any physical hardware platform, Linux performance appears to be about 25% faster, Cox says.

Audiocasts

• The free, distributed source control management tool Mercurial.

Ballnux

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Last week we openly asked the question if and when will X12 emerge to replace X11, which was met by a variety of responses. Some view the Wayland Display Server as being a potential successor to the current X11 / X.Org Server, but others don’t give it much credit seeing as it’s not too actively worked on — well, directly, but it leverages a lot of work actively going on with the Mesa and kernel DRM. The last time the Wayland Display Server received new commits to its code-base was back in March, but that changed this weekend.

• While many new packages have been pulled into the “Maverick Meerkat” repository for Ubuntu 10.10, one area that hasn’t yet received many changes compared to the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS packages has been the X.Org graphics stack. However, that soon will change with X.Org Server 1.8 being pulled into the Maverick repository in the very near future.

Applications

• It is a fork of version 1.0.4 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

• It is likely the most successful open source tool in feature motion picture work today. It is free software under the GNU General Public License.

• With Slideshow Creator and dvd-slideshow you can transform your pictures in a beautiful dvd-quality slide show rich of fashinating effects like ken burns, pan and animated transitions.

Proprietary

• I’ve been working on a project for work involving the re-use of older (6-8 years old) PCs and laptops using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with the goal of distributing them to some of our tech-impoverished Georgia libraries (nothing’s firm yet – still in the exploratory phase). These were state library staff members’ computers from maybe 2 generations ago and if they are not re-used, they’ll be surplused or discarded. As I was installing and configuring Ubuntu, it occurred to me that since we would be redistributing whatever software we install, we are constrained about what we can include when they are sent out. Ubuntu, as-is, is all free software and all included packages can be redistributed freely. However, installing Adobe Flash, Sun (or Oracle) Java, or many proprietary A/V codecs or device drivers, makes it illegal to redistribute.

Instructionals

• This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 13 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Games

• Shortly after Alex Austin released Gish’s source code, Gish got its first new public feature courtesy of FrozenCow. I find these “zero day open source contributions” really interesting. It reminds me of the immediate rush to crack DRM or to exploit a newly disclosed vulnerability, but this is unequivocally awesome, feels good, and is only motivated by positively helping the community.

Desktop Environments

• In terms of popularity KDE is the second most popular desktop environment. Like Gnome it is fully matured and provides it’s own full application set as well as GUI tools for configuration. KDE also has a wide selection of “plasma widgets”, which are handy applets you can place all around your desktop for all sorts of tasks. They range from something as practical as a calculator to as useless as a display from “The Matrix”.

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• All of the various desktop environments have their advantages and their disadvantages. Which one is right for you largely depends on your task at hand. Personally I run LXDE on my netbook, KDE on my gaming laptop, and Gnome on my home media center. If you are not sure which is best for you, try them out! It is all free software after all, get a feel for which desktop environment you are most comfortable on and use that one.

• Is there another desktop environment that you enjoy using that I failed to mention here? If so let me know, I am always looking to tinker with new things.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

KDE SC 4.5

• Of course, there is still a lot of work to do. I’ve already got a few ideas for the future of quicklaunch, but since KDE SC is currently in it’s beta phase, these will have to wait until trunk unfreezes for the 4.6 cycle. In the meantime, if you’ve got the chance to have a look at the new qucklaunch plasmoid and you’d like to share some feedback (be it positive or negative), please let me know.

• Window Tiling

• This is a feature a lot of people have been asking for. I have never really used a tiled window arrangement. I suspect that this would be good for people with large monitors, who work on multiple applications at once – for example developers, journalists or technical writers. However, on my 13 inch laptop screen, there’s just not enough screen real estate for tiling to be practical. It’s difficult to say whether this is a good or bad implementation of window tiling. Given I’ve never really played with window tiling, I’ll leave such an analysis to the those users who are tiling junkies.

• Right now, as in KDE SC 4.5 and Qt 4.6/4.7 is still not for everyday use, is still not so stable and there are some graphical glithces (this actually varies from a graphics driver/video card model like crazy) but what is encouraging is that since this feature was introduced (Qt 4.4) it came a very long way, it’s really sooo better than when it was originally out.

GNOME Desktop

• Because it has been a while since I made an entry about icons, I decided to gather some new icons sets that you may have never seen before.

Distributions

• Another week-end spent out, shooting people… I liked the expression on the face of this arm wrester so much, that I couldn’t resist messing with it in Inkscape.

• After the success of the 2009 Screenshot Contest the Contest Team is doing it again!

• When I found about Pardus some weeks ago, I was surprised to find a distro which is not among the most popular ones, but an impressive piece of work nevertheless. I personally believe the Pardus developers have a very good understanding of their users needs, specially those users who may not have any experience in Linux or KDE. I think they have done a superb job at removing “obstacles” where it matters, joining other great distributions like PCLinuxOS 2010 or Linux Mint 9 in making the Linux desktop more accessible than ever.

Reviews

• Quirky distribution built using Woof builder for Puppy Linux, looks as same as puppy linux 5.0 but more lighter, we already reviewed Puppy Linux 5.0 check it for more information.

• Overall, though, I am enthusiastic about the possibilities Arch Linux offers and plan to continue experimenting with it. This article has been completed using the beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.2, which is available through the Arch Linux repository. Both the stable and the beta versions can be installed. It would be immensely valuable to me if users could try the new packages for features important for them and provide feedback.

• After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. It looks as if it’ll take a little more time to get to know Slackware but it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but comments about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren’t. Personally, I wouldn’t thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves but it’s not at all bad for that.

• The shortest posts I seem to have are always for the tools that are the quickest, most efficient and most effective. PLoP Bootmanager is one of those things, and for that reason, I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it.

• A long time ago I kept Smart BootManager on hand, for times when a machine wouldn’t boot from a CD. Any more though, PLoP has supplanted it, and won a place in my little CD binder.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE4 is a rock solid distro – just in my case I had a problem with the LiveCD, but not with the installed version – which offers a KDE4 DE tailored to newcomers and KDE-geeks alike.

Red Hat Family

• ed Hat Inc. options saw high put activity today. A total of 1,871 put and 276 call contracts were traded raising a high Put/Call volume alert. Today’s traded Put/Call ratio is 6.78. There were 6.78 puts traded for each call contract.

Fedora

• In short, I’m not running the latest versions of applications anymore, because Fedora doesn’t have a rolling release schedule. This used to be a big deal for me, now I find that I don’t care. The repositories are extensive, but of course Arch has the AUR which contains almost all open software known to man…but I’m not running anything exotic anymore.

• Fedora 13 is the latest update to the Redhat-sponsored, RPM-based Linux distribution. It has long held a reputation of being a testbed for features that will eventually make it into Redhat Enterprise Linux, and, therefore, less stable than other desktop-oriented distributions. And I think that’s one reason why Fedora has features that you’ll not find on other desktop-focused distributions.

• Let me list out the pros and cons for both Fedora and Ubuntu and you can decide for yourself what you want.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.10

• A new theme called ‘Eclipse’ can be found in the Ubuntu-Light testing area on Launchpad. Using the Equinox and Murrine engines it takes advantage of RGBA transparency enabled in Maverick.

• I am sure the people working on this release are painfully aware of the implications of a release number of 10.10, no failures will be tolerated in what has already been dubbed the 10/10 (ten out of ten) release.

Flavours and Variants

• IMHO Kubuntu is the best Kde Distro I have tried. It very close to the kde upstream and provide a solid Ubuntu base for stability.

Devices/Embedded

• A considerable segment of embedded systems are often found in mass-market products and are therefore subjected to hard economic constraints. The basic nature of these systems mandates further constraints on physical size and power consumption. These in turn give rise to resource constraints on the computing platform level, e.g., constraints on computing speed, memory size, and communication bandwidth etc. In spite of the rapid development of computer hardware these constraints are true due to the economic overheads. In most cases it is not economically justified to use a processor with more capacity due to the overall product’s cost limits.

Sub-notebooks

• In the emerging netbook market, Google decided it would announce a new-style Linux-based OS that would be perfect for netbook owners, set for release in Q4 2010. Recently, Google has also showed off a new application market for Chrome and Chrome OS. We at The PC Report have used Chrome OS briefly when it was first released, but today we’ve taken an in-depth look at the OS and how it will affect the OS and netbook markets.

Free Software/Open Source

• Fidelity: Software running in a virtualised environment should not be able to detect it is running on a virtualised system. Containment: Activities within a virtual machine (VM) should be contained within the VM itself without disturbing the host system. A guest should not cause the host or other guests running on the host to malfunction.

• You’ll find many Linux-based and/or open source options when searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot solution. Whether you’re wanting to give away or charge your visitors for the wireless Internet, you should find something that will work. The best part is that most of these solutions are free — you don’t have to spends hundreds on a off-the-shelf hotspot gateway.

Mozilla

• This Firefox add-on installs a menacing little “Destroy this page!” icon on the Firefox toolbar and all you have to do is load up your favorite or even not-so-favorite webpages and hit the button. Soon afterwards, you are greeted to arcade music and a countdown timer that beckons you to “Destroy the Web.”

Oracle

• This is a huge number but this number doesn’t count all distribution specific variants. The number could even be higher when taking the download numbers from other build providers into account.

• Everyone has heard the old saying “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, well statistically OpenOffice.org is used somewhere between 0.2% and 22% depending as to where you live. (these statistics can be found at Webmasterpro.de). This leaves a lot of people saying, “Huh?!?”. So I will resolve to discuss OOo adoption anecdotally. The first class of pharmacy students I taught 4 years a go had never heard of OpenOffice.org prior to me using it for a presentation, but this past month (May 2010) I had several students email me their pharmacy law papers as ODTs. The reasons for this increased adoption could be due to multiple reasons such as alternatives being perceived as bloated, slow, and expensive or the increased number of students I have using alternative operating systems where OOo has a native port or maybe even the fact that they find their pharmacy professor so darn cool that they want to be just like him and run OOo as well. As biased as I am towards myself, I seriously doubt it’s that last reason but I am seeing more and more OOo use. My intention with this article is not to proselytize OOo, but instead to show some good ways to extend the use of OOo.

Business

• Q. How do you make money with open source?

• A. “If open source is free software, how do you make money with it?” is a question I hear often, sometime expressed simply as “you can’t make money with open source”.

• Since 2002, I have made my living working with open source software, specifically the OpenNMS project. While I wouldn’t describe myself as wealthy in terms of money, I am both happy and comfortable. It is possible to make money with open source, although being free does mean a departure from traditional software business models.

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 is the second most buzzed word around I think, second only to the Hypepad. In case you’re wondering whether your current browser is compatible with it or not, a simple tool to help you determine this is the HTML5 test tool.

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