alll about linux

With the birth of each new year, the accolade of ‘year of the penguin’ has been dusted off and pre-emptively awarded time after time. 2005 was no different, and there’s little reason to suppose that 2006 will underwhelm either.We’re coming out of 2005 with a massive vindication of the open source movement. We now have patent bodies co-ordinating and even acquiring patents for royalty-free use by the community. The founding licence - the GNU General Public Licence - is being updated for the first time in more than 15 years. Any litigious threat seems to have had nearly no impact on Linux and open source: and this at a time when patent holders are waving their portfolios ever more wildly in court.

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As most of you know I am also primarily a user of KDE, though also use Gnome. But the following article is really a nice and simple article for those who have mostly used Gnome and might wanna have a look at what KDE has to offer. Free Software is about making choices after all.

“This document was created to show non-KDE people what they’re missing - and if you haven’t used KDE a lot, you’re missing a lot of things and you may interested in reading this page to learn how many wonderful things you’ve been missing. The writer promises that this is a subjective analysis of why KDE rules. He was a GNOME user for a long time, one of those users who loved GNOME UI, and he didn’t know how much things he was missing with KDE until he tried it.”

The Linux-powered Nokia 770 Internet Tablet offers convenient Internet browsing and email through built-in WiFi, or via a Bluetooth connection to a compatible mobile phone. The device boasts a 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touch-screen, plus integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, and a reduced-size MMC (RS-MMC) card slot.

Although positioned as an “Internet tablet,” the 770 has much wider applicability. Bundled software currently includes: web browser, email client, Internet radio, news reader, media players, image viewer, file manager, search, calculator, world clock, PDF-viewer, notes, sketch, and games. Additionally, a broad and growing range of software can be downloaded and installed onto the device from the 770’s Maemo.org community website. >>>>

A new Firefox extension has been debuted that incorporates peer-to-peer capabilities into the browser via a sidebar. AllPeers “combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent” to add media sharing to the long list of available extensions.

Created by British-American-Czech software developer Matthew Gertner, the AllPeers extension uses a taskpanel approach rather than a dialogue box.

“The heart of AllPeers is the Navigator, a sidebar that provides rapid access to all the information managed by AllPeers. Since AllPeers is by nature an extensible platform, the Navigator needs to be extensible as well. That’s why you see the buttons at the bottom for changing the view (”My Peers” and “My Media”),” reads the AllPeers website.

Screenshots of the new functionality can be found here.

Unleash your online experience and add multimedia sharing
capabilitities to your favorite browser.

Share private photos worry-free. No passwords to remember, no public access.

Share your videos without uploading - save on hosting costs while saving time.

No cumbersome interface. No sharing restriction. Private and secure.
No spyware, no adware, no annoying advertisements.

Do you like free software? Do you like Firefox? Do you like sharing?

We do! That’s why we built AllPeers.

A direct competition to Flickr and the likes? Here is another post on this topic.

Emmy Huang, Product Manager of the Flash Player, explains what the plans concerning the Linux version of Flash Player 8 are. Instead of releasing a 8.0 version we will directly move to 8.5 on Linux. This will avoid even more delay after we ship Flash Player 8.5 for Windows and Mac. That will also make sure that the new virtual machine works using gcc from start. I see that as a big benefit as gcc is a more strict and standards compliant compiler than Visual Studio or CodeWarrior. >>>>

The Indian information technology and business process outsourcing industry is poised to grow ten-fold by 2010, according to a report released Tuesday.

While Indian companies will continue to maintain their 46 percent share of the global business processing outsourcing (BPO) market and 65 percent share of the IT outsourcing market through 2010, the combined market is estimated to grow from the current level of $30 billion to $300 billion by 2010.

These two sectors of the Indian economy will earn $60 billion in exports by March 2010, an increase from 3 percent of gross domestic product to about 7 percent, according to a report by the Indian software trade association Nasscom and global consulting firm McKinsey. >>>>

Just went through CoolSolutions webpage provided from Novell and notices to great articles that might come in handy for new users of SUSE.

One is related on how to setup your SUSE box as a router, which I have personally setup for quite a sometime now, and the other is related on how to keep your SUSE 10.0 up-to-date using Yast repositories, for which I use a combination of Yast+Apt repositories. Here are the links:

HOW-TO: Set Up a SUSE 10 Machine As a Router

Update All Package Versions on Your SUSE Linux 10.0 Machine

And here is one more review on SUSE 10.0 from .free-bees.co.uk

Merry Christmas to everyone.

The mission that I set for myself some months ago was to find a desktop Linux worthy of replacing Windows XP—to rejoin the world of free software. Make no mistake—Linux is a worthy server operating system. It runs many servers around the world. The distinction here is between server uses and desktop or consumer uses of an operating system. The question on my mind then was whether Linux had grown into something worthy of replacing the typical desktop operating system from Microsoft.

I started my search for a desktop Linux with one of the biggest names in the Linux world: Red Hat, Inc.

For several months, I used Fedora Core 4. It had its good points, and it also had some problems.

My next stop in this quest was Debian GNU/Linux.

A friend of mine in Minneapolis was using a Linux that I had never tried before: SUSE Linux. Originally from Germany, SUSE Linux is now a product of Novell. SUSE is also going with a community oriented approach like Fedora that they call openSUSE. But I decided I wanted to go with the commercial SUSE, which is available by the way for $53.99 from Amazon.com. I have yet to do that though because I ended up downloading the evaluation version of SUSE Linux from the Internet. It’s a DVD worth of good stuff. >>>>

As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz’s GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like.

Why would you want to receive feed updates in your inbox rather than checking them in a feed reader? Isn’t the whole point of feed subscriptions to browse them at your leisure? For the most part, I don’t want to receive an email every time one of the feeds I subscribe to is updated — I have more than 200 subscriptions, so that would fill up my inbox pretty quickly. However, there are a few select feeds I do want to monitor more closely, so I use rss2email to shoot me an email when those are updated.

If you don’t subscribe to many feeds, then rss2email might be a better fit for you than a full-blown RSS client. You can receive updates in the comfort of your favorite mail reader without having to set up a feed reader.

Debian users can grab rss2email just by running apt-get install rss2email. The rss2email site has instructions for installing rss2email on other Linux distros and Unix-type platforms. You will need to have Python installed beforehand. >>>>