Scrolling on MID Running Midinux

Found the following scroll feature really cool. Hope all MID devices will feature it.

WengoPhone 2.1 gives Linux Users a Solid Softphone

Wengo — the commercial PSTN-routing SIP provider that is the open source project’s parent company — focused on its Windows builds and essentially skipped over Linux during the 2.0 release cycle. OpenWengo’s Linux developers were never satisfied with the stability of the 2.0-series release candidates, so they never incremented the Linux version number to 2.0.

2.1, on the other hand, is a solid, stable release, although side effects of the missing 2.0 might cause users some confusion. The WengoPhone online documentation makes references to 2.0 code that is nowhere to be found, the 2.1 developers’ site refers to building on top of 2.0, and so on.

OpenWengo’s community development manager Dave Neary assures users that such inconsistencies are in the past, and that the project will be making release schedules much clearer in the future. He also describes the Linux and Mac OS X clients as first-class citizens, equal to the Windows product.Getting started

Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Embraces Linux

Answering the call for an open source option from Information Technology professionals, Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) announced today that businesses will soon be able to operate QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions® from Linux servers. It is the first time the company has made one of its products available to users of open source systems.The offering will enable the tens of thousands of growing companies that are passionate about using open source environments to take advantage of Intuit’s award-winning mid-market system while maintaining the increased security, manageability and lower total cost of ownership of Linux. The decision to extend the offering beyond Windows, made at the QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions User Conference, is part of Intuit’s effort to continue to meet the needs of more complex businesses.

Press Release

A Linux server version of what Thomson describes as the “top end of the QuickBooks line” may not be a big move toward Linux, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Maybe this product will do well enough that, someday, Intuit will consider producing Linux versions of desktop QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax.

Interview with Brian Aker, MySQL Architect

MySQL’s architect speaks out on the future of database storage engines, Amazon’s Web services, the next generation of distributed revision control and the economics of creating open source software.

When I look at your Web site, I see some pretty unusual storage engines for MySQL. You can use a Web site as back-end storage or even memcached for memory-backed storage. Do those engines have any practical application? Or are they more in the nature of sample code?

Well, they actually have quite a bit of practical application. In the database industry, we’ve been hearing, especially from companies like IBM, for some time now, about federating sources of data. So, taking data from different sites or, in this case, just different data strategies and putting them together. This is kind of a very early concept that Monty Widenius had when he first came up with MySQL, though it was more around analytics and transactional engines. What we’ve done is we’ve kind of spread that concept out.

Complete Interview

Interview with Brian Aker, MySQL Architect

MySQL’s architect speaks out on the future of database storage engines, Amazon’s Web services, the next generation of distributed revision control and the economics of creating open source software.

When I look at your Web site, I see some pretty unusual storage engines for MySQL. You can use a Web site as back-end storage or even memcached for memory-backed storage. Do those engines have any practical application? Or are they more in the nature of sample code?

Well, they actually have quite a bit of practical application. In the database industry, we’ve been hearing, especially from companies like IBM, for some time now, about federating sources of data. So, taking data from different sites or, in this case, just different data strategies and putting them together. This is kind of a very early concept that Monty Widenius had when he first came up with MySQL, though it was more around analytics and transactional engines. What we’ve done is we’ve kind of spread that concept out.

Complete Interview

Gnash, The Open Source Flash Project, Releases Support for YouTube

I missed that the Gnash team had started a blog, but in going through my feeds I discovered it and found out that they’ve recently added support for viewing YouTube videos. Gnash is an open source project that aims to provide the functionality of the Flash Player. It has had some decent success and has become a fairly trendy project in the open source world.

Gnash has been focused on implementing features from Flash Player 7 and being able to play YouTube videos is a substantial milestone. There were a lot of changes from Flash Player 7 to Flash Player 9, and with the release of the Linux version of the player, the need to download Gnash may be lessened, but it does provide a lot of Flash Player 7 functionality for those who want a true open source solution.

ZDNet Blog

Opensource Driver for the ATI R500-based cards

Jerome Glisse announced that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it’s the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community. Jerome writes:

“Over the past couple of months, a small group of people has been working on reverse engineering the r500-based AMD video cards. Everyone involved worked on this in whatever free time they had, which is why this has taken so long.

The code released today is able to initialise and set video modes on rv515 and rv530 (X1300 up to X1600); we still lack proper initialisation for r520 & r580 (X1800 and above, some X1600) because of lack of time and hardware.”

The Original Announcement

Desktop Publishing with OpenOffice.org

“Do you offer a program like Microsoft Publisher?” Some version of this question appears regularly on the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. Many people automatic answer “no,” and say that Scribus is more suitable for desktop publishing. But, in fact, OpenOffice.org boasts two mid-level layout programs — Draw and Writer — each of which is far more versatile than its name suggests.

Draw and Writer have similar tools for positioning text, but Draw is better suited for text mixed with graphics or for highly variable pages, while Writer is designed for text-heavy documents with minimal variation in the pages. Both lack some of the fine controls of a high-end layout program, but their features are complete enough that either can be used to produce professional-looking work.

Article

Bringing Free Software Down to Earth

Mark Shuttleworth, software entrepreneur and space tourist, believes that open-source software is not just for geeks. AS HE lays out his vision for the future of open-source software, Mark Shuttleworth is enthusiastic, but he looks tired. He has been up late negotiating yet another deal as part of his mission to bring open source to a wider audience.

A successful South African entrepreneur during the dotcom era, he wants open-source zealots to lose their religion and concentrate on ease-of-use instead. And he is putting his money where his mouth is. Since 2004, he has been using his fortune to fund the Ubuntu project, which makes a user-friendly version of Linux, the open-source operating system. Ubuntu is a Zulu and Xhosa term that roughly means “universal bond of sharing between humans”. Ubuntu’s slogan is “Linux for human beings”, and it is aimed at mainstream computer users. For although Linux is popular on servers, it is not, so far, used on many desktops.

Complete Article from Economist

Novell Provides the Best Linux Support in the World

When it comes to Linux, support really matters. If you’re going to run your mission-critical applications on Linux, then you need a partner who will support you every step of the way.

You already know that SUSE Linux Enterprise is the leader when it comes to technology, so it only makes sense that Novell is the top provider of Linux customer support. Now, an independent marketing research survey by Lighthouse Research confirms it—Novell leads both Oracle and Red Hat in overall quality of Linux-based technical support.

The Lighthouse Research survey measured the satisfaction of more than 500 customers who use Linux-related technical support services from Novell, Oracle and Red Hat. Specifically, it examined and compared the services provided to customers by the three Linux distributors. Several of the online survey results were supported by in-depth follow-up telephone interviews. Survey respondents were asked to rate the overall quality of service received and then rate several aspects of the support services provided by Novell, Oracle and Red Hat using a zero to 10-point scale.

Customers clearly demonstrated higher satisfaction with Novell support when comparing it to Oracle and Red Hat in the following areas:

• Overall quality of service—Novell received a 7.09 rating , Red Hat 6.56, and Oracle 6.34
• Support in heterogeneous environments—Novell received a 7.10 rating, Oracle 6.78, and Red Hat 6.50
• Time to reach phone-based support—Novell received a 7.33 rating, Red Hat 6.00, and Oracle 5.74

It’s not surprising that Novell was rated the best of the three Linux distributors for overall quality of service. Novell has more than 20 years of experience supporting operating system platforms in enterprises large and small. And that’s not all: Novell has more than 900 Linux-trained technical support personnel deployed around the world.

If you translate the ratings for phone-based support into percentages, you find that Novell is almost 23 percent more efficient than Red Hat in terms of availability to help you with your problems and almost 28 percent more efficient than Oracle. What does this mean to you? It means you solve your problems more rapidly so that you can focus on your business, not your IT infrastructure.

Executive summary of the report   |   Results of the entire report