Slashdot Mirror

inkscapee writes "Android developers are paying little attention to Free/Open Source software licenses and have a 71% violation rate. Come on folks, FOSS licenses are easy to comply with, certainly easier than proprietary software licenses, and less punitive. But it seems even the tiny hoops that FOSS requires are too much for devs eager to cash in."

An anonymous reader writes "Accidentally 'bricking' a little Linux plug computer doesn't have to be forever. This is a good howto on repairing a non-booting Linux plug computer. For example if it uses the uBoot environment then it already has some good built-in recovery tools. The article also mentions ESIA, the Sheevaplug installer, openocd, and GuruPlug."

An anonymous reader writes "A refreshing dose of sanity, It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees counters Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad, which advocates the usual reactive and punitive Big Brother measures for keeping those icky, untrustworthy IT staffers in line. Management really needs to look in the mirror when IT screws up."

darthcamaro writes "It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago. 'We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment,' Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com. Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double, at 24 million."

darthcamaro writes "Remember Mozilla Ubiquity? It was an effort to bring natural language commands to the Firefox browser. Now after almost two years of development and a half million downloads, the project is no longer being actively developed. Project founder Aza Raskin is now working on other projects, including Mozilla Jetpack, so Ubiquity is on the back burner. '"There is huge demand for being able to connect the Web with language — to not have to move from one site to another to complete your daily tasks," Raskin said. "And there is huge demand for anyone to be able to write small snippets of code that lets them command the Web the way they want. Ubiquity gave everyday developers a voice with how the browser and the Web works."'"

darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"

darthcamaro writes "Moonlight 2.0, Novell's open source implementation of the Microsoft media framework, is now available and comes with a new patent promise from Microsoft. Any Linux user can use it now without worrying about being sued: '"A really important change in how the community and individuals will see and use Moonlight is a change and extension to the patent covenant that Microsoft provides to Novell and its end users," Brian Goldfarb, director of Web and user experience platforms at Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. "We're now increasing the reach of the agreement — Microsoft's commitment not to sue Novell or Novell's customers now extends to redistributors."'"

eldavojohn writes "A number of blog posts are surfacing that are calling out the helpful open source community on their documentation. No, not the documentation for the highly skilled technical people, but the documentation from beginner to apprentice. A two-part series by Carla Schroeder lists bad documentation as 'Linux Bug #1' and advises users to use Google as the documentation. We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date. Is it really as bad as these blogs paint it? Has it come down to using Google before a man page?"

eldavojohn writes "A number of blog posts are surfacing that are calling out the helpful open source community on their documentation. No, not the documentation for the highly skilled technical people, but the documentation from beginner to apprentice. A two-part series by Carla Schroeder lists bad documentation as 'Linux Bug #1' and advises users to use Google as the documentation. We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date. Is it really as bad as these blogs paint it? Has it come down to using Google before a man page?"

eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?

Lots of readers told us about the official release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (screenshots here for Ubuntu and Kubuntu). Some readers report that the distribution servers are being hammered. Here is a review of Feisty Fawn. Reader LinuxScribe sends us to LinuxPlanet for the story on a pleasant Java surprise in the release.

wehe writes "A post from two weeks ago mentioned Lenovo Preloading SUSE Linux on ThinkPad notebooks. But in an interview with LinuxPlanet, Rajat Aggarwal, Lenovo's worldwide product manager for ThinkPad T Series, said that Lenovo will sell the new T60p laptop both on its Web site and through its direct and indirect sales channels. 'But we are not pre-loading it with Linux,' he told LinuxPlanet. Still, Lenovo will be breaking new ground with the level of support given to Linux by a major laptop manufacturer, according to the worldwide product manager."

LinuxScribe writes "Is the world ready for another community Linux distro a là Fedora and openSUSE? We're about to find out, as Linspire used the Desktop Linux Summit to announce a community-driven version of Linspire, to be called Freespire. But here's the twist, Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire."

Crispin Cowan writes "Novell has announced the release of their AppArmor security system into open source. AppArmor is an application security system that confines programs, enforcing that they are permitted to do only what they are supposed to do, and nothing else. AppArmor is an LSM module that is an alternative to SELinux, but arguably much easier to use. Now in open source, AppArmor is included with every SUSE Linux distro, including openSUSE."

diegocgteleline.es writes "As it has been noticed by some news sites, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 has been released. RedHat's web site doesn't seem to have any reference, but with Red Hat being probably the most used distro in the enterprise and featuring for first time a 2.6 kernel, this is a major milestone for linux in the server arena. There're already some reviews."

Mayank Sharma writes "As reported earlier on /., Ubuntu released the "beta" Live CD of their next version, Hoary Hedgehog. While, there have been several Ubuntu reviews after that, no one seems to have covered why the release was an important one. Here I review the CD and, based on a irc conversation with Jeff Waugh, try to explain why this CD is a milestone for the Ubuntu project."

gruenz writes "Linux Planet writes in this article about a project inside Sun developing "an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers." A demo is available from Sun. 'In the demonstration, Jonathan Schwartz, vice president of Sun's software group, increases the transparency of a window so that you can see through it, turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf, turns a window completely around and leaves a note on the back, and takes a database of CDs presented as physical CDs, that you flip through, reading the labels, just as you would with real CDs, until you locate the one you want.'" It's called Looking Glass, in case you've heard that name before.

gruenz writes "Linux Planet writes in this article about a project inside Sun developing "an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers." A demo is available from Sun. 'In the demonstration, Jonathan Schwartz, vice president of Sun's software group, increases the transparency of a window so that you can see through it, turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf, turns a window completely around and leaves a note on the back, and takes a database of CDs presented as physical CDs, that you flip through, reading the labels, just as you would with real CDs, until you locate the one you want.'" It's called Looking Glass, in case you've heard that name before.

Random BedHead Ed writes "LinuxPlanet has an interesting interview with Pamela Jones, the paralegal and blogger who created Groklaw. Groklaw has become an indespensible site for geeks who need even more SCO updates than even /. provides - and if the site's inclusion in the footnotes of one of IBM's court documents is any indication, it's been handy for people involved in the case as well. No wonder the site won Best News Site in O'Reilly's OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards for 2003. It shows how useful and influental a well-run collaborative website can be."

Shisha writes "Linux Planet is running a story about a new Wine offspring. Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too. So why not try to sell it? For marketing reasons they're selling it to corporations under the AclereX name. Their website has a datasheet with more details about what they are actually offering. Unlike CodeWeavers, they don't seem to be targeting individuals at all, they'd rather sell to corporations. So no downloads available, sorry. Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good. Wine Weekly News discusses some of the reactions of the original Wine authors."

Shisha writes "Linux Planet is running a story about a new Wine offspring. Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too. So why not try to sell it? For marketing reasons they're selling it to corporations under the AclereX name. Their website has a datasheet with more details about what they are actually offering. Unlike CodeWeavers, they don't seem to be targeting individuals at all, they'd rather sell to corporations. So no downloads available, sorry. Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good. Wine Weekly News discusses some of the reactions of the original Wine authors."

IanMurdock writes "This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."

IanMurdock writes "This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."

Henri Poole writes "In the interview 'Trust Unlimited', Robert McMillan at LinuxPlanet asks Poole about the roots, current developments, and future of Affero's trust and commerce system. Poole talks about his work at the Well, Mandrakesoft's e-services initiative, and current work with LinuxQuestions, and covers topics of transportable reputations, gaming, profits, blogs, forums, independent media and the importance of independent perspectives and decentralized trust metrics in a democratic society."

Henri Poole writes "In the interview 'Trust Unlimited', Robert McMillan at LinuxPlanet asks Poole about the roots, current developments, and future of Affero's trust and commerce system. Poole talks about his work at the Well, Mandrakesoft's e-services initiative, and current work with LinuxQuestions, and covers topics of transportable reputations, gaming, profits, blogs, forums, independent media and the importance of independent perspectives and decentralized trust metrics in a democratic society."

Over at NewsForge, Roblimo asks the musical question of which of the several recently released "desktop oriented" Linux distributions won't survive the coming year. It's nice to see user-centric distributions at all, but it really is a niche market for now. Apropos that, psykocrime writes "The fine folks at UnitedLinux have issued a Press Release announcing UnitedLinux 1.0. Should be interesting to see whether this sinks or swims, considering the general ambivalence (at best) or even outright hostility (at worst) that most of the talk about United Linux has met, from the Linux community. Questions about GPL compliance, per-set licensing terms, etc... is this the future or Linux or just another albatross?" And J. J. Ramsey writes "BeyondUnreal reviews not only Xandros Desktop's installation, but also shows what this distro's $99 price tag actually gets you. Read more here. LinuxPlanet also has an in-depth review of its own."

Over at NewsForge, Roblimo asks the musical question of which of the several recently released "desktop oriented" Linux distributions won't survive the coming year. It's nice to see user-centric distributions at all, but it really is a niche market for now. Apropos that, psykocrime writes "The fine folks at UnitedLinux have issued a Press Release announcing UnitedLinux 1.0. Should be interesting to see whether this sinks or swims, considering the general ambivalence (at best) or even outright hostility (at worst) that most of the talk about United Linux has met, from the Linux community. Questions about GPL compliance, per-set licensing terms, etc... is this the future or Linux or just another albatross?" And J. J. Ramsey writes "BeyondUnreal reviews not only Xandros Desktop's installation, but also shows what this distro's $99 price tag actually gets you. Read more here. LinuxPlanet also has an in-depth review of its own."

Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.

KobyBoy writes "Damion Yates wrote a very nice and informative article about how the BBC is using Linux. Linux is quite widespread in their in-house server environment, their development environment and of course in their production environment. He even mentions the excellent support Donald Becker (from Linux NIC card support fame) has provided him." Update: 09/24 21:54 GMT by T : Whoops -- this article is pretty old. Make that, the BBC is still using Linux.

Alan Cox is one of the world's most famous Linux kernel hackers. Lately he's been speaking out quite a bit on issues like copyright law, software patents, and the future of Linux, and has generally become a bit more politically active, at least in the public eye, than he was in the past. Slashdot interviewed Alan back in 1999. Lots of things have changed since then, but our interview procedure hasn't; one question per post, we send 10 of the highest-moderated ones to Alan, and post his answers verbatim as soon as he gets them back to us.

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.

Greg writes: "Robert Bork, former Supreme Court appointee from the Reagan era and a recent entrant in the MS antitrust case, did an interview over at LinuxPlanet. The topic? The Evil Empire's court settlement." Bork isn't actually new to the Microsoft case or to the subject of monopolies -- his legal experience makes this an interesting read, even for those who don't consider Microsoft an "evil empire."

LinuxPlanet has a year-end review discussing their picks for favorite linux software in several categories, from window managers to time-wasters.

You can't help but know that Microsoft and the Department of Justice (plus several of the states that joined in the suit) are attempting to settle their antitrust dispute. The rest of the states are holding out for a settlement with more teeth, or a continuation of the case. A few links from the past few days: The LA Times looks at the states still opposing Microsoft. Microsoft defended the settlement before a Senate committee, which was crippled by political maneuvering (see also the NYT story). The speech given by the CEO of Red Hat is online. Microsoft filed a brief with the court, unsurprisingly urging the court to accept the settlement. The Register has a story on the proposed settlement, which is available at the DOJ Antitrust website. Linuxplanet has some advice for people who want to comment on the settlement - you've got 60 days from November 28. Finally, Microsoft has named two people to help it comply with the proposed settlement.

Let's go over the Sklyarov situation. Sklyarov is still in jail. In fact, he's still in Las Vegas, where he is being held without even a bail hearing, much less bail. The excuse given for not having a bail hearing when he was arrested on July 16 was that he was being immediately transferred to San Jose and would get a hearing there. Anyway, a recap of the protests: San Jose, more San Jose, New York, Seattle, Chicago writeup and Chicago pictures, Moscow writeup and Moscow photo and news coverage: New York Times, Business2.com. Wired has Washington's viewpoint - Representative Coble says "there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders". Well, duh. Linuxplanet has an opinion piece exploring the Digital Millennium Rape Act. Finally EFF has written a letter to U.S. Attorney Mueller, asking for the U.S. to drop the charges against Sklyarov. It seems pretty doubtful that he will, since he won't want to be seen as soft on crime during his Senate confirmation hearings.

rcriii writes: "Kevin Reichard is announcing the end of Linux on the desktop over at Linux Planet . Having spent the past couple of weeks fighting with Star Office and Netscape, I'd say that he has a point. Let the flame wars begin." I'm still not sure it was ever born in the first place ... although I happily run Linux on all of my desktops. But I'm not exactly the desktop of corporate America either.

rcriii writes: "Kevin Reichard is announcing the end of Linux on the desktop over at Linux Planet . Having spent the past couple of weeks fighting with Star Office and Netscape, I'd say that he has a point. Let the flame wars begin." I'm still not sure it was ever born in the first place ... although I happily run Linux on all of my desktops. But I'm not exactly the desktop of corporate America either.

An anonymous reader submitted a pretty well-written editorial running over at LinuxPlanet about the Microsoft Open Source Hoopla that has been fluttering about lately. Several good points (like how MS will obviously blur perception of Open Source and Free Software to their benefit). Worth a read.

Isldeur writes: "Dennis Powell has a very interesting article on GNOME, Eazel, and the control thereof. However, while it is very thought provoking, it might inspire some heat. Still, I think these things are manifestly important to the ideal of Free Software to figure out!" A very well written article that says a lot of truth. I tend to think that some points are over beaten (lack of binaries for example. So what? Anyone can compile and distribute their own). Especially interesting is the point about Eazel and Paypal, and the comparison to OS/2. The difference, of course, is that this is Free Software in the speech sense, so it's a little more important than OS/2 IMHO. But there's some spicy words in here, and it's worth thought for those with objective minds.

Well, it's here -- the KDE 2.1 final version. You can find the official (and lengthy) press release here as well as the locations to download the various packages. I have been playing with this version for a week (took the tagged version which went to packagers) and I can definitely say that it is very stable and fast. You can also read a small review here. Good work, KDE team.Update: 02/27 12:05 AM by T : Check out the change logs, as provided by seanr, and enjoy the "major improvements" pointed to by Andrew Coles in Konqueror and KMail, as well as "the addition of the excellent IDE KDevelop, as well as the modular new multimedia player noatun."

VSarkiss writes "A very nice (and rare) interview with Tom LaStrange, the developer of twm, is on Linuxplanet. Fascinating how some of the most useful programs are developed by one person, just because they wanted something better. In this case, Tom wanted something better than the truly-awful uwm, rumored to be an abbreviation for 'ugly window manager.'"

VSarkiss writes "A very nice (and rare) interview with Tom LaStrange, the developer of twm, is on Linuxplanet. Fascinating how some of the most useful programs are developed by one person, just because they wanted something better. In this case, Tom wanted something better than the truly-awful uwm, rumored to be an abbreviation for 'ugly window manager.'"

Rikul writes "Great article over at linuxplanet.com about Xi Graphics trying to remarket CDE under a different name, DeXtop. Aside from fact that DeXtop wouldn't work without Xi's X server, it also breaks many libraries that Gnome/KDE/e depend on. " The piece is definitely op-ed, but raises some interesting points.

mholve points to this LinuxPlanet feature titled "A Sneak Peek at Nautilus from Eazel." Despite that title, it's not just a collection of bulleted feature lists and screen shots. Instead, it's a nicely balanced, in-depth look at the thought process behind the creation of Nautilus as well as a description and critique of the current preview. The article raises some interesting points about the complications that Eazel has found in trying to make Nautilus distribution-neutral: "In the future, I think we're going to have to look for a way to abstract the package system much in the same way we've abstracted the file system," [Darin Adler, Eazel software engineering honcho] allows. In addition, he notes that the diversity found in other areas of Linux distributions presents a daily challenge: "We try to get weirdnesses out of our code as much as possible, when we discover we've accidentally done something distribution-specific, we try to 'unweird it.'"

jhughes wrote to us with the report that Debian will be including KDE2 within Woody, and according to the article, backtracking it into Potato. Of course, you've been able to get the packages by editing your sources.list ^[?] , but apparently this will mean including it in the "official" list.

summer was the first to note that it looks like Qt 2.2 will be released under the GPL. This removes the licensing problem that is central to the age old (and very boring) KDE/GNOME flamewar. There's still nothing official appearing on Troll Tech's site, but this looks reasonable.

Nerds writes: "The fourth beta release of KDE has been announced. Also, you might want to check out this editorial at LinuxPlanet. It is a bit biased, but the author makes good points." Its an enjoyable piece that everyone ought to read: it takes some pot shots, and points out some very real truths (and does both with a reasonable sense of humor).

Nerds writes: "The fourth beta release of KDE has been announced. Also, you might want to check out this editorial at LinuxPlanet. It is a bit biased, but the author makes good points." Its an enjoyable piece that everyone ought to read: it takes some pot shots, and points out some very real truths (and does both with a reasonable sense of humor).

KS writes: "Well, today, July 12, 2000 makes exactly 2 years since KDE 1.0 was released. It seems like forever. LinuxPlanet has a nice overview of the event and progress since then." It's amazing how much progress Linux has made in the last few years.