Slashdot Mirror

em8chel writes "LinuxTag, Germany's major fair for Linux and Free Software, is facing a massive boycott from open source enthusiasts in the country this year. Although the event doesn't open for a week, the community is voicing their anger and disappointment on various forums about this year's LinuxTag running under the auspices of Wolfgang Schaeuble, the conservative Minister of Interior, whose positions on issues of interest to the community are controversial to say the very least. Due to online protests and calls for a boycott, the organizer of LinuxTag has released a statement (German version, serviceable Google translation), holding that the politician's policies and political views have nothing to do with supporting free software, adding that if the community boycotts LinuxTag, it's the open source software that will be hit the hardest, and that Schaeuble probably won't even notice."

em8chel writes "LinuxTag, Germany's major fair for Linux and Free Software, is facing a massive boycott from open source enthusiasts in the country this year. Although the event doesn't open for a week, the community is voicing their anger and disappointment on various forums about this year's LinuxTag running under the auspices of Wolfgang Schaeuble, the conservative Minister of Interior, whose positions on issues of interest to the community are controversial to say the very least. Due to online protests and calls for a boycott, the organizer of LinuxTag has released a statement (German version, serviceable Google translation), holding that the politician's policies and political views have nothing to do with supporting free software, adding that if the community boycotts LinuxTag, it's the open source software that will be hit the hardest, and that Schaeuble probably won't even notice."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

Jamesday writes "Monty Widenius accepted a plaque celebrating ten years of MySQL and PHP at LinuxTag. Until the end of June MySQL also has some 10th anniversary MySQL mugs on sale which feature the names of all MySQL employees in April 2005, about 200 people who can personally testify that you can make a living from open source software. Since Slashdot and MySQL share many users in common, I asked the MySQL community manager to give some mugs away to the Slashdot crowd. An arbitrary number of registered Slashdot posters, at least one, whose answers are closest to the exact date when MySQL 1.0 was first released internally will get one. Answers in response to this post, 24 hour time limit; no employees, former employees, their relatives or others we think should be ineligible. Winner(s) will be notified by a reply to their post."

eean writes "As reported by KDE Dot News, today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary."

sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.

sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.

sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.

News for nerds writes "The Cell processor from Sony, Toshiba and IBM, has been known as the chip that powers the upcoming PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system, but except for that very little is known about how it's applied to a real use. This time, at LinuxTag 2005 from 22nd to 25rd June 2005, at Messe- und Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, Arnd Bergmann of IBM will speak about the Cell Processor programming model under Linux, and the Linux kernel in the first Cell Processor-based workstation computer, which premieres at Linuxtag 2005."

News for nerds writes "The Cell processor from Sony, Toshiba and IBM, has been known as the chip that powers the upcoming PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system, but except for that very little is known about how it's applied to a real use. This time, at LinuxTag 2005 from 22nd to 25rd June 2005, at Messe- und Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, Arnd Bergmann of IBM will speak about the Cell Processor programming model under Linux, and the Linux kernel in the first Cell Processor-based workstation computer, which premieres at Linuxtag 2005."

linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."

linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."

linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."

Dan writes "The Linuxtag in Karlsruhe is the biggest Linux event in Europe, and of course NetBSD was present there too! The event happened in two buildings, one for the conference, and one big exhibition area. A group of people from BSD and related projects have setup a joint booth to present NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as OpenDarwin, OpenSSH and MirBSD. See Hubert Feyrer's full report for more details."

steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."

steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."

steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."

steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."

RoLi writes "Heise has a story (The babelfish translation sounds like a speech from Yoda, but the important facts are translated correctly.) about LinuxTag taking legal action against SCO. SCO will either have to retract their claims, disclose their "proof" (if it exists) or be fined. That's certainly good news." Update: 05/26 17:25 GMT by T : Reader Fizz points to the more understandable LinuxTag press release (in English and German), and adds: "The notice, dated Friday, May 23, maintains that SCO Group is sowing uncertainty among the community of GNU/Linux users, developers and suppliers."

dcd asks: "It is interesting from time to time to look at what others are searching for using Google Zeitgeist The number 2 gaining request was for Moorhuhn3, which seems to be a freeware game that is popular in Germany. Searching for 'moorhuhn linux' brings up this page which when translated on google are directions and links to play it on Linux using WINE. Now two questions come to mind: Has anyone found a 'real-time' method to find out what is actively being searched for on google (I think alta-vista used to do this); Has anyone tried this freeware game, and was it interesting? For the curious, here's another web page describing this game and Linux." Back in a time before Google, I used Metacrawler for searches and that had Metaspy which I think is a good example of what the submittor is describing. I haven't tried this Moorhuhn Chicken game, but after visiting the sites, I must say it looks intriguing.

LinuxTag started today. Many of the usual exhibitors can be seen, and the floor is quite busy. Especially noteworth is the crowded KDE booth where they are excited about the 2.2 Betas. kazekiri sent us a report from Slashdot/Japan which you'll need to translate to read, but apparently one of the hotels was closed for hygiene reasons, and many of the developers are without a place to sleep. So now they are staying in a gymnasium! Fortunately for me, my hotel is open and I got a good nights sleep (after 36 hours without any) and am preparing for my keynote Saturday afternoon, and a Q&A session Sunday afternoon. If you're in Stuttgart, check it out, just don't try any of that Deutsch on me, I barely passed that class.

Thomas M Hughes sent us a link where Gillian Anderson announces that Sculley will follow Mulder's footsteps off the X-files after this season. (And since I'm in Germany for LinuxTag I get to post something before I usually even get up!)