According to cnet, the second company that SCO is going after is DaimlerChrysler. I really think that they have now spread themselves too thin. These are companies with large legal departments that do not generally settle hen frivoulous lawsuits are brought against them.
Let us hope that both of them do not settle, as it would indeed be a bad precedent.
It's hard to give credence to your story, although I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I have been using openoffice.org for windows at work, versions 1.0 and 1.1, and openoffice.org for Linux without issues for the past 18 months.
All of my students are given a disk with openoffice that they can use at home. Some do, some don't. Their.doc files open fine in my computers. What's more I write comments on their papers using the comment feature and the comments are there when the documents are opened in whatever version of word they are using.
I am with you on this one. Sun opens up Java and IBM does the same with their Lotus suite?
A gesture is met with a gesture and we all win.
It will never happen.
Re:A great success story of Linux on the desktop..
on
Rome Moving to Linux
·
· Score: 1
I submitted a number of stories about the project to Slashdot on this project and its implementation. It was never deemed newsworthy.
Re:A great success story of Linux on the desktop..
on
Rome Moving to Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have no idea what you are referring to. But Linex is very much alive. You can download it here.
http://www.linex.org
And the distribution is actually very decent. I have also seen it widely used in schools.
A great success story of Linux on the desktop...
on
Rome Moving to Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why is Munich the frame of reference for Linux on the Desktop when the region of Extremadura (Spain) moved 80,000 desktops to Linux nearly 2 years before Munich even announced its intentions?
More time should be spent on understanding how they did it and why they have had such good results. The move has been an incredible success with copies of Linex (the debian-based distribution they created) being given away when you buy the newspaper.
And schools have transitioned to it. The key, I believe, was localization. They switch the name of openwriter to "Cervantes", the famous Spanish writer, author of Don Quijote. They did the same for all of the applications and streamlined the installation to a process that makes it dead easy for anybody to install it.
Finally, the government is subsidizing the use of linux in rural areas for first-time computer buyers by paying for a chuck of a linux-compatible computer.
So why isn't this being talked about is the greatest mistery to me. Linux is on thousands of government, school and private desktops today. And it works!
Great, we now get to taste vicariously the wines of the wealthy.
I enjoy a good wine as much as the next guy and I hate to spoil the party, seeing that we are all having a jolly good time around here, but what the fuck does this have to do with "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
A tone of shit happened today in the free software world. Maybe somebody is hung over and has Slashdot stories on automatic pilot.
"3) Germany. Why? Because they have the largest Linux role-out to date. And according to recent news their Linux roll-out cost more than sticking with Windows which means they have money to throw away anyway."
I don't know why this keeps being repeated ad nauseam. Munich is not the largest roll-out. The government of Extremadura in Spain has rolled out 80,000 desktops and they did it well before Munich. In fact, as far as I know Munich is still in the planning stage.
Has it occurred to you that maybe the did try youur fix and it led to data corruption, so they decided not to apply it?
Or that they did not try because they knew it would not work?
There is also a huge difference between Linux supporting your hardware and your hardware manufacturers supporting Linux. The former implies that Linux provides APIs and ABIs for which drivers can be written, the latter implies the makers of your hardware thinking of Linux compatible hardware design and driver development as something more than an afterthought that they community will address for free.
And if Linux doesn't suit your needs now, you may wish to try it it in the future. Things change quickly.
By the way, why where you recompiling your kernel to enable DMA?
Look at/etc/sysconfig/harddisks or pass a boot-time kernel option to lilo.
As you recognized towards the end of your post, the small details are being addressed at many levels. Stay tuned for a Linux distribution near you.
In fact, your specific example has been dealt with by Mandrake and Suse for the past 2/3 years. Where have you been?
And how do they do it? Better than Windows, most times.
No driver CD necessary. If it's supported, plug in the camera and it shows up on your desktop. Click on it and get your pictures. Now that was easy, wasn't it.
I am not impervious to criticism and there are tons of things that need improvement, but they are coming. Anyone who has used Linux for the past five years cannot be blind to the huge improvements in ease-of-use and consistency that have been made.
Finally, the community aspect of Linux is not to be dismissed. When I set somebody up with Linux, I make sure that his/her every whim is satisfied so that the experience is more positive than it was with their prior OS.
Suddenly, I feel so old and jaded. Why must you bring out the past in this manner?
Oh, why, why?
On a more serious note, it's interesting how innovation always appears to be right around the corner, yet it doesn't happen fast enough when you breath and live technology.
And while technology has indeed evolved a great deal, I am not sure whether I can say that it has effected the type of social change that I once thought it would bring about.
What a strawman you have built! Yours is a classic example of a zero-sum game? For us to win, others must loose.
Yet free and open source software proves precisely the opposite. We all win. We all have better infrastructures, access to the tools to educate ourselves, technology that we can scrutinize and use to empower ourselves, technology to allow ourselves to transcend the narrow-minded divisions of nation and state and to reach out to others. And in reaching out, we establish a dialog about how to solve the big problems, because no country can solve today's big problems alone.
Have you noticed how pollution knows no boundaries? Have you noticed how natural disasters displace millions of people and countries must come together to find workable solutions? Have you noticed how the "Tequilazo" or the melting of the Asian-tiger economies was felt across the globe and a global answer was needed? Have you noticed how security problems are no more circumscribed by the interest of a single state and affect us all?
Have you noticed the emergence of what academics long ago term "epistemological communities", i.e., communities of people interested in solving a problem by applying their joint efforts and knowledge? Oh, you haven't. Then you must not be looking because an open heart is all that it takes. The mind then follows.
What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
on
Stallman Goes to India
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A very old proverb says that "it's hard to be a prophet in one's own land."
For some reason, Richard Stallman is demonized in the US as some eccentric loony. Yet the rest of the world actually holds him in very high regard. I have had the fortune of listening to him speak on the issue of software patents and not only was he articulate but he was able to appeal to a large audience made up of people from all walks of life.
Even if you disagree with specific positions that RMS might take, you have to give the guy credit for standing his ground. To me the GPL is one of the cornerstones of the free software movement and its cultural and social implications will reverberate for generations.
KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking
on
Koffice 1.3 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they, the KDE suite of applications would be very much complete.
Koffice, even if it doesn't attract all the attention of OpenOffice, is light-weight and architecturally sound. Koffice 1.3 is almost there, it just needs a little bit of loving care.
If you are convinced that Apple could be interested in Koffice, consider this.
*Qt applications can run natively under OS X.
*The Mac port of OpenOffice is seriously understaffed and very much behind.
* Koffice's code, due to its componentization, is much easier to maintain and to learn.
*It helps Apple maintain its open source credibility, an intangible asset, but one that shouldn't be dismissed.
*It provides a good trump card against Microsoft or at least some leverage to make sure that they continue to put out a Microsoft Office for the Mac.
*It gives Apple greater control over their destiny, which is one of the main reasons why they created Safari.
Re:What do you think of the community/official spl
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
·
· Score: 1
If you read the fine article or the quote I provide, they do say that from now on, the official distro will be supported for only eighteen months.
What do you think of the community/official split?
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been an avid Mandrake supporter for years, but the following quote from Roblimo's article has me concerned:
"The "community" version is expected to be the first major Linux distribution that includes the 2.6 kernel. Two or three months later, the "official" version will also incorporate the new kernel.
Bancilhon expects to see updated versions of the "community version" every six months, while the "official" version will be on an 18 month release cycle."
Basically, I take this to be that they will use the community version as a way to beta-test their real distribution. The paying customers get the good stuff, the rest of us deal with the bugs and have to be on a constant upgrade treadmill because security updates will no longer be provided after six months.
Very disturbing, IF this is indeed the case. If this is not the case, I apologize in advance for jumping to conclusions. It also makes you wonder as to whether Mandrake's repositories will now be fragmented between community and official, which will require much more man power to maintain and thus reducing the number of packages available.
Finally, six months is not nearly enough time for an operating system to stop being supported. This is just plain ridiculous and IT is exactly the same thing that Red Hat did with Fedora, which at the time I found appalling. Only difference is that Fedora actually has a fedora-legacy project in place that seeks to have longer-maintenance cycles.
What do you folks think? As much as I hate to say this, even 18 months is too short a time for an official distro, which is what you would use on a server.
Servers are only upgraded every 3 to 5 years. I am having a hard time understanding what it is that Mandrake is thinking. In fact, this is looking ever more so like forced upgrades to me.
While some of you may dismiss my comments, Mandrake has been my primary distro for over four years, so I say this with a lot of regret and I hope it spurs enough debate that Mandrake will have to respond to our concerns.
Yeap, that's evidently what I meant. I don't think I am the first one who makes this mistake. I type Linux much more often than I do Linux, so it is almost a reflex.
Well, I, would be curious to see what Linux can code beyond the kernel stuff.
Gosh, Slahdot is so full of irascible assholes that it really makes it hard to stay aboard the nonsense. Get a fucking life.
I asked a reasonable question. If Linux coded an office app, I'd be curious to learn of the design decisions and also to see the design mistakes and what kind of design prejudices and best practices come from trying to leverage your kernel expertise in other areas.
In the unlilely event that Linus or someone who could get his ear does read this.
Linus, I have been archiving my email with offlineIMap for years and it has been reliable and efficient, but I wonder whether you would share with us the little app that you concocted.
Slashdot Mirror
According to cnet, the second company that SCO is going after is DaimlerChrysler. I really think that they have now spread themselves too thin. These are companies with large legal departments that do not generally settle hen frivoulous lawsuits are brought against them.
Let us hope that both of them do not settle, as it would indeed be a bad precedent.
It's hard to give credence to your story, although I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
.doc files open fine in my computers. What's more I write comments on their papers using the comment feature and the comments are there when the documents are opened in whatever version of word they are using.
I have been using openoffice.org for windows at work, versions 1.0 and 1.1, and openoffice.org for Linux without issues for the past 18 months.
All of my students are given a disk with openoffice that they can use at home. Some do, some don't. Their
No, but the third party code can be taken out and re-written, I suppose.
I am with you on this one. Sun opens up Java and IBM does the same with their Lotus suite?
A gesture is met with a gesture and we all win.
It will never happen.
I submitted a number of stories about the project to Slashdot on this project and its implementation. It was never deemed newsworthy.
I have no idea what you are referring to. But Linex is very much alive. You can download it here.
http://www.linex.org
And the distribution is actually very decent. I have also seen it widely used in schools.
Why is Munich the frame of reference for Linux on the Desktop when the region of Extremadura (Spain) moved 80,000 desktops to Linux nearly 2 years before Munich even announced its intentions?
More time should be spent on understanding how they did it and why they have had such good results. The move has been an incredible success with copies of Linex (the debian-based distribution they created) being given away when you buy the newspaper.
And schools have transitioned to it. The key, I believe, was localization. They switch the name of openwriter to "Cervantes", the famous Spanish writer, author of Don Quijote. They did the same for all of the applications and streamlined the installation to a process that makes it dead easy for anybody to install it.
Finally, the government is subsidizing the use of linux in rural areas for first-time computer buyers by paying for a chuck of a linux-compatible computer.
So why isn't this being talked about is the greatest mistery to me. Linux is on thousands of government, school and private desktops today. And it works!
Great, we now get to taste vicariously the wines of the wealthy.
I enjoy a good wine as much as the next guy and I hate to spoil the party, seeing that we are all having a jolly good time around here, but what the fuck does this have to do with "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
A tone of shit happened today in the free software world. Maybe somebody is hung over and has Slashdot stories on automatic pilot.
"3) Germany. Why? Because they have the largest Linux role-out to date. And according to recent news their Linux roll-out cost more than sticking with Windows which means they have money to throw away anyway."
I don't know why this keeps being repeated ad nauseam. Munich is not the largest roll-out. The government of Extremadura in Spain has rolled out 80,000 desktops and they did it well before Munich. In fact, as far as I know Munich is still in the planning stage.
I have posted this already, but just in case it gets lost in the Slashdot shuffle of posts.
http://www.lipz4.com/lipz4.htm
The LIPZ4 is a SIP soft phone that runs on Linux. Very professionally done.
http://www.lipz4.com/lipz4.htm
The LIPZ4 is a SIP soft phone that runs on Linux. Very professionally done.
Has it occurred to you that maybe the did try youur fix and it led to data corruption, so they decided not to apply it?
/etc/sysconfig/harddisks or pass a boot-time kernel option to lilo.
Or that they did not try because they knew it would not work?
There is also a huge difference between Linux supporting your hardware and your hardware manufacturers supporting Linux. The former implies that Linux provides APIs and ABIs for which drivers can be written, the latter implies the makers of your hardware thinking of Linux compatible hardware design and driver development as something more than an afterthought that they community will address for free.
And if Linux doesn't suit your needs now, you may wish to try it it in the future. Things change quickly.
By the way, why where you recompiling your kernel to enable DMA?
Look at
As you recognized towards the end of your post, the small details are being addressed at many levels. Stay tuned for a Linux distribution near you.
In fact, your specific example has been dealt with by Mandrake and Suse for the past 2/3 years. Where have you been?
And how do they do it? Better than Windows, most times.
No driver CD necessary. If it's supported, plug in the camera and it shows up on your desktop. Click on it and get your pictures. Now that was easy, wasn't it.
I am not impervious to criticism and there are tons of things that need improvement, but they are coming. Anyone who has used Linux for the past five years cannot be blind to the huge improvements in ease-of-use and consistency that have been made.
Finally, the community aspect of Linux is not to be dismissed. When I set somebody up with Linux, I make sure that his/her every whim is satisfied so that the experience is more positive than it was with their prior OS.
Suddenly, I feel so old and jaded. Why must you bring out the past in this manner?
Oh, why, why?
On a more serious note, it's interesting how innovation always appears to be right around the corner, yet it doesn't happen fast enough when you breath and live technology.
And while technology has indeed evolved a great deal, I am not sure whether I can say that it has effected the type of social change that I once thought it would bring about.
The ruling can be accessed through Lindows's page, right here
Read the yahoo article and the one posted at Seattlepi.com and the (mal)practices of our media shine through in the reporting of this ruling.
What a strawman you have built! Yours is a classic example of a zero-sum game? For us to win, others must loose.
Yet free and open source software proves precisely the opposite. We all win. We all have better infrastructures, access to the tools to educate ourselves, technology that we can scrutinize and use to empower ourselves, technology to allow ourselves to transcend the narrow-minded divisions of nation and state and to reach out to others. And in reaching out, we establish a dialog about how to solve the big problems, because no country can solve today's big problems alone.
Have you noticed how pollution knows no boundaries? Have you noticed how natural disasters displace millions of people and countries must come together to find workable solutions? Have you noticed how the "Tequilazo" or the melting of the Asian-tiger economies was felt across the globe and a global answer was needed? Have you noticed how security problems are no more circumscribed by the interest of a single state and affect us all?
Have you noticed the emergence of what academics long ago term "epistemological communities", i.e., communities of people interested in solving a problem by applying their joint efforts and knowledge? Oh, you haven't. Then you must not be looking because an open heart is all that it takes. The mind then follows.
A very old proverb says that "it's hard to be a prophet in one's own land."
For some reason, Richard Stallman is demonized in the US as some eccentric loony. Yet the rest of the world actually holds him in very high regard. I have had the fortune of listening to him speak on the issue of software patents and not only was he articulate but he was able to appeal to a large audience made up of people from all walks of life.
Even if you disagree with specific positions that RMS might take, you have to give the guy credit for standing his ground. To me the GPL is one of the cornerstones of the free software movement and its cultural and social implications will reverberate for generations.
Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they, the KDE suite of applications would be very much complete.
Koffice, even if it doesn't attract all the attention of OpenOffice, is light-weight and architecturally sound. Koffice 1.3 is almost there, it just needs a little bit of loving care.
If you are convinced that Apple could be interested in Koffice, consider this.
*Qt applications can run natively under OS X.
*The Mac port of OpenOffice is seriously understaffed and very much behind.
* Koffice's code, due to its componentization, is much easier to maintain and to learn.
*It helps Apple maintain its open source credibility, an intangible asset, but one that shouldn't be dismissed.
*It provides a good trump card against Microsoft or at least some leverage to make sure that they continue to put out a Microsoft Office for the Mac.
*It gives Apple greater control over their destiny, which is one of the main reasons why they created Safari.
---Flame retardant suit is on!
Thanks for clarifying this.
If you read the fine article or the quote I provide, they do say that from now on, the official distro will be supported for only eighteen months.
I have been an avid Mandrake supporter for years, but the following quote from Roblimo's article has me concerned:
"The "community" version is expected to be the first major Linux distribution that includes the 2.6 kernel. Two or three months later, the "official" version will also incorporate the new kernel.
Bancilhon expects to see updated versions of the "community version" every six months, while the "official" version will be on an 18 month release cycle."
Basically, I take this to be that they will use the community version as a way to beta-test their real distribution. The paying customers get the good stuff, the rest of us deal with the bugs and have to be on a constant upgrade treadmill because security updates will no longer be provided after six months.
Very disturbing, IF this is indeed the case. If this is not the case, I apologize in advance for jumping to conclusions. It also makes you wonder as to whether Mandrake's repositories will now be fragmented between community and official, which will require much more man power to maintain and thus reducing the number of packages available.
Finally, six months is not nearly enough time for an operating system to stop being supported. This is just plain ridiculous and IT is exactly the same thing that Red Hat did with Fedora, which at the time I found appalling. Only difference is that Fedora actually has a fedora-legacy project in place that seeks to have longer-maintenance cycles.
What do you folks think? As much as I hate to say this, even 18 months is too short a time for an official distro, which is what you would use on a server.
Servers are only upgraded every 3 to 5 years. I am having a hard time understanding what it is that Mandrake is thinking. In fact, this is looking ever more so like forced upgrades to me.
While some of you may dismiss my comments, Mandrake has been my primary distro for over four years, so I say this with a lot of regret and I hope it spurs enough debate that Mandrake will have to respond to our concerns.
Yeap, that's evidently what I meant. I don't think I am the first one who makes this mistake. I type Linux much more often than I do Linux, so it is almost a reflex.
Well, I, would be curious to see what Linux can code beyond the kernel stuff.
Gosh, Slahdot is so full of irascible assholes that it really makes it hard to stay aboard the nonsense.
Get a fucking life.
I asked a reasonable question. If Linux coded an office app, I'd be curious to learn of the design decisions and also to see the design mistakes and what kind of design prejudices and best practices come from trying to leverage your kernel expertise in other areas.
And it is cross-platform and web-enabled.
In the unlilely event that Linus or someone who could get his ear does read this.
Linus, I have been archiving my email with offlineIMap for years and it has been reliable and efficient, but I wonder whether you would share with us the little app that you concocted.