Baldy’s Paradox

Dell Listens, Not

Well the first thing out of the Dell camp in answer to the requests for Linux machines, is the announcement that all Novell Products will be now available on Dell computers. Now is this a surprise? I think not. Years ago Dell had started a linux option for it’s customers and Microsoft jumped in ans said if you want to sell our Windows then forget the linux, and they folded and linux was ignored. Well fast forward a few years and now that Billyware and Novell have signed on as best buddies, Dell is allowed to offer all Novell products as a linux solution for their users. Now is this good or bad for linux in general, I have to say no, the user is still made to decide between only 2 options and not the many that Linux has to offer. Will this offer have a positive effect on the linux world? I hope that after some of the converts will start to learn that linux is a viable option and maybe learn that there are more distros available to them and then they will grow from there. I will cross my fingers that this is a step in the right direction, however they are not real tight. I will try and keep up with this debate and see what comes of it in the long run before I say it really is good for linux though.

Source: Bald Spot

Recently, I upgraded my cell phone to a Motorola RAZR v3 from T-Mobile, a Bluetooth-enabled device. I wanted to copy files to this device using my Laptop running Debian testing (Etch) using command line tools. I found what I needed in a package of Bluetooth tools and daemons called BlueZ.

Source: linux.com By: Duane Odom

One of the good things about OpenOffice.org is its ability to use different database engines. Just give it the right driver, and OpenOffice.org can connect to virtually any database system, including MySQL. However, deciding what database driver to use and configuring a connection between MySQL and OpenOffice.org can be a bit tricky. Let’s walk through the process.

Source: linux.com

So you’ve installed a flavor of Linux such as Ubuntu or you have shell access to a Linux system and you want to start doing some damage. The admins at LXPages.com compiled 10 commands that every Newbie Linux user should definitely know to start being effective.

Source: LXPageas.com

Four of the province’s largest centres will be connected to the network once it’s launched this spring. We look at the capital costs, the rollout plan and the challenges ahead

The Saskatchewan government announced Monday its plans to create what it called the country’s largest wireless Internet network, which will allow the province’s four largest cities’ residents and visitors to access free-of-charge Wi-Fi in the downtown core and post-secondary institutions.

Source: itbusiness.ca

With the rise in popularity of open source software, developers don’t need to start from scratch when coding new software. Instead, they can use specialized search engines that crawl repositories to find the perfect code snippet. Now, one entrepreneurial open source developer has built a business that expands on the basic code search engine, and in true hacker recursive style, finds his company relying on the very tool it exists to create.

Source: Krugle offers code search engine for open source, with open source

The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base — and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.

Source: Xara LX forked to replace rendering engine

The Firefox Web browser is more than a navigator — it’s a veritable online ecosystem that is continually expanding and evolving. This is largely due to software plug-ins called “extensions” that turbocharge Firefox with additional capabilities. I have access to hundreds of the modules, which typically work on both PCs and Macs, and I use several of them daily. More extensions are continually being developed and released to the public, usually for free. I wrote about Firefox last year, but I’m taking a closer look at extensions.

Source: Extensions Help Boost Firefox’s Attractiveness

On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed “Kludge,” the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware…

Source: New KDE 4 preview shows progress