Baldy’s Paradox

In just a few short days our choices in desktop operating systems seem to have tripled. Not only has Dell agreed to distribute Linux on certain desktop models, but it’s also given XP a new lease on life. Responding to user requests on its Ideastorm site, Dell has agreed to offer consumers the option to get XP and not Vista on select Dimension desktops and Inspiron notebooks — at least until Microsoft sends XP off to the OS boneyard in January 2008. Even Michael Dell is running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on one of his home notebooks.

Source: Is Microsoft’s monopoly kaput?

Red Swoosh (acquired by Akamai for $15 million earlier this month) released v1.0 of FoxTorrent today. This is a fully functional BitTorrent client for Firefox that works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and has a very cool additional feature - the ability to stream files as they are downloading.

This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete.

A good early review is here.

Technorati tags: Software

Source: Akamai Releases FoxTorrent 1.0 - Firefox BitTorrent Add-on

Pagestream is a proprietary desktop publishing program for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga. First developed for the Atari more than two decades ago, it is produced by a small company, but has attracted a loyal and active group of users. Pagestream’s strengths include an easy-to-use interface and a strong awareness of typography, but in the version 5.0.3.4 beta for GNU/Linux, users also have to contend with limited font support and apparently disabled table support.

I added this for you Jim here is your linux ready publishing program,Baldy

 

Technorati tags: Software

Source: Pagestream delivers easy, powerful DTP

Wireless networking on Linux is entering a new era. An era of bliss and ease; where users and network administrators have abundant time for relaxing lie-abouts on sunny warm hills because their wireless systems are humming along contentedly, instead of being vexing and unreliable.

(Oh please, I hope that this writer is correct,Baldy)

Source: Tutorial: Better Wi-Fi on the Linux Horizon

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions about how to install the free VMware Server (version 1.0.2) on a Debian Etch system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free). In this article we use Debian Etch (4.0) as the host operating system.

Source: How To Install VMware Server On Debian 4.0 (Etch)

Adobe is making an aggressive push into open source with its plans to release the code for its Flex platform. The Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License in the second half of 2007. At the same time, though, Adobe will continue to make the Flex SDK and other Flex products available under existing commercial licenses. The MPL will provide full access to Flex source code, giving developers free rein to download, extend and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler, components and application framework.

Source: Adobe Makes Bold Foray Into Open Source Territory

They used to call women like my long-suffering missus “Computer Widows” because so many men like me spent their evenings hunched over 15-inch CRT monitors messing around with things like text disk operating system commands and bulletin board servers. There was no World Wide Web yet and we hobbyists could only exchange e-mail by linking to Unix server computers, mostly at universities. These links ran at a whopping 300 bits per second. This column doesn’t have room enough for all the zeros it would take to express how much faster are today’s common high-speed broadband systems.

 

Technorati tags: Software

Source: Firefox Add-On Helps Create New Generation of ‘Widows’

Vendors challenge coders to port apps across platforms

A Canadian software developer has won an international programming competition aimed at changing perceptions about the challenge of porting .Net applications to Linux.

Mark Cafazzo, who works at NorthCore Technologies in Toronto, took the grand prize in a contest called “Race to Linux” that was jointly sponsored by San Jose, Calif.-based Mainsoft, IBM and Novell. More than 600 programmers from around the world entered the cross-platform race, which also awarded prizes to developers from Australia and Romania.

Cafazzo said he was an early adopter of .Net in 2001, when he used it to create an e-learning portal for Burlington, Ont.-based ITIL specialist Pink Elephant Inc. He also had another foot in the Linux camp, however, running Apache Web servers while working for the County of Oxford, Ont. He won the Race to Linux contest by using Mainsoft’s Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview and Visual Studio IDE to port an open source Blog Starter Kit to Java Enterprise Edition and run it on Linux.

Cafazzo said there were some initial problems using Suse Linux, but he had a breakthrough when he downloaded VMware Server virtual appliances, as well as a MySQL appliance, which he ran on a box with Windows Server 2003.

“I learned a lot about the .Net common runtime language and the internals of the C# language,” he said. “You also start to understand how Java thinks about these things . . .
It’s opened my eyes to a lot of similarities. There are problem spaces you encounter in the IT business over and over again. Java and Microsoft, although they might have different approaches, they’ve have had the same challenges to face.”

Source: itbusiness.ca

~LC

OpenOffice.org and business intelligence software maker Pentaho on April 20 announced a deal to include the latter’s open source reporting engine in OpenOffice.org’s next feature release. “Report Designer” will serve as an extension to the free office suite’s database application, “Base.”

Report Designer aims to give business users the ability to create sophisticated business intelligence reports from various sources — including OLAP and XML — and save them using the OASIS OpenDocument format (ODF), the ISO-approved open standard for file format, among other formats.

Report Designer also outputs files in Adobe PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, or plain text, a Pentaho spokesperson said.

Source: desktop linux

~LC

What is Arch Linux?

Arch aims to be a simple distribution for the experienced Linux user. It brings another package management solution to the fray, “pacman”. It uses a rolling release system so major periodic releases are not necessary as the system can easily be brought fully up-to-date.

Arch Linux doesn’t aim to showcase all the latest and greatest desktop technologies in Linux at the outset. It aims to be a distribution that is easy to setup and maintain but lets you handle most of the business.

It sort of reminds me of another distribution that I have some very fond memories of: Slackware. Slackware was the first Linux distribution I used, way back in 1995. It was easy to install and maintain, but you had to do most of the heavy lifting.

Downloading and Installing

I went to the Arch Linux website and followed the download links to get the 64-bit full install CD. I burned the CD and booted it up on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 desktop….
continue

Source: triedit.org

~LC