Eugenia Loli Archive

CTO of Adeptiva Linux, Stephan February, admitted that consumers find it difficult to use Linux because of the lack of support compared to Windows. "There is no compelling need to shift to Linux today," he said. Despite the availability of user-friendly graphical user interfaces similar to what Windows-based desktops have, Linux remains a very technical software product with few people outside the technical community are available to support consumer users. My Take: I personally agree with this fellow.

With the European Parliament poised to begin deliberating on software patents again, organizations on both sides of the argument are continuing to push their cases. Many European local governments are thinking about ditching Windows, but Microsoft is fighting back. Elsewhere, The Australian government agency responsible for distributing social security payments is still moving towards near-universal use of desktop Linux, but it's slow progress.

In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/.

KeithMerrington has a first look at the new eCS 1.2, and includes some screenshots.

One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of "choice" the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a single distributor has dominated since the late '90s. That distributor is, of course, Red Hat, and while the numbers analysts produce about its share of the Linux market vary, they consistently hover above 75 percent. The company is so dominant that it's not uncommon to hear less savvy executives simply refer to the distro as "Linux," which infuriates many.

"In NetBSD's sweet spot are organizations looking for a slim, lightweight, highly stable, and capable operating system to run the latest server applications on modest or specialized hardware." Read the article at ServerWatch.

MadPenguin has the first review of VectorLinux 4.3, with screenshots.

This company has a patch that allows C++ in the Linux kernel, but Linus thinks otherwise.

The C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 book written by Trolltech software engineer Jasmin Blanchette and Trolltech's documentation manager Mark Summerfield, can now be downloaded in PDF format from the publisher's homepage in the "Downloads" section.

MozillaZine reports that Firefox 1.0-RC1 has been released to the world.

Harman (maker of Harman Kardon and JBL audio gears) has bought QNX.

Ryan McBride requests the help of the OpenBSD community in convincing Texas Instruments to change the license of their firmware for the ZCX100 802.11b chipset. Theo de Raadt makes a similar request directed at Intel. A success story from Theo de Raadt in using this tactic on Adaptec. This is also important for Linux and the rest of the BSDs. I had to "pirate" my Prism's firmware files in order to make the pcmcia card work with my Linuces. I don't see the point of keeping these firmware files bound.

In the thousands of meetings that Microsoft employees have with customers around the world every day, many of the same questions consistently surface: Does an open source platform really provide a long-term cost advantage compared with Windows?

SUN Microsystems Java and Microsoft's .NET platforms are no more than programming languages that exploit network potential with the idea that the same software should function on different platforms. Both systems are centered around the principle of running software that doesn't reside on the client machine to provide greater functionality or faster execution, saving connection time and improving public perception of the server to which the client connects. Read Article