Monthly Archive:: August 2006

"You've built a linux desktop. You've mounted the learning curve to configure the hardware (or paid someone else to do so) and you are able to do your own work on the machine. You've discovered that if you can point and click you can run a modern linux OS on your desktop. But how is it you will ever relate to the rest of the world? What do you do with the MS attachments people send you? How do you enjoy the music distributed in formats for a Windows World?"

"This week I interviewed Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, to address the issue of Web standards compliance and IE7. There has been controversy about this lately, sparked by a Slashdot thread last week that claimed IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. I then repeated those claims on my ZDNet blog, but I have to admit that I (and Slashdot too) missed one vital point - it was largely based on an article Paul Thurrott wrote in August 2005, so it was outdated information. Chris Wilson was naturally sensitive to all the criticism and so he vigorously defended IE's standards compliance in his blog. I hope my interview with Chris Wilson went some way to clarify Microsoft's current position on CSS and standards support for IE7. Although I personally still prefer Firefox's features, I do think it's important not to unfairly tar IE7 with the same brush as IE6."

The Linux desktop has made great strides in just the last few months, and experts at the LinuxWorld Conference & Exhibition in San Francisco see much more to come. Talk about technological issues is finally turning into successful deployments. John Cherry, the Desktop Linux Initiative manager for Open Source Developer Labs, spoke with SearchOpenSource.com about the progress of the Portland Project's beta release of its programming interfaces for the GNOME and KDE environments.

"Most Debian GNU/Linux neophytes find that distribution's default installer a bit difficult and ugly. While developers are working on a new installer for Debian Etch, there is a fully baked command-line alternative today: debootstrap. Debootstrap creates a basic Debian installation, and can also be used for creating custom, minimal installations on embedded systems or for replacing a pre-installed Linux distribution with Debian on a co-located server."

Novell is still working on improving the VBA support of its OpenOffice submission, and is therefore open to all sumbmissions of VBA macros which are not working on the OOo version of SLED 10. In the meantime the question is when - or even if - Sun will accept the patches for OpenOffice to get VBA support.

Disagreements over what should be included in the free software license's next version have pitted the movement's leaders against each other. Say the letters G, P, and L in that order around most folks and you're likely to be met with a blank stare. But try dropping them around the open-source crowd, especially in proximity to San Francisco this mid-August, and you'll get a very different response: everything from fist-pumping to hand-wringing.

David Beers was in attendance at LinuxWorld San Francisco where PalmSource was exhibiting the Access Linux Platform. PalmSource also held a full day of hands-on tutorials in which they built and debugged native applications for mobile Linux. In this article David brings us up to date on ALP, its progress and other details on and what was being presented about ALP at LinuxWorld.

If open source were a religion, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who wrote the core of the operating system that would become Linux, would be its prophet. In 1991, Mr Torvalds created the kernel, or core software, that would eventually be adopted by millions of computer users and lay the foundation for a vibrant open-source community. In an email interview with Red Herring, Mr Torvalds says the increasing focus of venture capitalists and large companies on open source can only be good for a community that, until now, was on the fringes of the commercial realm.

New Iyonix computers are shipping with Nvidia FX52 series graphics cards and RISC OS 5.12 fitted as standard. The FX5200 and FX5500 cards are newer than the dinosaur Nvidia GeForce MX 2 that shipped with original Iyonixes, plus they feature dual-head and DVI output capabilities. RISC OS support for these two functions is understood to not yet be fully complete, however. The new cards are also mildly faster than the MX 2 devices, speeding up graphics operations by an estimated 25 to 30 percent.

How is data sent from a Windows Communication Foundation client to a service? This chapter explains the involvement of XML serializers to improve control and optimization.

Patrick Volkerding, Slackware's benevolent dictator for life, has 'released' Slackware Linux 11.0 Release Candidate 2. From the changelog: "This is mostly frozen now unless bugs (or irresistible upgrades) come up, so I'll call this update Slackware 11.0 release candidate 2."

"A common task for System Administrators is to monitor and care for a server. That's fairly easy to do at a moment's notice, but how to keep a record of this information over time? One way to monitor your server is to use the Sysstat package. Sysstat is actually a collection of utilities designed to collect information about the performance of a linux installation, and record them over time. It's fairly easy to install too, since it is included as a package on many distributions."

"In the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about Xgl, compiz, AIGLX et cetera. It seems that 'Xgl' has become a synonym for fancy desktop on Linux - but no one seems to talk about the alternatives or how it all works. I have had a little look into this and am going to summarize it for y'all. I will explain where the following come from and how they work: Xglx, Xegl, Luminocity, and AIGLX."

Ubuntu bug hunters and users in general have discovered a severe bug in the Debian-derived distribution. The bug is rated as 'critical', and is said to prevent Ubuntu from gaining any significant ground in the computing world. This bug can be observed everywhere in the world, at companies, in shops, in people's homes. It's Ubuntu's bug #1.