Monthly Archive:: January 2013

Icaros Desktop, the popular distribution of the AROS Research Operating System, has recently released its version 1.5, a new milestone since it finally allows to run classic Amiga software and games on full screen or perfectly integrating them into the host AROS desktop.

A blog post on the Free Software Foundation Europe site is making the rounds around the web. The blog post, written by Torsten Grote, claims that 'the Android SDK is now proprietary', because upon download, you have to agree to terms and conditions which are clearly not compatible with free and/or open source software. What Grote fails to mention - one, these terms have mostly always been here, and two, they only apply to the SDK binaries. The source is still freely available.

"Samsung, the world's largest seller of mobile phones, said it will start selling smartphones this year featuring the Tizen operating system backed by Intel. 'We plan to release new, competitive Tizen devices within this year and will keep expanding the lineup depending on market conditions', Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung said in an e-mailed statement today. The company didn't elaborate on model specifications, prices or timeframe for their debut." The odds for Ubuntu on phones just got worse. Great news for competition, though.

"Ubuntu, once the darling of desktop Linux and the overwhelmingly popular choice for newcomers, may soon lose that role to Mint." I switched to Mint KDE, and have no intention of going back. By the way, KDE4 is finally good (don't hit me, Aaron) - fast, fluid, stable, pretty, and thanks to its versatility, a joy to use after a few hours of tweaking. Just... Please, unify Plasma and the regular widget style. This is insanity.

Proprietary software like Windows often includes surveillance code to track user behavior and send this information to vendor servers. Linux has traditionally been immune to such privacy violation. Ubuntu 12.10 now includes code that, by default, collects data on Dash searches. The code integrates Amazon products into search results and can even integrate with Facebook, Twitter, BBC and others as per Ubuntu's Third Party Privacy Policies. This article at the EFF tells how it all works and how to opt out of information sharing, while Richard Stallman himself comments here.

Microsoft's legal chief: "We continue to be dogged by an issue we had hoped would be resolved by now: Google continues to prevent Microsoft from offering consumers a fully featured YouTube app for the Windows Phone." Utter nonsense, since MetroTube offers a complete and full YouTube experience on Windows Phone (it's one of the best Windows Phone applications), and YouTube+ on Windows 8. Two fantastically rich applications, built by small ISVs - yet Microsoft can't do the same? Don't make me laugh. Coincidentally, Microsoft is also whining some more about Google's removal of ActiveSync - Redmond again refuses to acknowledge that all it needs to do is implement the open standards CalDAV and CardDAV, just like everyone else has done. Times have changed, Ballmer. You don't get to dictate the industry anymore.

Asus is the company that shook up the laptop market a couple of years ago with their introduction of the EeePC netbook. And with their announcement that they will no longer be producing netbooks in 2013, Charles Arthur over at the Guardian UK has declared that the netbook era has now come to an end. Sad news for those of us who still love our netbooks! Harry McCracken over at Time Mag thinks they'll be back. Anybody who spends time wiping the smears off their tablet's touchscreen might agree.

Expected, but still insanely cool: Canonical has just announced Ubuntu for phones. This is a new mobile phone operating system, with its own user interface and development platform. It's built around Qt5 and QML, and the interface reminds me of MeeGo on the N9. It's supposed to be on the shelves in early 2014, but the developer preview is out today.

Want to run FreeBSD on your Raspberry Pi or other ARM-based device? You're not far away from being able to do so. The folks over at the FreeBSD Developers Notebook report huge gains made in running FreeBSD on ARM v6 processors. They've got builds prepared for the Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard, and several others, though support isn't yet total. What can you do with it? Lots of stuff, like running the Go programming language on it like Dave Cheney. Cool!

There are a lot of WebOS fans out there who regret this remarkable operating system got shelved by HP just as Android was swooping in to win the hearts and minds of developers. Is there still hope? WebOSNation reports they've got it running on Google hardware. Surely a little competition for Android isn't a bad thing?

I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner - Apple's Platinum and QNX' PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture.