Linux Tricks

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Thursday, June 28, 2007—On Friday, June 29, not everyone in the continental U.S. will be waiting in line to purchase a $500 iPhone. In fact, hundreds of thousands of digital aficionados around the globe won’t be standing in line at all, for June 29 marks the release of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Version 2 of the GPL governs the world’s largest body of free software—software that is radically reshaping the industry and threatening the proprietary technology model represented by the iPhone. (more…)

Earlier today I read a post about Ron Paul’s website. Interestingly, his site is less of a typical candidate site and more of a mashup of other sources of information about him. What a fantastic idea and it shows additional transparency. That got me even more curious, what was the site developed on?

According to Netcraft, Ron Paul’s site was previously run on Microsoft IIS but as of June 5th it’s now on Apache! (more…)

“The newest versions of Lightning and Sunbird, released simultaneously by Mozilla yesterday, include 38 new calendars as well as support for Google Calendar, a viable print function, enhanced support for Outlook displays and numerous other upgrades.

“Lightning is an extension that integrates with Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, most useful for those who send and receive meeting invitations by e-mail and who prefer to customize the application via add-ons…”

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“Microsoft has no current plans to join the Open Innovation Network, a move that some in the free and open-source community have suggested would benefit them both.”OIN is an intellectual property company that was formed to acquire Linux-related patents and share them, royalty-free, to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux or its applications…”

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If you believe Jeff Jones, Microsoft’s security strategy director, then Vista is much more secure than XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Why, oh why, is anyone paying any attention to this man outside of the walls of Microsoft? His paychecks are signed by Bill Gates, people! (more…)

“With Mandriva and others rejecting Microsoft’s Linux payoff deal, there is a lot of talk lately about Microsoft’s new Patent Infringement Protection Plan and how it might not be the ‘you scratch our backs and we wont stab you in yours’ plan that it was initially thought to be.

“Microsoft is a company that has product in place in nearly every industry in the world as well as ties and relations in those industries. Leveraging all those ties in all those industries is it not possible that these agreements are setting the stage for something bigger? Considering this, one has to take a step back and think about what the end goal of these kinds of agreements might be…”

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New filesystem technology for Linux includes high capacity, snapshots, copy-on-write, and on-the-fly corruption detection.

By Jonathan Corbet, LinuxWorld.com, 06/27/07

Almost exactly one year ago, as the developers were discussing changes to the venerable ext3 filesystem, Andrew Morton was heard to say: (more…)

“We talked a few days ago about the Compiz and Beryl mergence and the name of the newly born project resulted from this fusion, Compiz Fusion. The Compiz Fusion project tries to bring us all the latest 3D technologies, such as Cube reflection, paint fire on your desktop and a lot of new eye candy animations.

“The following guide will teach you (step by step) how to install Compiz Fusion on your Ubuntu (Kubuntu) 7.04 operating system. Be aware that Compiz Fusion is still in heavy development, so it may not be very stable. For me (at this moment) it’s pretty stable, as I didn’t encounter any bugs…”

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“I’ve spent recent days praising Ubuntu’s simplicity. My $1,400 investment in a screaming Dell machine running Ubuntu was money well spent. But I also realize Ubuntu won’t appeal to all users. In fact, I can think of at least four key reasons why many Mac and Windows users won’t want an Ubuntu PC. Here they are.

“4. Business Application Users: Yes, a lengthy list of server applications from Oracle, IBM, etc., run on Linux. But consumers who run mainstream accounting, financial and other desktop applications could be out of luck with Ubuntu…”

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“Mozilla and Google are collaborating on an effort to make web applications work offline.

“Firefox 3 will be the first internet browser to offer offline web application support when it launches at the end of this year.

“Mozilla is working with open-source messaging provider Zimbra, for example, to offer offline features for its email service–such as saving emails typed offline to a ‘drafts’ folder, ready to be sent when the user next connects…”

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