Linux Tricks

Interoperability Still Stumbling Block for Open Source in 2008

Nicu — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:28:19 +0000

“Enterprise customers are using open-source software more and more, but issues of interoperability are still a stumbling block to widespread adoption, say customers and open-source software vendors.

“Enterprise customers need assurance that open-source solutions will continue to work together over update cycles before they will expand the adoption of open-source components across their IT environments, said Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource…”Complete Story

UK Government: Closed Minds on Open Source

Nicu — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:26:46 +0000

“To its eternal shame, the UK Government uses far less open source than most. Worse, it seems to have a closed mind to the whole idea. That’s evident in the guidelines that have been released to aid in the interpretation of amendments to Computer Misuse Act (CMA) of 1990 with respect to ‘unauthorised access to computer material’ (aka cracking)…”

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Open Source ActionScript HTML/CSS broswer released

Nicu — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:56:30 +0000

A public beta version of Wrapper, a formerly closed-sourced cross-browser compliant HTML/CSS rendering engine written in ActionScript has been released. Wrapper eliminates cross-browser issues and makes integrating ActionScript and HTML/CSS projects possible without needing to compile. Wrapper combines the best of both technologies into a single framework that is smaller and faster then the alternatives. At only 21K custom fonts, shapes, filters, gradient fills, blend modes, and much more all from CSS.

http://code.google.com/p/htmlwrapper/

Distro hopping all the way back to Windows XP

Nicu — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:53:53 +0000

“This past week I have evaluated five Linux distributions to see if any of them would make suitable replacements for Windows XP so that I could avoid Vista. Sadly, Linux proved to be far more finicky and troublesome than I expected. Take it from me, if Windows XP is behaving itself, then don’t try to fix what ain’t broken; stick with what works!

“It all started out on Boxing Day when I installed Kubuntu 7.10, which I chose because I prefer KDE, but also because of name recognition; I’ve heard good things about Ubuntu so Kubuntu must be good, too. Right? Wrong…!”
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Linux Users Could Face European Patent Threat

Nicu — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:09:59 +0000

“Linux users in the UK could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open-source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft’s claim that open-source software infringes its patents.

“Microsoft has claimed that Linux and other open-source software infringes 235 of its patents. Although the company has refused to say which patents are involved, the risk must be lower in the UK than the US, because the company has far fewer patents in the UK, argued Andrew Katz, a solicitor at Moorcrofts, last week…”

Complete Story

Access (K)ubuntu console with a single key

Nicu — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:30:23 +0000

Yakuake is a Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology which makes the console more user friendly. If you need the ability to quickly pull down a console to run a few commands with a keystroke, and then make the console disappear again with another quick keystroke. YaKuake is exactly what you are looking for.

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How to set up surround 5.1 audio in Linux with Alsa

Nicu — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:15:54 +0000

The main problem I had with the sound setup in linux was getting it to work so that i can use all my speakers. After a few hours of searching the web and trial and error I finally figured out how to do it. I have put together this tutorial hoping to help other people in a similar situation.
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Open Source is about Trust

Nicu — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:41:45 +0000

“In highly sensitive operations such as banking, military or government - but also our certification authority** - source code of the operating system and programs which run on those servers and computers is essential. Because without being able to read, verify, control and modify the programs in its source form, one can’t know what’s under the hood.” Complete Story

NVIDIA GeForce 8: Linux vs. Windows

Nicu — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:30:07 +0000

“When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that’s able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it’s not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux…”

Complete Story

What’s the Story Behind Apache?

Nicu — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:28:50 +0000

“Most people in the free software world know two things about Apache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a ‘a patchy server,’ built out of patches to the earlier NCSA HTTPd Web server. The other is that in terms of market share, Apache knocks Microsoft’s IIS into a cocked hat. Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.

“Here’s what Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache project, and the person who came up with the name, told me a few years ago…”

Complete Story