My new avatar from today onwards …. so if you see this anywhere on the internet, then it is me 
… btw, do you know where the word avatar comes from …. no … then head here for a small introduction to this magical word.
Archive for the 'linux and open source blog' Category
You can now test the Linux operating system and desktop environment. It’s as easy as ABC.
The Linux Test is just that, a very clever way for anyone to experience Linux on their Windows PC without having to install anything. Just hit the ‘START Linux’ button and a Linux OS will start up in a virtual space. You’ll need an Internet connection. Yes, it runs a much much slower than normal full install will, or even LiveCD/DVD, but then again it’s a great way to get acquainted with minimal of what Linux has to offer and to try out the included applications such as Open Office 1.1 and few others. be much better if they had updated their applications, and provide both KDE, at least 3.5, and Gnome versions of it.
Here is a quick and small video showing the execution of this application on my …. hmm hmm …. system:
Now, ain’t that cool …. I mean that I have seen now GaZiLLiON ways of how you can run, launch and test Linux OS.
True or False: Switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%.
The answer is: TRUE
A UK government study in late 2004 reported that there were substantial green benefits to running a Linux open source operating system (OS) on computers instead of the ubiquitous Windows OS, owned by Microsoft. The main problem with Windows users was that they had to change their computer twice as many times as Linux users, on average, thereby effectively creating twice as much computer-generated e-waste.
The report, titled, “Office of Government Commerce: Open Source Software Trials in Government - Final Report” reported the following:
“There are also potential Green Agenda benefits, through reducing the energy and resources consumed in manufacturing replacement equipment, and reducing landfill requirements and costs arising from disposal of redundant equipment.
“Industry observers quote a typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows systems as 3-4 years; a major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years.”
- EcoGeek (original)
Didn’t notice, but it came out few days ago. If you are not happy with Digikam (which I like) or F-Spot, or have been using the previous Picasa 2.5 version, then check out the preview of the upcoming release of Picasa 2.7.
New Features:
- Upload to Picasa Web Albums
Use the new “Web Album” button to post your best photos online to share with friends and family. - Save edits to disk
Save edits, undo saves, and revert to the original file with ease. We’ve got batch saving too! Picasa will even match the jpeg quality of the original. Right-click on your saved files to try the new “locate original” feature. - Folder hierarchy views
Browse through folders Explorer-style. Use the button at the top of your Albums List to try them out. - Improvements to Import
Import into an existing folder- we know you’ve wanted this feature for a long time! We’ve made importing photos from your camera faster too. - Better RAW support
Now you can work with RAW files from the Canon 30D, the Nikon D200, Adobe DNG files, and more. - Many other enhancements
Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, special “Starred Photos” album, search by ISO and focal length.
Please see http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/testrepo.html for information on using Google’s Linux Software Testing Repository to install Picasa for Linux, otherwise download one of the following corresponding to your Linux distribution:
- rpm, for Red Hat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva i386 or x86_64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/testing/i386/picasa-2.7.3736-7.i386.rpm - deb, for Debian/Ubuntu i386 and amd64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_2.7.3736-7_i386.deb
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_2.7.3736-7_amd64.deb
The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0.
While progress on the quality and completeness of what is to become the KDE 4.0 desktop has been great, the KDE Community decided to have another release candidate before releasing KDE 4.0 on January, 11th. The codebase is now feature-complete. Some work is still being done to put the icing on the KDE 4.0 cake. This includes fixing some major and minor bugs, finishing off artwork and smoothening out the user experience.
With this second release candidate, the KDE developers hope to collect comments and bug reports from the wider KDE community. With their help, we hope to solve the most pressing problems with the current KDE 4 codebase to ensure the final 4.0 release is stable, usable and fun to work with. We would like to encourage anyone who is willing and able to spend some time on testing to find and report problems to the KDE developers. It is recommended to have a current snapshot of the codebase handy. That makes trying things easier, it also helps the process by not having to hunt down bugs that have already been fixed and makes it easier to test patches proposed by developers.
More Here (with screenshots)
281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month.
The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:
- level of contribution
- reasons for participating
- attitude towards Novell
The results are now ready and can be found here:
The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.
- openSUSE news
Korneliusz Jarzebski has done the numbers and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up.
The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it’s worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. With more tweaks and optimization, at least we can hope that it will, if not much faster, slower than KDE 3.5 on the same specs.
Also check out a small and interesting post: KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel
Conduit allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.
Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, conduit allows you to;
* Synchronize your tomboy notes to a file on a remote computer
* Synchronize your emails to your mobile phone
* Synchronize your bookmarks to delicious, gmail, or even your own webserver
Article By: MoosyBlog