Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software.

The two day event will allow participants to share their Ubuntu experiences, learn from each other, and catch up with the latest developments from Ubuntu, our partners, and the free software and open source ecosystem. Ubuntu Live is the meeting place for enterprise users and community developers to come together to exchange ideas and discuss projects face to face.

The Ubuntu Live program committee is now accepting proposals to lead sessions, panel discussions, and demos at the 2008 edition of Ubuntu Live. How are you taking Ubuntu further? Are you a guru using Ubuntu in unexpected ways? An entrepreneur launching a business with Ubuntu? An educator or researcher helping an underserved community thrive with Edubuntu? Are you a programmer, trainer, or system administrator with techniques or best practices to share? If so, submit a proposal to speak by February 4, 2008.

Co-presented by O’Reilly Media and Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Live is conveniently co-located with the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) event, thus making Portland, Oregon the place to be during the week of July 21.

Wish there would be something similar here. It’s be great the Linux movement and for OSS in general. Event managers, are you listening?

For those planning to go for the Convention, here‘s more details

Nokia, one of the leading cell-phone manufacturers will acquire Trolltech as announced by Nokia today. Trolltech which designed the Qt toolkit, on which KDE is based upon.

As per the Press release,

Espoo, Finland and Oslo, Norway – Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech (www.trolltech.com), a company headquartered in Oslo, Norway and publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Trolltech is a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. In addition to the key software assets, its talented team will play an important role in accelerating the implementation of Nokia’s software strategy.

 

Nokia will offer NOK 16 per share in cash. The board of directors of Trolltech has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept Nokia’s Offer. Holders of 35,024,830 shares, representing approximately 66,43 % of Trolltech’s issued shares and votes have as of January 27, 2008 irrevocably undertaken to accept the Offer. Haavard Nord, Vuonislahti Invest AS (controlled by Eirik Chambe-Eng), Teknoinvest and certain funds managed by Index Ventures are among the shareholders who have agreed to tender their shares to Nokia.

 

The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. Nokia’s software strategy for devices is based on cross-platform development environments, layers of software that run across operating systems, enabling the development of applications across the Nokia device range. Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.

 Interesting news! Will KDE make it to Nokia’s cellphones? What will be the future of Trolltech I wonder

Almost everyone would be knowing about ASUS eeePC by now. For the uninitiated, The ASUS eee PC is a subnotebook. The eeePC is powered by a 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 processor, features 512MB of DDR2 RAM and uses Xandros as it’s OS and has an Integrated Intel GMA 900 as its graphics processor. The GMA 900 means that technically the eeePC is capable of running Compiz Fusion. So has anyone done this?

Yes! Someone has! Fred Welland, who received an ASUS eeePC for his birthday according to his blog, has gone ahead and installed Fedora 8 on his eeePC and has mentioned that Compiz and Compiz Fusion are running well on the eeePC.

Here are some excerpts from his Blog:

I got a eeePC for my birthday, in mid-November 2007. It is a wonderfull little machine, that is a nice compliment to my Dell Latitude D820 and various and sundry desktops. The top of this page will be devoted to how I installed Fedora 8 on my eeePC. The bottom part of the page relates my experience with eeePC in general.

Fedora 8 Install Goals

[...]

Being a Linux user can be really funny. You just go reading few ignorant Windows users’ comments on How Linux is crap bla bla bla. Today’s source for making me laugh comes by way of Christopher Dawson’s article on ZDNet on Why Linux Will Not Displace Windows(a rather nicely written article, though). The best thing about such articles are the comments written by, let’s saw, rather “well informed” users.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

[...]

Virtualization is a concept most likely you will be familiar of.
Take an example. Consider PSCX. It’s an emulator, which allows you you to play PS2 games on a PC right? That’s basically virtualization at work. Virtualization is a fancy name for emulation. Virtualization software allows you to virtualize a machine, create a “virtual” PC – you can do anything on the virtual pc as you can do on a normal PC – Install an OS, run applications, compile applications, surf the web, the applications are limit less. So why virtualize you may ask?
Well that depends on what you want to do. If you’re a developer, wanting to test cross-platform applications(ie, applications that will run across multiple OS) virtualization provides you to do so without the hassles of actually installing the required OS.
Some terminology:

[...]

openSUSE 11 Roadmap overview

• Dec 6 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0
• Jan 17 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1
• Feb 07 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2
• March 18 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3
• April 17 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1
• May 2 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2
• May 13 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3
• May 29 openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1
• June 12 openSUSE 11.0 Goldmaster (internal)
• June 19 openSUSE 11.0 Public release

Detailed roadmap to follow soon

I look forward to Beta 3 and RC1 release, as they’re a pretty good indicator as to what openSUSE 11.0 public release will be like.

At the moment, openSUSE developers still haven’t finalized whether KDE4.0 will be the default desktop environment, but the inclusion of PulseAudio is great news indeed!

Technorati Tags: openSUSE, Roadmap, linux

With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

The Beautiful New Look of the Installer

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory,
we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth
a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not
suitable for production systems.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0

We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

• Sat Solver integration
  • Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package
    solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages
    - there might be suprises ahead. Please note that we need test cases
    for things that look funny to you (wiki link)
• Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4)
  • Note that it’s still in draft state and your feedback is welcome
• KDE 4.0.0
• perl 5.10
• glibc 2.7
• NetworkManager 0.7
• CUPS 1.3.5
• Pulseaudio

Most Annoying Bugs

Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:

• The new solver does not yet have a “ignore this requirement”
  choice, i.e. it’s not possible to create a broken system. We’re still
  discussing if this is a bug or a feature
• the CDs lack a huge amount of software. Many packages had to be
  taken out to make way for others. The CDs should still have a a
  completely working desktop, however.
• the Qt port and its theme are early releases and create noticeably
  more flickering and drawing glitches, e.g. the progress bar is only
  visible on some installations
• jpackage packages are broken and one package will complain during installation – just ignore
• the installation crashes at the end when creating the x11 proposal:
  in this case, your desktop will still have a working X config, it just
  might not be the perfect one. You may need to call sax2 after it happens
• PPC cannot be installed as the bootloader config can’t be written
  out. However, you can get a working PPC system when updating from alpha0

Media and Download

Please refer to software.openSUSE.org/developer for direct links to all the available media.

Have a lot of fun!

Technorati Tags: openSUSE, linux, sathyasays.com

Here’s something which made me go

Kaj Arno:

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?

Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.

Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention?

Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?

I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.

Read the entire post by Kaj Arno

Brandon over at LinuxFUD has posted about the top 10 list of themes used by anti-Linux FUD campaigners.
He states,

The following is my Top 10 list of themes used by anti-Linux FUD campaigns. This list is based on observations made over my years of following the Linux market. The ranking loosely correlates to frequency of usage and is somewhat subjective at best. Understanding each pattern will help you recognize a nicely-prepared piece of FUD when you encounter it. Each will be covered in more depth in subsequent posts.

1. Linux has a steep learning curve.
2. Linux is not “officially” supported.
3. With Linux, you cannot access old files or share new files with others.
4. There are no good software titles for Linux.
5. Linux is not secure.
6. Linux is low-quality software.

Continue reading at LinuxFUD

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo’s pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads. The ThinkPad T61 with SLED 10 Service Pack 1 will come with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7250. The T61 laptop is powered by a 2.0GHz processor with an 800MHz FSB (front-side bus) and a 2MB Level 2 internal cache. For memory it comes with 1GB of DDR2 SDRAM. For graphics, the T61 will use an Intel GMA X3100 GM965 on the motherboard. This, in turn, displays images on a 14.1-inch WXGA (Wide XGA) screen. This widescreen has a maximum resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. On the storage side, the T61 uses an 80GB hard drive that speeds along at 5400 rpm. The PC also includes a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. For network connectivity, the system will use a built-in ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wi-Fi wireless minicard.

The starting price for this system will be $949, $20 less than the same laptop with Vista Home Premium.

The R61 with pre-installed SLED has almost identical equipment. However, it’s been designed to be quieter and use less power than its T61 brother. Its price will also be about $950.

With both systems, Lenovo will provide direct support for the hardware and operating
system. Novell will provide maintenance updates for SLED directly to ThinkPad notebook customers.

Source: DesktopLinux

Technorati Tags: Lenovo, laptop, SUSE