Sun Microsystems is on a major Open Source Acquistion spree. First it was it’s MySQL acquisition, now it’s moved on to acquire innotek. For those who’re still wondering who or what innotek is, innotek is the developer of the hugely popular Virtualizer, VirtualBox.

According to Sun’s Press Release

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org. 

“VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Software. “Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications.”

So what will be the future of VirtualBox? Can we see some innovations in VirtualBox? Let’s hope so.

Introducing Ubuntu Mobile – full Internet, no compromise

Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition that targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices.
Ubuntu Mobile, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MID hardware from OEMs and ODMs, are redefining what can be done in mobile computing.

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet, with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs and popular third-party applications.

• Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more
• Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation
• A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go
• Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps, in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as a compact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the open source community, Ubuntu Mobile is the software that makes it all possible.

[...]

Mark Shuttleworth today posted on the Ubuntu Mailing list, what is planned for the next version of Ubuntu, titled The Intrepid Ibex which would most likely have a version number of 8.10 and be released around October 2008.

To quote him,

With Hardy now past feature-freeze it’s time to start to plan
features that are being lined up for inclusion after Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
is released in April.

And so I’d like to introduce you to the Intrepid Ibex, the release
which is planned for October 2008, and which is likely to have the
version number 8.10.
The Intrepid Ibex will take shape at our next Ubuntu Developer
Summit, an open event to which members of the Ubuntu community,
upstream communities, corporate developers and other distributions
are all invited. That summit takes place in beautiful Prague, in the
Czech Republic from 19th – 23rd May 2008. Together we will draw up
detailed blueprints for Ubuntu 8.10. Please join us there to help
define the Intrepid Ibex:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Intrepid
During the 8.10 cycle we will be venturing into interesting new
territory, and we’ll need the rugged adventurousness of a mountain
goat to navigate tricky terrain. Our desktop offering will once
again be a focal point as we re-engineer the user interaction model
so that Ubuntu works as well on a high-end workstation as it does on
a feisty little subnotebook. We’ll also be reaching new peaks of
performance – aiming to make the mobile desktop as productive as
possible.
Hardy is our best development cycle yet, delivering on our promise
of reliability and stability for the Heron. We must stay focused on
that goal. To the extent that you have a brilliant idea for the
future, you now have a peg to hang it on – the Intrepid Ibex. When
the Hardy Heron has taken flight we will engage fully with the Ibex.
Give it horns!

Read the entire article over at the Ubuntu Mailing List

 The good folks over at Free Software Magazine got bored writing regular articles on free software. For some chuckles, they decided to research on some easter eggs. Here’s what they found.

What is it with cows and GNU/Linux? Let me answer my own self-serving question and show you some varied and slightly bizarre examples of human randomness. Assuming you are running under Ubuntu from a terminal type:

apt-get help | grep -i super

This APT has Super Cow Powers.

OK, let us generate some somewhat warped and deranged ASCII

apt-get moo
         (__)
         (oo)
   /------\/
  / |    ||
 *  /\---/\
    ~~   ~~
...."Have you mooed today?"...

Having fun yet? My brain is starting to bake trying to work out the meaning of it all. There are even serious and well researched Ubuntu bug reports on the subject.

How about trying to use aptitude from the command line to discern a recognizable and potentially disturbing pattern of social humor. Can we get aptitude to talk sense? Let us beat it around the head verbally and see if we can get it to admit its origins.

aptitude -v moo
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.
aptitude -vv moo
Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?
aptitude -vvv moo
Stop it!
aptitude -vvvv moo
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?
aptitude -vvvvv moo
All right, you win.

                               /----\
                       -------/      \
                      /               \
                     /                |
   -----------------/                  --------\
   ----------------------------------------------
 aptitude -vvvvvv moo

What is it?  It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.

Yes now I understand life clearly. Well, if you cannot beat them with sharp pointy objects, then join them I say. Let me introduce to a small program called cowsay, a man’s best friend, a configurable talking cow. Just what you need when you already have multiple personalities and two children. From your favourite terminal, please type:

sudo apt-get install cowsay
cowsay what the

 ----------
  what the
 ----------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w||
                ||     ||

Cows, cows everywhere and not a pint of milk to drink.

For more chuckles, read the entire article over at Free Software Magazine

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only])

andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. CoLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows. Although this technology is like VMware or Virtual PC, CoLinux differs itself by being more of a merger of Windows and the Linux kernel and not an emulated PC, making it more efficient. Xming is used as X server and PulseAudio as sound server.

andLinux is not just for development and runs almost all Linux applications without modification.

Screenshot (click to enlarge)

To start Linux applications, you may either use the XFCE Panel:

The XFCE Panel

Or, you may choose to use the andLinux Launcher, which ships with andLinux since Beta 1. It consists of:

• quicklaunch icons (e.g. for the file manager or the terminal)
• a start menu in the system tray (next to the clock) which can be adapted to your own needs
• so-called Explorer shell extensions, i.e. context menu item, with which you can open a folder in the file manager / terminal or open a file with the text editor
• file type associations at your choice (e.g. for KOffice files, .tex / .dvi / .ps / .pdf files)
• andCmd.exe to run linux commands from Windows scripts

Requirements

• OS: Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista [32-bit only]
• Memory: at least 128 MB (192 MB or more is recommended)
• Hard disk space: 2.5 GB (XFCE version) / 4.5 GB (KDE version)
  Note that you need an NTFS file system (which is default since Windows 2000) because you can’t create files larger than 2 GB on FAT(32) file systems!
• A good internet connection (to be able to install further applications)
• Some basic Linux skills to proceed once andLinux is installed

What you will get

You will get:

• a fully functional Linux system, however without the usual desktop (you’ve already got one from Windows)
• a second panel (e.g. at the top of your Windows desktop) or a second start menu (in the system tray next to the clock), from which you can start Linux applications
• Linux applications and Windows applications can be used simultaneously and you can cut and paste text between them
• apt / synaptic to install further applications

You will NOT get:

• another desktop
• the bench of applications that usually ship with Linux distributions (you have to fetch whatever you want)
• a printer driver
• trouble with further drivers

Security warning: It is recommended to use andLinux only on single-user-PCs or in a trustworthy environment because the communication with the X-Server and the launcher is not secured, i.e., every user who can login to Windows can access andLinux.

This looks really interesting and promising! Am definitely going to try this out and report how it turns out

Thanks to @chetanthaker who twittered about this

Technorati Tags: linux, andlinux, sathyasays

For all those people who miss Amarok badly while on Windows, well fear not, your dream has come true….almost.

With the release of KDE4.0 which uses Qt4 framework, which has been GPL’d and available for Windows and MacOSX, a lot of effort has been put in to port KDE4 for Windows, which allows Amarok to be run under Windows as well.

At the moment, just a tech preview has been released, and you can get the steps required to install Amarok under Windows over at KDE techbase.  Being a tech preview release, it’s rather buggy. In fact the developers have asked users not to submit any bug reports, because they’re busy working on the obvious ones. So don’t expect miracles. In fact, don’t expect Amarok not to crash.

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that the 3rd beta of the next version of their immensely popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox would be available for download. I’d posted earlier on the impressive changes between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2. So what does the third Beta bring? Let’s have a look.

[...]

Mozilla Developer Center reports that Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now available for download.

New features and changes in this milestone include:

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.
• Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 350 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.

I will have a review of the Beta 3 soon.

Only three weeks after Alpha1, we’re glad to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2. There are various exciting changes in there that we would like to have feedback on.

  
For more screenshots head over to the Screenshots/openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 wiki page

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1

• KDE 4.0.1 replaced KDE 3.5.8 as default KDE
• GNOME 2.21.90 was integrated
• Continued work on the Installation workflow
• Live CDs for both GNOME and KDE
• CDs support German as an additional language
• DVDs have only OSS software
• Linux 2.6.24
• OpenOffice.org 2.4 Beta
• Alsa 1.0.16rc2
• D-Bus 1.2rc2

For a more detailed list with links to backported packages, see the Factory/News wiki page.

Most Annoying Bugs

• Progress dialog Loading the Package Manager… blocks the installation-update proposal (Bug #359235). Although you can accept the proposal by clicking on [Accept] you can’t see the proposed data/values.
• KDE3 autostart applications may crash on KDE4 Startup (Bug #359800)
• Mono apps do not work on the GNOME LiveCD (Bug #359768)
• Missing graphical menu on Live-CD (Bug #359486)
• Popups during the installation behave sporadically

Media and Download

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

Comments, Feedback and Helping

Please report all bugs you find on in our bugzilla as explained on http://bugs.opensuse.org;

discussion is most appropriate on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list. For other queries and ways to communicate with the openSUSE community — including IRC, Mailing Lists, and Forums — take a look at the Communicate wiki page.

The next release will be openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3, on March 18.

If you’ve ever followed KDE 4 development then you’ve probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places.

But wait! There’s more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different “map themes” and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application! This means that as a programmer you can use Marble in your very own project as a map widget (License: LGPL). Marble was designed to run on any device and on any operating system supported by Qt4 without any further requirements. You can download the latest version of Marble together with KDE 4.0.1 here (It’s part of the KDE-EDU module).

How Marble stores texture data

If you start Marble you might realize that the startup time is pretty good: It usually takes maybe 2-5 secs to start Marble (and we are working on improving that dramatically). If you zoom into the earth you might notice that Marble doesn’t get slower while zooming in. Looking at the amount of memory being used up you will also see that memory numbers don’t change either. No matter how much you zoom in it’s as little as 65-100MB which is pretty lean compared to other virtual globes.
Among other concepts this is being accomplished by loading the map piece by piece. Marble uses a concept that is very popular among virtual globes: Quadtiles.

Continue reading at torsten rahn’s blog