Manjaro is a new desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch Linux is known for its text-based installation process, so a feature I’m always looking for in any distribution based on it is a graphical installer. While there are many good graphical installation programs that new distribution developers can reuse, many still opt to code one from scratch. That shouldn’t [...]

About three weeks ago, I published automated LVM and disk encryption in a pre-release version of what will become Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal. Shortly after, the state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity was published. The gist of that last article was that automated LVM and disk encryption were fully supported in the installer, [...]

Exactly ten days after Mandriva was forked, another major Free Software has also been forked. And this time, it is OpenOffice.org, the free suite of office applications similar to Microsoft Office. The fork, or the new office suite, will be temporarily known as LibreOffice. It has the backing of community heavyweights, and its development will be overseen by a newly [...]

Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked, and the new distribution is named Mageia. With the well publicized mass exodus of developers and contributors, this does not come as shock. I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons: Mandriva’s management has done a very lousy job [...]

This is a press release from Fluendo announcing the launch of Flumotion Media Server and its own website. This press release marks the official launch of the free software version of Flumotion. Flumotion is a streaming media server with a modern distributed design and advanced extensibility. Flumotion is being developed by Linux multimedia specialist Fluendo. Flumotion is available for immediate [...]

Fluendo has announced the release of its Media Center, a software application developed by the Spanish company. Fluendo Media Center’s versatility was evident from the off when it was used for reproducing a whole manner of multimedia in a variety of devices using completely different platforms. Whether on Windows, Linux or Open Solaris; on netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs), notebooks [...]

It has now been almost exactly five years since kernel development community tentatively started using the git source code management system with the 2.6.12-rc2 commit. That was an uncertain time; nobody really knew how long it would take the development process to get back up to speed after an abrupt core-tool change. As it turned out, git was almost immediately [...]

OpenStreetMap and Sahana are two free software projects that are facilitating aid to Haiti. We wanted to call attention to two free software projects that have been involved in the Haiti humanitarian effort, both because of the usefulness of their work and because they can surely use the help of skilled volunteers. The first, Sahana, is free software for disaster [...]

It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as “Godson”) family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China’s [...]

Data compiled by top500 shows that Linux is the operating of choice on supercomputers. That’s good news. The table (image reproduced below) does not go into details like which distro is the most popular on these supercomputers, but that’s not important. What matters is that we’ve won that battle.

If you want to introduce a group of people to the Web, a group that’s never used a PC, and have never used the Internet, what route would you take? Sell them a Windows PC, or one powered by a Linux operating system? My guess is it would be a Linux PC, and that’s is exactly what discount.age and Wessex [...]

Observations from the Open World Forum and Open Source Think Tank – Paris, October 2009 Despite some logistical challenges and a very diverse agenda, the second edition of the OWF was a tremendous success, I believe most of the 1600 attendees came away very happy. This year the Open Source Think Tank was a single track within the OWF held [...]

Astaro Security Gateway Home Edition, a free, Linux-based firewall-cum-router distribution, has just had its IP address limit bumped to fifty (50). Previously, users of Astaro Security Gateway HE were limited to using it to protect no more than ten (10), active networked devices. The IP address limit change was made known to license holders in an email message.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it will begin rewarding those who find and report any nonfree components in free software operating system distributions with public recognition and “GNU Bucks.” The FSF maintains a list of guidelines covering what it means to be a free distribution, and endorses distributions that commit to meeting those guidelines.

A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post [...]

You know what Microsoft doesn’t get? — For one thing, the Internet. Microsoft doesn’t control it. What it used to be able to do in the dark now falls out of its noxious bag of tricks into the Internet’s bright light, stage front and center. And there stands Microsoft in the spotlight, with its pants down, and let me tell [...]