Ben Sutton » Syndicated

Mark Shuttleworth Denies Microsoft Negotiations

Ben — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:35:27 +0000

In a blog post Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project, states his position regarding the recent spate of patent protection agreements with Microsoft. He believes that the allegations regarding unspecified patents carry no merit.

Allegations of “infringement of unspecified patents” carry no weight whatsoever. We don’t think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together. A promise by Microsoft not to sue for infringement of unspecified patents has no value at all and is not worth paying for.

He goes on to discuss Microsoft’s OpenXML formats and his position on future colaboration with Microsoft. An interesting read as this guy and the Linux distribution he spawned is starting to carry a lot of weight in the Linux world.

No Negotiations with Microsoft in Progress [via Mark Shuttleworth]

Embed a Terminal on Your Gnome Desktop

Ben — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:42:45 +0000

An open source application called DevilsPie allows you to embed a terminal on your desktop. The utility itself is designed to give you control of where applications appear when you open them - perhaps useful for kiosk devices. An Ubuntu Forums post describes how to place a console as your background and how to set its transparency.

The objective is to have a gnome terminal running as the desktop background, right above the actual background image, that won’t be displayed by the statusbar or ticker. It should look something like this:
Full transparency or Semi-transparent with shadows (using Xgl)

Embed the terminal on the desktop [via Lifehacker]

Gentoo 2007.0 Released After Delays

Ben — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:31:57 +0000

Gentoo, known in the Linux-o-sphere for its customizability has released its 2007 edition. Named ‘Secret Sauce’, the release was delayed awaiting security updates to core packages. The release contains the latest editions of GNOME and KDE as well as a completely rewritten installer.

The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named “Secret Sauce”. This release met with several delays due to an abnormally high number of security vulnerabilities in large packages which had to be rebuilt using the newer, secure versions of the packages. There was also a complete resnapshot done about half-way through the release period due to the release taking so long and the packages becoming stale.

Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Released [via Gentoo.org]

Learning the Linux Command Line

Ben — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:22:15 +0000

Once you’ve settled into using Linux on the desktop you may be interested in how you can start doing things a little more productively, or writing short scripts to do away with some of the more repetitive tasks. Theres no getting away from the fact that a GUI can be limiting for some tasks. Linux Command offers a useful introduction to the Linux shell. The guide takes you through file management and permissions, job control and I/O redirection.

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are helpful for many tasks, but they are not good for all tasks. I have long felt that most computers today do not use electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the “pumping” motion of the mouse! Computers were supposed to free us from manual labor, but how many times have you performed some task you felt sure the computer should be able to do? You ended up doing the work by tediously working the mouse. Pointing and clicking, pointing and clicking.

Learning the Shell [via Life Hacker]

Technorati Tags: Linux, desktop, shell

Dell To Offer Linux On Corporate Desktop and Laptop Range

Ben — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:37:56 +0000

Responding to consumer demand Dell is in the process of certifying Novell’s desktop Linux product for its corporate machines. Computer Wire reports:

“We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step toward ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.”

Read the complete report here.

Getting an OpenID

Ben — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:21:21 +0000

So, now you know a little bit about what OpenID is, and how it benefits you. The next step is to sign up! Because the OpenID network is decentralized, there are many providers. Here is a handy list of those I know of:

There is a degree of trust required when choosing a provider. If you know how to administer a web server, you can host your own identity. Expect information on this in a future post. Please let me know if you know of any more OpenID providers in a comment.

Dell, Can They Support Desktop Linux?

Ben — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:54:52 +0000

Linux Magazine has an interesting article discussing the possibility of Dell supporting Linux on their retail desktop machines. After Dell asked for customer feedback through their Idea Storm website last week they received a large responses asking for the option of Linux being bundled with their machines or opting out of an operating system altogether. Good article, worth the read.

For Dell to offer a Linux desktop, they’d have to tie up with one of the commercial distributions — Red Hat or Novell. They would then get to field all of the complaints from everyone that wanted [insert favorite niche distribution here] but they could spin the fact they were the first tier one vendor to really throw their weight behind desktop Linux as a positive.

Read the complete article here.

Understanding Memory Usage on Linux

Ben — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:42:25 +0000

土人天堂 has published a useful post describing how memory is used under Linux. To the untrained eye Linux can look memory hungry - this article describes the reasoning behind that.

This entry is for those people who have ever wondered, “Why the hell is a simple KDE text editor taking up 25 megabytes of memory?” Many people are led to believe that many Linux applications, especially KDE or Gnome programs, are “bloated” based solely upon what tools like ps report. While this may or may not be true, depending on the program, it is not generally true — many programs are much more memory efficient than they seem.

Read the complete article here.

Solutions to Ubuntu Upgrade Problems

Ben — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:28:52 +0000

Ubuntu Geek has put together a useful list of problems people have encountered when upgrading the Ubuntu Dapper release to Ubuntu Edgy. Well worth a read if your looking for a solution.

We have already discussed how to upgrade ubuntu dapper to edgyeft and some people are complaing after upgrade they had problems related to x server and update problems.I have collected some of the common problems and their solutions from ubuntu forums.

You can find the list here.

Some ‘Top’ Tools You May Not Have Heard Of

Ben — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:13:48 +0000

Dagus.org has a short article listing some of the ‘top’ like programs that exist. Top is a tool that allows you to monitor resources on your computer.

All of you may know about the top command line of linux, well there are a lot of similar programs to monitor other type of resources, here we have some of the more useful to me.

Read the article here.