original picture by Elke Wetzig, CC-SA-BY 2.0 Germany
As it turns out Stallman doesn’t like web applications, he doesn’t like them at all and says that using GMail and its kind is “worse than stupidity” and just as bad as proprietary software. Continue reading
As Lifehacker is reporting CodeWeavers ported Chromium, the OpenSource project behind Google Chrome to Mac and Linux. I’m not too surprised as it was already known to run in Wine and I’ve know idea why CrossOver as a tweaked, proprietary version of Wine shouldn’t be able to run it as well. They probably just ported it for the sake of it. Continue reading
The waiting time is over VLC 0.9.2 featuring the new QT4 interface is ready for prime time.
Besides finally getting rid of the wxwidgets interface, it offers many improvements in terms of usability: The settings got a complete overhaul and *nix and Win users got full screen controls, a feature until now only available on mac. For those who are using it to play music if now offers cover discovery and last.fm scrobbling, the playlist now features some sort of very minimalistic media library and an option to add podcasts which I’m not sure about how to use, but as I probably won’t use it for listening to podcasts anyway I didn’t pay much attention.
All in all it now looks a lot friendlier in it’s new shape and with new tangoesque icons. The next days will show how well it performs and how stable it runs.
Grab it while it’s hot at http://www.videolan.org/vlc
For those of you who don’t want to compile from source I found someone with debs and a repository. Remember to be cautious using third party repositories.
http://blog.jetienne.com/2008/09/vlc-092-on-ubuntu-804.html
VLC media player 0.9.2 – Grishenko from Antoine Cellerier on Vimeo.
“hey, isn’t it called Large Hadron Collider?
Yes, it is, but apparently they’re using KDE for visualisation and so it’s just a matter of time they’re putting the K in it. Using KDE alone of course isn’t indication that they’re using Linux, as it runs on FreeBSD just as well, but the fact that those guys and gals at CERN made their own distribution called Scientifix Linux, at least makes it very likely that in fact Linux is used.
What definately is using Linux, is the LHC Computing Grid and about one month from now, when they first let protons collide and the world is sucked into a black hole I’ll think that at least they used Linux and open source to destroy the world!
Take that Bill Gates!
When you think about free software you probably think about Linux and other open source operating systems but free software isn’t limited to free operating systems.
Free software applications on Windows are on the rise, most prominent examples being Firefox and OpenOffice.org and everyone can tell they’re not the only ones. Other applications like Pidgin, VLC Player and FileZilla are getting more popular as well. Reasons for this may different and functionality is an important factor but probably not the most important for many of their users
The most important factor are word-of-mouth recommendations by friends and colleagues. Average Joe does not read tech related blogs, he does not browse the depths of SourceForge and he does not care or know about the difference of licenses and open or closed source software. Average Joe’s going to use the software that either came with his PC, or what friends or other people he knows tell him about.
People who want to spread free software may find themselves in an ethical dilemma: Is an Average Joe who’s using free software without knowing what free software actually is, just as valuable as a user who does know what it is and uses it? Is it alright to tell people to use free software, when they don’t understand what it is and there may be better closed proprietary alternatives?
The other day a friend of mine asked me to make a RSS-icon following the tango icon design guidelines.
He really much likes the look and feel of the original tango icon set but they got a major flaw. They are released under a GPL-incompatible CC-license.
Personally I think it’s a little odd that the probably most used icon set in the open source world isn’t compatible with the most used license. At least the colour-palette is public domain and therefore GPL-compatible and everyone is free to follow the naming and design guidelines.
Anyway, here’s the icon I made.
Today, while using Okular I found something which really annoyed me. While not being a showstopper it is definitely something which isn’t working as it should be. For those of you who don’t know Okular. It’s KDEs document viewer, used to display pdf-files for example.
About the problem: Okular has a sidebar with the option to show all pages of a document in thumbnail view. This thumbnail view features a box which represents the field of view in the main area of the application and which you can drag around. Now here’s the problem, you can’t drag this box onto another page in the thumbnail view because every thumbnail has a border which acts as a barrier for you dragging pointer. These barriers however do not restrict the box itself in its movement. You can drag the box ‘into’ the barrier and grab it from the other side.
I made a short video and put it on Youtube in order to help illustrating the problem.
I just read this blog post on ZDNet, where someone is running Ubuntu 16.04 in 2016 which features OpenOffice 6.2 and Firefox 8.
2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.” by ZDNet‘s Jason Perlow — July 24th, 2016. Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim [...]