17535258
submission
jjohn_h writes:
Not even two weeks ago, Mark Shuttleworth announced to the stunned Linuxers that Ubuntu would be transitioning from X11 to wayland over a period of four years:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Reactions were mostly positive with a minority of pessimists:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/137212/Ubuntu-Dumps-X-For-Unity-On-Wayland
Now wayland is scoring a second hit. The Fedora distro is moving away from X11 to wayland over an unspecified period, but surely if ubuntu is done in four years so will Fedora:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17351/fedora_like_ubuntu_to_dump_x_for_wayland
Fedora developer Jackson has evidently learnt from the previous discussion and repeats step by step what is going to be done and why the faint hearted can sleep peacefully:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-November/145290.html
Any bets about openSUSE?
16901716
submission
jjohn_h writes:
So it is official in the meantime: Oracle is not going to co-operate with The Document Foundation:
http://practical-tech.com/development/the-openoffice-fork-is-officially-here/#more-3153
That's fine, Oracle, good riddance. But how is the successor to OpenOffice going to survive with a name like !@#$%Office in the namespace of this universe? You can see, I even refuse to spell it out. The recent Slashdot discussion has certainly shown that everybody and his cat dislike the name.
So what can be done about it? Well, let's start a Slashdot contest for an appealing name to the product. And also let's ask The Document Foundation and have the bright guys who came up with that name explain what they are expecting from it.
It is urgent. Another couple of weeks and the chance for a new name to a real free office suite will have passed (free as in freedom). Yes, Slashdot, please, you can give me bad karma but let this post run.
14854764
submission
jjohn_h writes:
If you believe Phoronix
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3Mw
the Linux desktop is going to become responsive. They say it isn't responsive right now in respect to high work loads.
I say it is not responsive under any workload — on the basis of experience with Gnome in Ubuntu, current and previous, on sundry PCs. (I cannot remember KDE 3.5 and I have dumped KDE4.)
Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, OpenOffice, file managers are sluggish under Gnome, although they (or equivalents) are not under Windows XP on the same hardware. Maybe the applications are to blame and not the desktop? But what about Gnome's Help? That's a help feature that takes seconds to launch and has a latency on each and every click.
After years of usage, I dare say: for common tasks on the same hardware Windows XP is snappy and Gnome is not. Phoronix is expecting relief from a kernel patch for high loads. I wouldn't mind getting relief from any patch for low loads.
11045790
submission
jjohn_h writes:
Midnight Commander was taken over by a group of young Russians two years ago. 'Taken over' means that they just appropriated the trade mark and developed the code.
In the meantime a couple of programmers in E. Europe and Germany have joined the team but the status of the project has not changed. Unclear it was, unclear it is. Founding father and official maintainer Miguel de Icaza was silent on the trade mark issue and appears rarely on the mailing list
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/
But now an experimental release 5.0 is out
http://www.midnight-commander.org/
and it is a Mono application with a little README from Miguel stating:
>>>
This is a C# version of the Midnight Commander that I am using as a testbed for Mono-Curses.
Do we have to look at the calendar? If it is serious, is MC's end nigh?
4740337
submission
jjohn_h writes:
Remember Xandros? When Corel disintegrated in 2001, Xandros picked up Corel Linux, the Debian based distro pitted against Windows. In Summer 2008 it absorbed Linspire, another Debian based distro explicitely competing against Windows.
It is currently June 2009 and Jordan Smith, product marketing manager for OEM solutions at Xandros, is in Taipeh
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/03/xandros_custom_linux/
to attend Computex and proclaim the new faith: software for small computing devices, including a microbial OS nisted in the BIOS. And their previous Linux vs. Windows desktop focus? Quote:
"We are kind of getting away from being a Linux company, and we are more interested in presenting a user experience... Users don't care about Linux... Doing that general purpose operating system is a nightmare, and you lose your shirt on it."
The quote is a strident variation over a theme of Canonical from
http://blogs.computerworld.com/ubuntus_shuttleworth_i_dont_think_anyone_can_make_money_from_the_linux_desktop
The difference is essentially that Shuttelworth has to pander to the fanboys while Smith is unencumbered in that respect. But what about the fanboys, the observers and the hopeful, i.e. what about us: are we going to take note and reach conclusions?
3173167
submission
jjohn_h writes:
"I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else."
That's exactly what I think and it gives me such a pleasure to hear it from none other than Linus Torvalds:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9126619&taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=5
Since the welcome KDE 4 received was pretty much on this rejecting line, it this time to ruminate about the implications.
(1) Is KDE going to fork and get KDE 3 recompiled with the last Qt version?
http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/kde-its-time-for-a-fork/
(2) Any developments on Gnome being ported to the Qt library? Mark Shuttleworth mentioned it last summer but all he needs to do is to make the bucks available (or would Fedora be recalcitrant?):
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/14/1245204
(3) How is Novell going to reposition itself since they own both Suse (another name for KDE) and the original Gnome authors (de Icaza et alii)?
And why not a good Slashdot thumb suck: how long it is going to be until KDE 4 market relevance shrinks to XFCE level? Anybody noticed that Xandros has not been updated for more than one year? No KDE, no Xandros,
the end of Corel Linux?
2912315
submission
jjohn_h writes:
Google has a Linux based operating system for mobile phones, Android. It is open source and two guys have now managed to compile it for an Asus netbook:
http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/01/android-netbooks-on-their-way-likely-by-2010/
Immediately, speculation gets ripe that Android will soon be running on PCs and laptops:
http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/the-google-linux-desktop-has-arrived/
http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/02/an-faq-about-those-android-netbooks/
while, needless to say, officialdom is displeased
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10130422-64.html
For my part, I surely hope it is going to happen. Since Android does not rely on X11 but has its own framebuffer graphics that would indeed be a cosmic shift.
457880
submission
jjohn_h writes:
In his recent interview with the Linux foundation
http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/linus-torvalds-part-i/
Linus Torvalds mentions the weak contribution from Asian countries to the kernel and free software in general. A few excerpts:
>>> ... some of them have huge penetration of Internet use, they have a obviously great education and they do not end up contributing a lot to open source ... ... I actually think the cultural barrier is bigger than the language barrier and the reason I say that is especially South America has been pretty active, so it's not that — and they don't necessarily speak English all that much, but I think culturally they're more closer to Europe and the U.S. which makes it easier to enter.
So — and the cultural differences I don't think we even know how to really even approach.
And here are my questions to Slashdotters with extended personal experience in Asian countries:
(1) What would you consider specifically cultural barriers disregarding the language barrier?
(2) Do Asian countries have an internal developer community offering free software in the local languages? Is it comparable in some way to what is happening in USA?
(3) Would economic factors be relevant? For instance, having an own and good performing PC, sufficient space at home, regular power supply, affordable broadband?
(4) Is broadband penetration a good indicator of Internet penetration? I seem to recall a post on Slashdot by an American in Japan. The guy was saying Japanese do not really use the Internet despite their broadband prowess.
