MySQL AB's namesake database is a package that many would list among the crown jewels of Free Software. The Swedish company's database has been deployed over five million times by the company's own count. Yet, some, quite legitimately wondered if certain wording on the MySQL site might indicate the company is backing away from Free Software, and, more specifically, the GNU General Public License. We wanted to know if this was an actual concern or simply a misunderstanding, so OfB contacted MySQL AB to find out more information.
Last week, some developers disagreeing with the direction of the GNOME Project decided to create what appears to be the beginning of a fork of the project — GoneME. Like many from KDE Project and elsewhere in the community, GoneME's major complaints boil down to what has proven to be GNOME's most controversial move: simplifying the user interface. While naysayers, including the GoneME developers, seem to feel that the simplification of the interface, undertaken with the encouragement of such GNOME leaders as Havoc Pennington of Red Hat, is actually just “dumbing down” the interface, I think these critics are actually missing the point completely.
This past week a number of exciting developments toward the popularization of Open Source desktops occurred. Novell heralded the arrival of Mono 1.0. Mandrakesoft announced the acquisition of a French IT services firm, further indicating its return to financial health. Real Networks inked deals to bundle Helix and Real Players on major GNU/Linux desktops. Out of the noise and clammer, nevertheless, there are two announcements that I believe are the best tickets to moving the GNU/Linux desktop forward, and they both had a name other than Red Hat, Novell or Mandrakesoft attached to them. They both involved Apple.
Everyone loves fireworks, right? Well, at least most everyone does. If money and a safe place were not considerations and you were free to produce the show of your dreams, what kind of show would you produce? Would you want to plan it down to the minute details or would you prefer just to select the varieties of fireworks? This fourth of July, what if you could do all of that — on your Macintosh computer? Read on to find out how.
With new security holes appearing every day and spy/ad-ware spreading rampantly, the combination of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are becoming increasingly dangerous choices for safe web browsing and e-mail. Yet what is one to do if they can't or won't switch from Windows to another operating system? It's simple: bring the security and power of Open Source applications to Windows. The Mozilla Project's Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client do just that, and do it without sacrificing the easy-to-use, clean interface users demand. As associate editor Ed Hurst noted in his OpenCD review earlier this year, many of the Open Source community's best applications are available conveniently packaged for Windows, and the Mozilla Project's applications are no exception.
A few months ago, we looked at the IOGear Miniview Extreme series of keyboard, video and mouse switches (KVM's) that can be used to control multiple computers without the clutter of multiple input and display devices. Unlike many KVM's, however, the IOGear unit provided multimedia support — speaker and microphone sharing — in addition to its abilities to share the normal stuff people expect KVM's to work with. Like the IOGear units, Avocent's creatively named SwitchView USB 4-port (Audio) Switch, is one of these new “KVMP” multimedia switches.
Novell is an interesting company, and has only become more so since it decided to dive head first into GNU/Linux last year. Nat Friedman, formerly of Novell acquired Ximian and now the veep of Novell's Linux Technologies Group took some time to answer our questions about exactly where the company is heading with GNU/Linux.
Perhaps it is a new laptop that will compliment rather than replace your desktop or perhaps you have found the need for both a PC and a Mac. Whatever the case, if you have the need to operate two or more computers, the idea of a KVM switch — which provides a way to control multiple systems with just one keyboard, monitor and mouse — becomes very attractive. Unfortunately not all KVM's are created equally — many do not get along that well with Mac or Linux systems. What are you to do? Join me for our look at the first two of several promising new KVM switches we've been testing — IOGear's MiniView Extreme KVM's.
Apple computer has a long and distinguished list of “firsts” in
personal computing, not to mention the least of which, they invented
personal computing as we know it today. The others include a long line
of stuff, including, but not limited to, in personal computer “firsts,”
first with a GUI, first with a mouse, first with a color monitor, first
with a floppy drive, first with a hard drive, first to have a CD-ROM,
first to make home movie editing possible, first with USB and Firewire,
first with 64-bit processor — the list goes on.
The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For
the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much
that those running distributions now going on a year in age are
really missing anything terribly substantial. We did find a few
interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with
Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1.