LinuxPlanet Classics: Bruce Byfield reviews his choices for the top general-purpose Linux distributions, and their strengths and weaknesses.

continue reading.....

The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determination to monetize the add-on and keep its source code closed results in elaborations that make the basic idea less effective, and its constant pleas for donations make Interclue into nagware. As much as the usefulness of the basic utility, Interclue serves as an object lesson of the difficulties that the decision to go proprietary can take.

continue reading.....

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge is best-known for novels like A Fire Upon the Deep and Rainbows End, as well as the concept of The Singularity — the idea that, in the next couple of decades, humans will become or create a super-human intelligence. What is less well-known is that Vinge has been a free software supporter since the earliest days of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). He has served several times on the jury for the FSF Awards and spoke at an FSF-sponsored event held last month in San Diego to coincide with the LISA conference. As someone who deals regularly with large scale speculations, Vinge places free software in a larger historical context. He even speculates that free software may be one of the factors that will shortly bring about the Singularity.

continue reading.....

As a regular browser of the Firefox Add-ons site, I’m troubled by the apparent proliferation of proprietary extensions in the last year. Maybe I’ve simply exhausted the free-licensed extensions that interest me, but recently every interesting-looking extension seems to be a proprietary one — especially in the recommended list. Nothing, of course, in the Mozilla privacy or legal notice prohibits proprietary extensions simply because they are proprietary, but I find them not only contrary to the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS), but, often, annoying attempts to entangle me in some impossible startup.

continue reading.....

Properly speaking, Nadav Rotem’s Open Text Summarizer (OTS) is not a summarizer at all. True summaries generally involve rewording contents at a higher level of generality while preserving the meaning, not just producing a condensed version of the original the way that OTS does. However, within its limits, OTS is an efficient tool for automatically producing abstracts of non-fiction, that, in the last 15 months, has received favorable mention from at least four academic publications, including one in which it outperformed similar utilities, including commercial ones such as Copernic and Subject Search Summarizer.

continue reading.....

Presentation software isn’t complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn’t need to be. Maybe that’s why OpenOffice.org’s Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

continue reading.....

Presentation software isn’t complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn’t need to be. Maybe that’s why OpenOffice.org’s Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

read more

continue reading.....

“The future of software is in cloud computing,” says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, a company that provides mobile services. And if free and open source software (FOSS) is going to survive in that emerging market, he says, then the community needs to adjust by promoting greater use of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), a license specifically crafted for software as a service.

continue reading.....

If any process ever cried out for a graphical interface, it is using NDISwrapper to enable wireless devices to run on GNU/Linux using Windows drivers. The process is often torturous, especially for first-time users, who are unsure whether any problems are due to NDISwrapper’s limitations or their own inexperience. By organizing and explaining the process, KNDISwrapper promises to remove much of the labor. But, so far, it only partly delivers on that promise by neglecting the hardest part of working with NDISwrapper — finding the right Windows driver.

continue reading.....

Mounting and unmounting filesystems used to be straightforward in GNU/Linux. A basic knowledge of the mount command or some editing of /etc/fstab in a text editor and you were done. However, with the addition of udev in the 2.6 kernel for autoplugging, and the demand for hotswapping USB devices, along with the increased use of logical volume managers and other complications, the process is now more complicated — perhaps too complicated for many among the growing number of desktop users. That is where graphical mount managers such as Forelex Mount Manager, PySDM, and MountManager find their niche.

continue reading.....

Fedora Linux has always pushed forward with an intense release schedule, and is usually the first major distribution to package new technologies and advances. Fedora 10 promises to be even a larger milestone than most, both for its development community and users; Bruce Byfield goes behind the scenes and uncovers some of the legal, development, and community issues that the Fedora team have to deal with.

continue reading.....

The number of Firefox extensions continues to grow. For example, when I last wrote about tab extensions just over a year ago, about 110 existed. Now, despite the need to rewrite many extensions to make them compatible with Firefox 3.0, the number is over 190, and the choice is greater than ever. Basic functionality, coloring options, positioning of the tab bar, automatic opening of tabs at startup — whatever your need, you can probably find it on the Firefox add-ons site.

continue reading.....

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative, then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn’t. However, the release of the GNewSense distribution a few years ago has complicated the situation, pitting idealists against pragmatists and sending some distributions scrambling for a compromise that is unlikely to satisfy anyone. The GNewSense team was the first to point out that the Linux kernel contained proprietary firmware blobs, and that many kernel drivers depended on external proprietary blobs, and has dedicated itself to producing an operating system with all this material removed.

continue reading.....

When users want the latest in free and open source software (FOSS), they are likely to think first of sites like freshmeat, or perhaps Softpedia or GnomeFiles. However, as the FOSS community has divided into specialized communities, sites for new releases have proliferated, to the point where it is difficult to keep track of them all. Since 2007, openDesktop.org has provided a portal for many of these specialized sites. Under the slogan “Let’s build the desktop of the future,” openDesktop.org provides a quick overview of new software that is independent of desktop or distribution.

continue reading.....

Glancing at the features list for Fedora 10, at first you might be unimpressed. Many of the features are basically infrastructure improvements, fixing known problems and enhancing performance while laying the groundwork for future developments. However, infrastructure affects almost everything you do with your computer, and the more you use Fedora 10, the more you are likely to conclude that — one or two minor problems aside — this may be the strongest Fedora release yet, as well as the first glimpse of its future. Fedora 10 comes in three formats: A single DVD, or a complete set of six CDs with the GNOME desktop, or a single live CD featuring either GNOME or KDE. You can download all these formats using BitTorrent, Jigdo, or a direct download. For efficiency, I used the live GNOME CD, reasoning that I would immediately want to upgrade online anyway.

continue reading.....

All sorts of misconceptions, misunderstandings, propaganda, and FUD swirl around Free and Open Source Software like autumn leaves. Bruce Byfield addresses and debunks the twelve most prevalent FOSS myths.

continue reading.....

With Fedora 10 scheduled for release today, many users are thinking about how they are going to upgrade. A complete upgrade is something you do no more than twice a year, so the details are easy to forget. Also, the Fedora upgrade process, which centers on pointing to a new repository, is more complex than, say, the equivalent Debian process, in which repositories remain constant and only their contents change with a new release. But an even stronger reason for the uncertainty is that a Fedora system can be upgraded in at least four ways, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.

continue reading.....

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they’re more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.

continue reading.....

StarOffice 9 reminds me of the classic Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman wrestles himself. Although StarOffice is being aggressively presented as an alternative to Microsoft Office, it seems to be equally marketed and bundled to compete against OpenOffice.org, the free software project that is sponsored by Sun and that shares a common code base with StarOffice. The trouble is, the differences between the two have diminished with each release, until, with StarOffice 9, you have to wonder who the potential customers might be.

continue reading.....

Most of the new breed of open source hardware centers on specific products. Bug Labs is taking a different approach. Instead of developing particular devices, Bug Labs’ goal is to provide a Lego-like collection of open source hardware and software that customers can use to build their own devices. According to CEO Peter Semmelhack, the result should be not only a higher degree of innovation, but also a forerunner of the hardware business of the future.

continue reading.....

Many academics and students share a dirty secret: They hate the drudgery of assembling bibliographies. The cb2bib utility attempts to remove some of the drudgery, at least so far as online references go. Designed primarily for use with BibTeX, cb2bib can also be used with other formats once you export the results. However, whether the application actually makes bibliographical tasks easier seems questionable.

continue reading.....

Currently in late beta, the Sun Presenter Console (SPC) is Sun Microsystems’ latest extension for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. Other extensions from Sun in the last year, such as the Sun PDF Import Extension, Sun Presentation Minimizer, and Sun Weblog Publisher, have sometimes been lacking in design and sometimes buggy, but all of them are so invaluable that you might wonder why they are extensions instead of new features. SPC is no exception. It gives slide show presenters a separate view of their presentation and some tools to help them organize and deliver their talks, but includes no indication of how to set it up or use it.

continue reading.....

read more

continue reading.....

New Linux users may be content with automatic updates and the package information shown by desktop tools, but more experienced users are generally more cautious and demanding. Experienced users, for instance, may want to assess the risk of an upgrade by studying its dependencies before they begin, or to overcome a package conflict by using versions from an older repository. Because of Debian’s long history of providing for advanced users, this sort of information is available from several different sources — from the apt-cache command, from distribution Web sites, and, in Ubuntu, with the new Ubuntu Simple Package Crawler. Unfortunately, no single source has all the features you are likely to want.

continue reading.....

After two years of litigation, the parties involved in an Israeli law suit that centered on the validity of the GNU General Public License (GPL) have settled out of court. The result leaves the legal status of the GPL in Israel unresolved. As reported earlier on Linux.com, the case began in early 2006 when Alexander Rabinovitch, CEO of International Chess University (IchessU) approached Alexander Maryanovsky, the developer of Jin, a Java-based chess client, about writing a chess client and server for IchessU. When Maryanovsky declined, IchessU produced its own software, which Maryanovsky described as “95% my code and 5% theirs.”

continue reading.....

OpenOffice.org Writer is as much a desktop publishing program as a word processor. That fact, however, has yet to have much influence on the extensions created for Writer — perhaps because most users prefer manual formatting to organizing themselves with page styles, templates, and other elements of document design. Still, extensions for layout are starting to appear, as demonstrated by four extensions that help you automate layout: Alba, which manages page orientation; Pagination and Pager, which manage page numbering; and Template Changer, which allows you to change the template, and therefore the entire layout of documents, on the fly. And all but one of these extensions use styles and templates, the way that OpenOffice.org is built to work, which means that they are highly stable.

continue reading.....

Few sites about free software attract more controversy than Boycott Novell. Founded in 2006 in response to the first Microsoft-Novell deal, as its name suggests, the site has evolved more recently into a site for commentary and investigation of any subject that might be a threat to free software. To its regular readers, this subject matter makes Boycott Novell — like Groklaw, its apparent inspiration — a defender of the community. But to others, especially those who have been the subject of its articles, the site is full of illogical arguments and undeserved attacks, and an embarrassment that only brings the community into disrepute.

continue reading.....

For some reason, mouse gestures have never fully caught on with desktop users. Movements of the mouse that launch a command or simulate a combination of keys are ideal for those who prefer not to move their hands constantly between the mouse and the keyboard, or who have trouble typing because of some physical challenge. Yet many users have never heard of mouse gestures, and they are apparently so little in demand that, nine months after the KDE 4 releases began, KDE has yet to implement any of the software or settings that enabled mouse gestures in earlier versions of the desktop.

continue reading.....

read more

continue reading.....

Back when Mandriva was called Mandrake, the distribution had the reputation of being the most user-friendly Linux distribution. Financial difficulties, personnel changes, and the rise of Ubuntu changed that, and somehow Mandriva never quite regained its reputation. With this week’s release of Mandriva 2009, Mandriva has continued to work on user-friendliness. Aside from a poorly organized installation program and a few scattered problems, Mandriva 2009 offers a desktop experience that is at least the equal of any other distribution for everyday use and that has a strong claim of being the most advanced available for system administration.

continue reading.....