Posted by: Kobzeci
on July 06 2009
Pardus 2009 is rocking ! With its own KDE integration and "managers" 2009 will be the Pardus year. Don't wait to get into it. Here is the release announcement :
Posted by: James Sparenberg
on July 05 2009
I've begun my journey. May God have mercy on my enternal soul. For whatever reason, I've broken down, and have begun the journey into programming, again. Now I did this once before, the part about learning programming that is, and I'm not sure I want to repeat my initial disaster.
I began my programming career with Fortran IV (the Watt book, also known as "What For") back in the days of punch cards and paper tape. When other schools had dumb terminals in rooms that undergrads could use, CWRU had the punch card.
Posted by: Gergely Máté
on July 05 2009
OK, so you have recommended a GNU/Linux flavour to someone who is interested, and you go and help her in installing her new system. Linux understands all the hardware, everything turns out to be a success (except for the to-be-spanked webcam), and here is a new desktop computer filled with free software. And than your fellow wants to watch some online video or listen to an MP3 stream - quite usual things to do. And the new system tells you, that it is intended to download some interesting things called "codecs" which are needed in order to watch a video or listen to an audio stream. And the new Linux-based desktop system tells the user that this may or may not be illegal in any particular country - Continue or Cancel? No more information is given.
And most users click Continue... And many users start to violate immediately their country's patent laws. Is this a crime?
If this is a crime - an illegal thing to do -, than the user is responsible for committing it. This must be a very small crime, but it is illegal. Some patent holders will not get their patent fees. And it is not about software patents - these are somewhat more complex technological patents, established for a long-long time. You can debate on it, but it is out there in the legal code, and is violated day by day. This is a small crime by an individual, and probably never ever will anybody punish an individual for this. But this has a bigger effect when you consider a larger scale of deployments. Ten million small individual crimes may add up to a large patent fee not paid, and that is a loss from the due payments of the economy. Audio and video codec developers... Many many company.
Most GNU/Linux distributions encourage this small crime - it is really easy, one click to commit it, and there is quite few information about it being committed. There are codec packs with paid patents for Linux systems, but the basic setup will not tell about it - instead, it shows just that small dialog. May be illegal. You can not know. We don't know either. Continue or Cancel?
Posted by: Petros Koutoupis
on July 05 2009
On my primary blog I have just finished posting an entry on my latest article to be published in the 4/2009 issue of Linux+ Magazine, The Linux RAM Disk. My last article written for the same periodical has just hit the news stands earlier this month (issue 3/2009, Linux Storage Management).
While on the topic of RAM disks, I wish to share the following from the same post:
Posted by: Sean Tilley
on July 05 2009
Tagged in: Untagged
KDE Developer Frank Karlitschek has an ambitious plan of providing a computer system dedicated entirely to Linux, for consumers. Announced at Gran Canaria Developer Summit, Frank's slides and presentation talk about the dire need for GNU/Linux systems to have a fully open-specification machine.
Posted by: Miguel Fernandez
on July 04 2009
If you are using Ubuntu or any other modern Linux distribution, you are probably running Mozilla Firefox 3.something. While those versions are stable, they are getting a little outdated; why not upgrade? Shall We?
Getting Firefox
Before we can install our new version of Firefox, we need to get a copy. I always like to download the latest from the Mozilla FTP Server.
Linux Community 
