KDE (yes, it’s Linux above) can be customised to
look and behave like Jaguar/Tiger (and far beyond)

UITE recently I enabled all shadows, translucency, and fade-in/out effects in KDE. The results are stunning, but they require a real-time demonstration (or animation) to be fully appreciated. The load on the CPU is almost bearable while translucency is the biggest detriment of all.

The progress made by the KDE team is tremendous, so envy (sometimes hatred) among GNOME’rs seems beyond understandable. Admittedly, I am working in GNOME while I compose this item, yet I always long for KDE. I am not mesmerised by a default KDE desktop, which is simple, user-friendly, yet somewhat dull. I am actually thinking about heavily-customised environments and powerful settings enabled as in the example above, which illustrates Mac OS X intersections.

It is also worth checking what shall come up in KDE 4. It is said to incorporate the new component titled Plasma. It’s not just eye candy, but a productivity tool, which gives power to the power users.

External Link: KDE 3.5 Released

OpenDocument may lead the way to Web-based office suites
(TinyMCE is shown for illustrational purposes only)

TAGED acceptance of the OpenDocument standard was discussed in the context of Massachusetts. It was also argued, with timely backing from the media, that corporate Open Source migrations are no longer the exception. Finally, IBM have big plans for OpenDocument, which they can vigorously employ and help spread.

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

IBM and their occasional Open Source push gets mentioned in an article titled “Is Open Source Really Just as Good”? (Part I, Part II – published today)

While I didn’t say it explicitly, when companies like IBM, HP, Novell, Dell and even Sun are driving the adoption, deployment and support of various parts of the LAMP stack in the enterprise, it’s safe to say that the ecosystem for many open source projects is thriving…

Hotter among the gamers’ headlines: Quake4 Demo for Linux

The answer is actually rather complex.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

Will the French be forced to use Internet Explorer (bearing in mind that Opera is now free)? I am not sure what the motive of the government actually is, but I can only speculate. Perhaps it is shielding people’s jobs — primarily in the software industry, that is. Maybe it is the realisation of that DRM and the like suffer from OSS (if not vice versa).

Clarifications soon emerged in a newsgroup that I regularly read (posted by 7):

What they are trying to say is that a new law passed in France will allow those that publish any software to access protected content will face prosecution from those that are harmed by that software. Because any software can become a target, even free software is also a target.

It seems fatally flawed, because you could publish it as two separate modules and have the thing working only when they are brought together by the user as happens now with certain codecs.

In any case, the whole world is running away from DRM because it denies mind share and contributes to elimination of public interest in a companies product, and thus eliminate their revenue!

The day is coming when DRM is burned along side the word hate in the public’s mind.

And nobody will want to touch it and instead opt to go with sharing friendly companies that allows media to be downloaded and stored permanently and transferrably on hard disks and players.

In other (and better) news, the 2008 Olympic Games aim for an Open Source migration.

Contextually-related : No Software Patents in Europe

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

From previously-cited writer comes yet another ‘killer essay’.

if (Windows Rules) then (Linux fails)

Part of the problem with the documentation and identification issues I talked about last week – and will talk about more later – is that it is very hard to separate information from disinformation.

Disinformation comes in three major forms:

1. innocent mistakes;
2. intentional disinformation (aka FUD); and,
3. (self) delusion.

[...]

Read on…

Also see: Linux is not Windows

AID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. As yet, I find RAID somewhat redundant, at least in my individual scenarios and for my personal purposes.

RAID is associated with backups on multiple disks, which in turn enables easy data recovery. The disks may also be distributed across geographically isolated and thus independent places. RAID does not directly cater for synchronation of data, applications, settings. That, for instance, is one of the powers of on-line services and network-hosted environments. This, as a matter of fact, is what pushes computers towards becoming relics.

One question to consider in RAID is the target of a write/read operations. This point refers to where data should be fetched from or save onto and how changes should propagated among the multiple disks. These issues are easily resolved in the following way:

Let us look at this conundrum, which is flawless management of files across computers. The confusion over where data gets stored and fetched from can be resolved owing to remote login. Assuming we speak of high-bandwidth networks here (100Mbit LAN in my case), the ‘cost’ of using SSH bandwidth is almost negligible. Even 10Mbit connections would give you a very responsive UI behaviour over the network. I know this because I tried it. The exception are cases where you stream many large frames over the network (e.g. video, games).

I have never looked deep into RAID technologies. Why not just scp (or rsync) the entire content of a hard-drive periodically? I maintain files on just a single machine, which I always SSH to from elsewhere. Its contents get mirrored on two other remote machines. Files that change on a daily basis are backed on the SAN overnight using cron jobs. This simplifies life a great deal. I still see no compelling reason for using RAID, especially with the existence high-speed networks.

As for Web site backups, these can conveniently be downloaded unless an automated job is set up, which is something I hope to do one day.

Related short items:

• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML presentation)
• Mail Backup and Restoration
• Backup Fallacy

ARGE quantities of Red Hat-based terminals are expected to reach the African people. This comes a month or two after Microsoft refused to give Africa cheaper software, arguing that skills were needed rather than more software.

South African news site Tectonic is reporting how KDE terminals are Giving South African Farmers a Leg-up.

[...]

The government’s IT manager said “People’s perception of open source is that everything is command-based, text-based. Our pilot projects are meant to address that perception.”

On the same topic: 100 Dollar Open Source Laptop

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

INUX distributions and their great diversity lead to endless discussions at best and flame wars at worst. Because they all incorporate the same kernel, they can be equated to beer from different brands (the infamous beer analogy). Each person, however, will try to convince you that his/her favourite beer is distinct and superior to all others.

A survey was conducted by ZDNet, which aimed to identify the best Linux distribution for a small business. Among the options that have been put to the test: Mandriva Linux 2006, Novell Linux Desktop 9, Red Hat Desktop 4, SUSE Linux 10 and Ubuntu Linux 5.1. The outcome:

We emerged from our Linux experience with a strong preference for Ubuntu Linux 5.1, with SUSE Linux 10 a close second. Both did everything we required of them, and both have very low setup costs. Ubuntu, in particular, costs absolutely nothing to purchase.

Interestingly enough, Ubuntu and SuSE have naturally become my preferred distributions. At some stage, I had 2 Ubuntu boxes and one preloaded with SuSE, but I now have 2 SuSE boxes and one which runs Ubuntu. One wonders if the crucial factor which is cost could have put SuSE at the very top rank. OpenSuSE can definitely make the exception in due time.

Related link: also in the headlines, among the ‘recent attractions’, is a comprehensive review of processors — mainly a collection of benchmarks comparing AMD and Intel.