Linux and opensource news across the web

Make Your Application Accessible with Accerciser

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Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched

thorwil writes "Brainstorm is a new site where everyone can submit and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. It's inspired by Dell's Ideastorm. By default, you see the ideas submitted by the community sorted by popularity. Each idea is accompanied by arrows so you can vote it up or down (you have to log in first). You can only click once per idea. So this is an easy way to submit ideas and see what people are really wanting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe To Port AIR To Linux

unityofsaints writes "Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash. This may be about to change because the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. No definite release date is mentioned in the interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, just a vague 'later this year.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe To Port AIR To Linux

unityofsaints writes "Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash. This may be about to change because the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. No definite release date is mentioned in the interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, just a vague 'later this year.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Microsoft's New EU Fine is Just Fine

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

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What is your favorite scripting language?

* Python * Perl * PHP * Lua * Ruby * AWK * bash * Other (comment below)

Lots to Learn in the Land of the Legal

Technology news comes in many flavors — product debuts, security revelations, acquisition antics, et cetera et cetera — but one of our very favorite is legal wrangling. Today's news is filled with items of interest from the legal side of the tracks, so lets get our wigs on and get rolling.

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There’s a New Bird On The Scene

Sometimes we get the bug to be cheeky. Enter TuxParty.com.

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P2P Scammers' Lawyers Attack Open Source Team

An anonymous reader writes "Late last year a company affiliated with the French RIAA hijacked the Shareaza.com domain name from the original, open source project's owner. They are passing off their own for-pay software, which violates the GPL, as the real thing. Now, having stolen the Shareaza project's identity, the scammers are threatening legal action to shut down the real open source team."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance

Nemilar writes "Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times, similar to the Windows Vista SuperFetch function. This article examines Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost, and discusses basic installation and configuration to get you started."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn

edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IP Voice 2008 - Lisbon, Portugal - March 5th to 6th, 2008

IP Voice 2008 (http://www.ipvoice2008.com/eng/index2.php) will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on March 5th to 6th, 2008, and with the main audience of this conference being targeted to enterprise customers and communication carriers.

There have been a number of Open Software Phone projects that have happened in the past year and which continue to move forward:

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Music Notation Programs: Recent Releases

A few weeks ago I promised to bring in some more general news from the world of Linux audio software development. Alas, my plans were ambushed by the happy intrusion of the release of Renoise for Linux, but I'm back on track. As promised, here's more straight reporting on the world of Linux sound and music software, starting with some news about recently released music notation programs.

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Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them

ptorrone noted a Make article about twittering your plants just in case you need that sort of thing in your life. And you do. He says "The gang from Botanicalls used one of Adafruit's new open source hardware ethernet shields for Arduino (open hardware too) to make some plants talk — and now you can too! That's right, having your houseplants Twitter you when they need water and more! You can see what one of the plants is doing now..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux At the Point of Sale

NegativeK writes "I work at a local comic and games shop, and I've been kicking around what it would take to implement a barcode scanner and more detailed inventory control. Currently, the setup is a low-tech register that tracks general areas of sales: new comics, ccgs, Games Workshop, rpgs, etc. Requirements include FOSS on Linux, the ability to use a cheap scanner, datamining, and output in a useful format (perhaps OpenOffice spreadsheet). The idea hasn't been pitched to the shop owner yet, so ease of use is probably more important than anything — but breaking out the programming books to work on parts isn't out of the question for me. Assuming the actual register stays, what resources are out there for a barcode/inventory implementation?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation

Michael Larabel writes "With the Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) starting today, where John Bridgman of AMD will be addressing the X.Org developers, AMD has this morning released their 3D programming documentation. This information covers not only the recent R500 series, but goes back in detail to the R300/400 series. This is another one of AMD's open source documentation offerings, which they had started doing at the X Developer Summit 2007 with releasing 900 pages of basic documentation. Phoronix has a detailed analysis of what is being offered with today's information as well as information on sample code being released soon. This information will allow open source 3D/OpenGL work to get underway with ATI's newer graphics cards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation

Michael Larabel writes "With the Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) starting today, where John Bridgman of AMD will be addressing the X.Org developers, AMD has this morning released their 3D programming documentation. This information covers not only the recent R500 series, but goes back in detail to the R300/400 series. This is another one of AMD's open source documentation offerings, which they had started doing at the X Developer Summit 2007 with releasing 900 pages of basic documentation. Phoronix has a detailed analysis of what is being offered with today's information as well as information on sample code being released soon. This information will allow open source 3D/OpenGL work to get underway with ATI's newer graphics cards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Third Annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference: March 26th and 27th, 2008; Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

Most of the time I write about FOSS events, or community events, but every once in a while there is an event that bridges several different categories, and the Third Annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference to be held on March 26th and 27th 2008 at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (http://www.phillyemergingtech.com/index.php) is one of these.

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Are Wikileaks Servers in a Nuclear Bunker?

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has a two page spread on the background of some of the Wikileaks people, the Wikileaks scheme for "an open-source democratic intelligence agency" and the possible location of its secret servers — an abandoned US nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common and a radar station in Kent. "The Kent bunker is deep underground and supposed to survive 30 days after a nuclear strike.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interview With Tyler Mitchell of OSGeo

Linux Journal's James Gray recently spoke with Tyler Mitchell, Secretary of OSGeo, about his organization's efforts to promote open geospatial technologies.

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Stumbling Into eGroupWare

Recently I have been grumbling about project management, accounting and organizational software in general. Basically, Gixia and I want to just build the Geek Ranch rather than be bogged down with overhead. The reality is, however, this is too big a project to do without some back-end organization.

As I looked for specific packages for each item I was overwhelmed with

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Child-Suitable Alternatives To Passwords?

An anonymous reader writes "Two months ago I donated my old PC to my little sister, who is 7 — I had promised she would get her own computer as soon as she can read and write properly. I then proceeded to answer her questions about how it works, as far as she inquired, and tried to let her make some choices when installing Debian (she can already use GNOME). As I explained password protection and encryption to her, I was pleasantly surprised when she insisted on protection measures being as strong as possible, so that no one else can screw with her computer. She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent. The significant problem is that she cannot permanently memorize abstract passwords, even if they are her own creation. I talked with a teacher who assured me that this is common at her age. My parents would probably be able to guess non-abstract passwords. What mechanism of identifying herself does the Slashdot crowd suggest?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ohloh Tracks Open Source Developers

eldavojohn writes "The startup company Ohloh has a database listing 70,000 developers working on 11,000 open source projects. Their aim is to 'rank' open source developers, which raises some interesting questions about exactly how useful this tracking company is. Questions like, 'Is there an accurate way beyond word of mouth to measure the importance and skill of a developer?' I found it slightly alarming that, to this site, the number of commits (with input from the number of kudos) tells how good a developer you are."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Review: X-Arcade

X-Arcade is an industrial quality arcade game controller that injects the ultimate arcade game experience into your PC, MAC or game console (we tested on Linux, of course).

With your X-Arcade Joystick, you can reverse time and play the classics like Ms. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Robotron, Galaga, Donkey Kong and Street Fighter.

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What's Next for Open Source and Public Media?

Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting.

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