You can preorder OpenSuse 11.0 now, but it doesn’t seem to be available for download on opensuse.org.
I would guess that the latest development version is close to what 11.0 will be, but I could be wrong.
Archive for the 'Linux' Category
Was playing a little with Io. I like one of the options for the conditional if; you can basically just pass “if” three arguments; a statement, something to do if it’s true, and something to do if it’s false.
So you can do simply:
Io> a := 3
==> 3
Io> if(a%2==0, writeln("a is even"), writeln("a is odd"))
a is odd
==> nil
I know, in ruby you could just do a%2==0?"a is even":"a is odd", and similar in other languages. I do like the idea of if looking like a function to which I’m passing arguments, though. Just seems intuitive, somehow.
[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
In 2003, this would have been a huge story. By now, pretty much everyone seems to have concluded that SCO’s case was hopeless, so in some senses this seems like little more than a rubber stamp on the general consensus. It’s a legal rubber stamp, though, and it’s sort of nice to have that whole fiasco at or near a close.
For those not paying attention to Linux/SCO in 2003: in early 2003 SCO announced that they owned the Unix copyright, and that furthermore, Linux infringed on said copyright, so therefore Linux corporations owed them license fees. They made this big news by suing IBM, among others. At some point, Novell stepped in and said that they still owned the Unix copyrights, and this ruling is related to that case.
Legally speaking, I suppose there are a lot of loose ends to wind up, but as far as the end-user, home or corporate, this seems to me to be a pretty good ruling.
I know; full disclosure — yes, I work here.
But, I don’t sell anything. So, move on and read the news.
The nutshell? The Oracle 11g database will ship this month (okay, it will ship “probably in August”), and it will do so on Linux — “Oracle wouldn’t comment on when 11g would be available for the other operating systems the database will support including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows.”
As an unabashed Linux fanatic, that’s just sort of cool. Doesn’t mean too much in the long run, because Oracle will, of course, release a Windows version (I assume — I certainly wouldn’t know).
At any rate — yay, Linux. Let’s go have some breakfast.
Pyro is a new kind of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing.
This is closer to my idea of what the “Web OS” will be. Projects like EyeOS and related efforts are neat, and all; but being as they require a traditional OS, running at least enough of a Window manager to render a browser, they seem a bit unnecessary. Pyro, as an add-on for Firefox, and taking on the role of Window Manager for itself, seems like a cool bridge between the traditional OS and the so-calledweb-based/browser-based OS. Pyro doesn’t try to call itself an OS — it’s a Window Manager.
Very beta, from what they say on the site; I’ll have to test it out at some point. It’s an interesting idea; could be a fun project to keep an eye on.
…and I have to go with Linux Mint.
Sabayon looks very impressive, but much like Gentoo, it seems you still need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and spend some time neck deep in bash and config files to get it running at full capacity.
I don’t mind that… in fact, even on Ubuntu I usually wind up editing xorg.conf by hand at least once. But in my old age, I’ve found that I really want things to “just work,” and that I don’t really want to stay up until 3 in the morning tweaking nVidia drivers so I can get xorg working again.
So, Linux Mint tops the charts right now, in my opinion. It is basically the latest greatest version of Ubuntu, plus (in the full “imagine there’s no software patents” version) added drivers and codecs that make your first boot a real treat… everything just works. Even Beryl, right out of the box (if it came in a box).
I just stumbled, recently, across Daniel Robbin’s website — that would be drobbins, creator of Gentoo Linux, among several other things.
While there, I clicked on a link to Sabayon Linux, which is billing itself as “the most bleeding edge Linux around.”
Um… good! Downloading now, thank you.
Nero has released Nero Linux 3, billed as the “ultimate Burning application for Linux.” You can have your own for… $24.99.
Now, I’ve always had good results from Gnome’s built-in burning, or K3b. However, regardless of the availability of free/open source CD/DVD burning solutions, this is an awesome thing.
A CD/DVD burning application is not a server farm/data warehouse application; it is aimed right at the end user, the desktop market. In other words, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the existence of said market. This cannot possibly be anything but good, and I’ve half a mind to drop the $25 on the software license just to encourage companies to port their desktop apps to Linux.
However, I don’t think we want to go overboard with that tactic, either. If everyone just buys commercial Linux desktop apps to “vote for Desktop Linux” rather than because they actually want the software, that creates an artificially inflated sense of demand for Linux desktop apps… seeing the numbers, yes, more companies may create desktop apps for Linux. Meanwhile, the Linux world, seeing the success of their efforts, stops buying a copy of every single Linux desktop app that comes out and goes back to burning with K3b, coding with Bluefish, and playing Tux Racer. Then what? All the companies that saw the numbers don’t sell the number of apps that they thought they would, and they stop making them.
Okay, that’s a worst case scenario; you could also have a simultaneous increase in market share, you could have a company rise up that actually offers a great consumer-targeted Linux desktop & laptop product (and I bet it will not be Dell) — any number of things could happen in the next few years.
So I think… if you want the app, if you’d like to use it on Linux… heck yes, go buy it. Let’s have a real, living market for Linux desktop applications; markets work best when supply and demand are governed by what people actually want…
I saw a mention of Linux Mint on the cover of some Linux periodical recently — really I saw nothing more than the name and that it was based on Ubuntu. Sounds interesting, I thought, and promptly forgot about it.
Then I happened to see a link to some Linux Mint topic in del.icio.us earlier today, and the next thing I knew, I was downloading the torrent. After all, why not?
Continue reading ‘Linux Mint’
