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Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, has reached the beta testing stage. The beta release, which was made available for download last week, provides users with an opportunity to get an early look at the features that will be included in the new version of the popular Linux distribution.
Ubuntu 9.04 includes GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source GNOME desktop environment. We did some hands-on testing with the new GNOME release when it arrived earlier this month. GNOME typically represents a large chunk of the user-visible improvements in new Ubuntu releases, but there isn't really anything particularly exciting for Ubuntu users in GNOME 2.26.
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The global economic downturn has compelled a growing number of companies to search for ways to reduce IT costs. Uptake of open source software is climbing in this environment, which means more opportunities for the companies that have built their businesses around the open source Linux platform.
Red Hat, one of the most prominent commercial Linux vendors, reported its quarterly earnings Thursday and revealed that its total annual revenue was $652 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Subscriptions to Red Hat's commercial support service, which accounts for $541 million of that revenue, were up 20 percent. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines COO who joined Red Hat in 2007, cites the recession as a factor that has contributed to the company's success.
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The developers behind the GNOME project announced the official release of version 2.26 on Tuesday. It includes several useful enhancements, new programs, and improved configuration utilities.
GNOME is an open source desktop environment for the Linux platform. It provides a cohesive desktop user interface and an assortment of applications and utilities for messaging, multimedia, web browsing, and a variety of other tasks. In addition to applications and user interface components, it also offers a collection of application development frameworks that have made it the nexus of a much broader software ecosystem.
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GNOME Do is an open source launcher utility for the Linux desktop that offers a minimalistic, task-oriented, and keyboard-friendly approach to application launching and task management. The latest version, 0.8.1, was released on Friday.
GNOME Do was originally modeled after Quicksilver, a similar program for Mac OS X. It runs hidden in the background and appears when the user invokes it with a keyboard shortcut. It allows users to type in the name of a program or some other item and then perform an action with the selected target, and it has a predictive autocompletion feature so that it can be used very quickly.
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Do androids dream of electric penguins?
In the decade since its founding in a Palo Alto garage, the name "Google" has become practically synonymous with the Internet. Thus it was that the search company's celebrated entry into the mobile market was met with significant enthusiasm from those who believed that Google would be able to use its immense resources and Internet savvy to produce a next-generation mobile product that would deliver "the cloud," in its vast entirety, into the eager hands of consumers. Some of the biggest names in the tech industry flocked to Google's banner and affirmed their support for the Open Handset Alliance, which promised to liberate the mobile masses by building a blooming garden without walls.
After the fanfare faded, we ended up with Android-a platform that launched with some limitations but nonetheless has significant potential. Although the first Android devices leave a lot to be desired when compared to competing products, the platform itself is evolving quickly, and it offers the advantages of openness and collaborative development. In this article we'll take a close look at the underlying technology of Android and what the platform means for developers.
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed plans Friday for Ubuntu 9.10, which will be codenamed Karmic Koala. The developers plan to bring cloud capabilities to Ubuntu's server edition, boost startup performance on the desktop, and continue work on the distro's netbook flavor.
Ubuntu adheres to a time-based six-month release cycle. The next major release—version 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope—is moving towards feature freeze and is scheduled for launch in April. Ubuntu 9.10, which will be the next release after Jaunty, is planned for October.
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Novell developer Aaron Bockover has created a clever Firefox plugin that uses Moonlight to play conventional Windows media streaming video content at websites like C-SPAN. The plugin takes advantage of the video codecs that Microsoft provides for Moonlight, Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework. Moonlight 1.0, which was officially released Wednesday , automatically downloads a proprietary codec pack from Microsoft in order to provide Linux users with legally licensed support for Microsoft's video formats. Bockover's plugin uses the NPAPI to register itself as the default consumer of Windows Media content and then, when it is invoked Read More...
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Mozilla Labs has launched a new project called Bespin that provides a browser-based framework for interactive code editing. The prototype includes a simple IDE with a built-in command system, a basic project management interface, and an editor that supports syntax highlighting and other features. The Bespin framework is distributed under an open source license and can be deployed by users on any server. It uses standards-based Web technologies and doesn't rely on features that are specific to the Mozilla ecosystem, so you will eventually be able to use it in any standards-compliant Web browser. It does use some cutting-edge standards, however, so you will need Firefox 3 or a WebKit nightly build Read More...
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Last year, we looked at Neuros, a company that aims to put Linux in living rooms with open set-top boxes. The company’s flagship product is the Neuros OSD, a DVR that runs a heavily customized Linux platform. In November, Neuros expanded its lineup with a media extender called the Neuros LINK.
The $299 LINK is designed to bring digital video content from the Web and your local network to your television. It integrates with Neuros.tv, a Web-based application that provides easy access to third-party streaming video providers such as Hulu and Amazon Unbox. The Neuros.tv service is still under active development and will likely provide support for a broader number of services in the future.
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Michael Widenius, the original creator of the MySQL database system, announced in a blog entry on Thursday that he has left Sun Microsystems and is launching his own company. He is unsatisfied with the direction of MySQL development and believes that he will be able to make more meaningful contribution to the software from outside of the company.
MySQL AB, the original company behind the open source database platform, was cofounded by Widenius and David Axmark in 1995 and was acquired by Sun last year. The acquisition, which came as a surprise to the open source software community, has created some friction within the MySQL ecosystem. Axmark left Sun shortly after the acquisition because he became frustrated with the company's rules.
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Fun Script, also known as F-Script, is a command-line based interactive Cocoa shell. The open source F-Script offers a new way to create and interact with Cocoa objects using a simple scripting language and a Smalltalk-like development environment. Recently, the F-Script shell went beta, providing a new way to interactively build Cocoa.
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