Biker|Geek

http://linuxgeeksunited.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-open-is-open-enough.html
Written by: Don Sanderson

We have seen the signs that changes are happening. Not just specifically in the Linux world, but in Open Source, Open Standards and in the proprietary world as well.

Companies like Microsoft are sharing information, whether it’s because they want to or because a court of law compels them. The recent announcement of sharing SMB protocols with the SAMBA group is evidence of that.

Also, Microsoft has entered the realm of Open Standards by trying to push their own version of an open document standard through the works. While I am not altogether impressed by their methods, it is telling that they see the need to play the open documents game. It’s what businesses, governments and community agencies are clamoring for.

IBM and Sun, to name two of the biggest players in the market, have released some of their most important software under Open Source licenses recently. Giving us a view that they are not just laying back and watching anymore, but are becoming more assertive, even aggressive in pursuing Open Source solutions.

Novell, once the dominant giant in networking with it Netware products, is reinventing itself using Linux and other Open Source apps to regain some of their statutre in the network world and has produced recently some of the best work yet in a Linux offering.

The GPL Open Source license has now been defended at least twice publicly and successfully.

Things are looking good for Open Source and Open Standards. Where do things go from here?

People need to insist on having Open Standards. When you install a word processor, you want to make sure you are getting one that allows you to save it and transport it so that anyone, with any word processor can read it or edit it. That’s a fundamental part of having access to Free Speech. Except it’s not Government imposing closed communications on you, it’s corporate giants. In the name of Big Business, we have allowed corporate types to dictate how, when and with what we should communicate with.

Small businesses are moving to Open Source solutions more and more in order to save on operating expenses, licensing costs and more. As these small business continue to adopt Open Source solutions, they will need to have more “open” access to do business and access other avenues, such as tax preparation and government document filings.

The B2B industry will need to “Open” up quite a bit if the big Corporates who have been resisting find their small business customers stealing away to do business with others who will support their new Open Source software solutions.

It takes time to make big changes such as these. It’s not as mundane as “X OS sucks” and “Y distro is great.” Other Operating Systems like MS Windows will never g oaway entirely and Apple, Linux, Windows and others will continue to share the market as they have, perhaps with market shares of some decreasing while others take up a bit more, but in the end, the monopoly of Software and computers is over and on it’s way out. Even if not Linux, the attention has been brought, the spotlight been shined on the disastrous position that corporate greed and government blindness has wrought.

With the right know-how, a willingness to run a few terminal commands and a mind for efficiency, you can get every last bit of power from your Linux box, or get more life out of an older system. Read on for our roundup of tips that any level of Linux user can implement

read more | digg story

Addictive 3D games for Linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most are cross platform and all of them completely free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

read more | digg story

The future is coming. Innovation will rise again.

read more | digg story

I’ve been using Mint on my wife’s PC for about a month and on my laptop for about a week. I must say it’s is an amazing distro. Clean and beautiful. Things work well and I have encountered ZERO issues thus far with either box. Give it a try. http://linuxmint.com

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7491263673.html

While there are some Linux users who still insist on running free software exclusively, a growing number are more than happy to mix and match open-source and proprietary software. For these latter users, Ubuntu 7.10-based Mint 4.0 is a distribution made in heaven.

To see if Mint was as angelic as it promised to be, I ran it on one of my older systems: an HP Pavilion a250n. This PC has a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 processor with 800MHz frontside bus, and 512MB of PC2700 DDR (double data rate) RAM. For graphics, it uses a low-end Nvidia GeForce4 MX.

If that doesn’t sound like much of a system, you’re right, it’s not. Vista would be nothing except annoying on it and even Windows XP would be cranky. Desktop Linux, though, even the newest of the new, does quite well on older systems.

Installing Mint, from a freshly burned CD, took about 20 minutes. Once in place, everything just worked. No fuss, no muss.

Mint 4.0, aka Daryna, uses Ubuntu 7.10 as its foundation. So, Mint is built on top of the 2.6.22 Linux kernel. Ubuntu users will also recognize the interface, Gnome 2.20, and the applications, OpenOffice 2.3, Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 and Firefox 2.0.0.6.

This is a consumer desktop, not an office desktop. For example, Thunderbird is a fine e-mail client, but if you’re in a business, Evolution is what you really want. With Evolution, you can work with Microsoft Exchange servers and sync your Evolution calendar with calendar applications that support iCal and popular programs such as Google Calendar. For a lone user, that’s not a big deal, for someone trying to keep office schedules synced up, it’s a necessity.

OK, so Mint’s not SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) or Red Hat Desktop, but where it shines is as a home user desktop. In particular, like Linspire 6.0 and Freespire 2.0, it includes proprietary multimedia support.

Mint 4.0 uses Amarok, Totem, and Mplayer to display multimedia content. Behind the scenes, Mint provides MP3, Flash, Windows Media and encrypted DVD playback support. That’s neat, but lately many Linux distributions either include this kind of support or make it mindlessly simple to install it.

What sets Mint apart, though, is that instead of simply being Ubuntu plus multimedia playback, its community and developers have worked to make solid improvements to the already well-regarded Ubuntu distribution.

For example, while MintInstall and the Software Portal have been present in earlier versions of Mint, no one seems to have noticed them. In the Mint 4.0 release notes, the developers say they suspect that’s because “their presence had not been made obvious enough.” While they are much easier to find, I put the blame on users, myself included, who just immediately headed to the old familiar software package management programs such as Apt-get and Synaptic.

The more fool me. MintInstall and Software Portal make it easier than ever to install new or updated programs on your Linux desktop. I especially appreciated that MintUpdate, which also doubles as the automatic system update tool, also brings you more information about the updates and the risks involved in applying them.

Far too often all update systems assume you always want the newest updates. All updates are not created equal, and some are more hazardous to your system or applications’ stability than others. For example, I once traced down a problem with a blogging application to an overeager system administrator who had updated a server’s PHP implementation to PHP 5.x. unfortunately, at the time, many PHP applications were PHP 4-specific. They blew up, badly, when you tried to run them with PHP 5. Sometimes, it’s better not to update a system at all. Mint can’t give you expert advice on this, but MintInstall does give you enough information that you can at least make an informed decision.

Like Linspire and Freespire’s CNR (Click’N'Run), Software Portal gives you a virtual shopping mall of software application to choose from. Once you find the application, you click on it and it’s installed. Unlike CNR, which is still at the beta stage, Software Portal is already running at full power.

If you’d rather just install a program without having to search for it, you can also just enter its name — Skype, Google Earth, Banshee, whatever — and Mint will find it, confirm that’s the program that you’re looking for and install it for you. It doesn’t get much easier than this.

Mint has also made its desktop a trifle easier to manage and make attractive with its MintDesktop desktop configuration tool. The developers have also taken a big step forward in making the desktop more usable by including the Red Hat Liberation Fonts. These are open-source equivalents of some of the more common Microsoft fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is. Many users find themselves mildly bothered, for no reason they can put a finger on, when they start reading fonts that they’re not used to. With these fonts, the gap between Windows and Linux desktop users inches a small, but significant, bit closer.

All in all, Mint 4.0 is a very attractive and easy-to-use desktop Linux for home users. In fact, I think Mint 4.0 is downright heavenly.

– Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols