Some people are scratching their heads over recent Windows 7-related comments attributed to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth. But Shuttleworth’s words provide an important reminder that innovation and competition from Microsoft will help to propel Ubuntu and Linux forward.
Gedit is the default text editor for most of the Linux distributions using Gnome as the desktop environment. As it turns out and as we shall see shortly Gedit supports plugins and there are some very useful plugins for Gedit.
The Linux Foundation — the Oregon-based non-profit responsible for promoting Linux and keeping developer-in-chief Linus Torvalds off the dole — is about to launch a contest aimed at filling the Linux gap left in the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials, and as one might expect, have set out a competition that highlights the collaborative nature of the
One of the great promises of software is its infinite malleability: software can be whatever you want, so long as you have the skills necessary (and legal rights) to modify it.
An anonymous reader writes “In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he’s switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a ‘disaster.’ Although it’s improved recently, he’ll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use.” There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.
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Here is great list of a Top 50 Linux Alternatives to Popular Apps.
Microsoft assigns “taksforces” to fight GNU/Linux adoption (Wal-Mart in this case)
nerdyH writes “As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Recently, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux’s role in Microsoft’s misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: ‘Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.'”
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Elektroschock writes “According to Russian media, the Russian Government is going to develop a National Operating System (Google translation; Russian original) to lower its dependencies on foreign software technology licensing. The Russian plan will base its efforts on Linux and expects a worldwide impact. Microsoft is also involved in the roundtable process that led to the recommendation. The Chinese government successfully lowered its Microsoft licensing costs through an early investment in a national Linux distribution. I wonder if other large markets, such as the European Union, will also develop their own Linux distributions or join in the Russian initiative.”
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ffs writes “The next release of Fedora, 11, will default to the ext4 file system unless serious regressions are seen, as reported by heise online. The LWN story has a few comments extolling the virtues of the file system. Some benchmarks have shown ext4 to be much faster than the current default ext3. Some of the new features that matter for desktop users are a faster file system check, extents support (for efficiently storing large files and reducing fragmentation), multiblock allocation (faster writes), delayed block allocation, journal checksumming (saving against power / hardware failures), and others. The KernelNewbies page has more information on each feature. As is the extfs tradition, mounting a current ext3 filesystem as ext4 will work seamlessly; however, most new features will not be available with the same on-disk format, meaning a fresh format with ext4 or converting the disk layout to ext4 will offer the best experience.”
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