Desktop Linux Summit Highlights 416
mo writes "The Desktop Linux Summit has just concluded in San Diego. There were a number of exhibitors, including Novell, AMD, and Mozilla. I've put together a summary of some of the more interesting announcements and booths at the conference. Highlights include a Linux-only 3D game, DRM-free music services, and a new Asterisk GUI."
The 3D game in the summary isn't Linux only... (Score:2, Informative)
How the hell did you leave out OpenOffice.org? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:great timing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cool -- ring me when they have an SOE I can sel (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, people have been installing Linux over a network for over a decade. The old NFS installs worked just fine. You didn't even need a boot floppy if you had a boot ROM on the network card. Now I just do everything with a business-card CD of Debian, and download all of the packages, including our custom ones, from a central company server.
> end-user configuration lockdown
UNIX has had this for over 30 years, and Linux for over 13 years. When you don't give the end-users the root password, the configuration is locked-down.
Real unveils features of next version (Score:5, Informative)
Re:thanks for great review, but how does Skype com (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Real unveils features of next version (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, with now 84% of Real's record revenues coming consumer SERVICES, not products, like RealRhapsody, and RadioPass, Real can be much more open about our direction.
Today the free Helix-powered RealPlayer 10 plays MP3, Flash, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, RealAudio 10, RealVideo 10, so users can enjoy the web's best FREE content. Our goal of the NEXT version is to allow users to start to enjoy PREMIUM content, including dozens of commercial-free radio stations.
For those of you interested in following our process or lendign your insight, join the free dev mailing list right here: https://helixcommunity.org/mail/?group_id=154
Kevin
Re:great timing (Score:4, Informative)
Argh!!! There are PLENTY of games (2d/3d alike) (Score:5, Informative)
Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.
Re:Haha ... (Score:3, Informative)
As a beginner you should use one of the standard base installs and either yum or apt to install software.
Perhaps what you really want is ubuntu. Installs with synaptic by default and is super snappy even on low end systems. Not too much bloat.
ymmv.
Re:Coding in Parallel (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
My suggestion. (Score:3, Informative)
I would suggest staying with Windows for the time being. Why becuase it works for you, why fix something that isn't broken.
Now from your description I would suggest to moving to Linux in the future. This is how I would do it.
First Thing I would suggest you to do is read up on how to use Linux, and get used to it. Try out one of the bootable distro and use that for awhile, make sure you can use everything. If everything works(hardware and software), and you have the time go ahead and (Backup)install Linux.
Otherwise I would wait for when you are ready to replace your computer, and plan my purchases around Linux. Linux is really good about Hardware support, but I would be careful and double check everything you buy and make sure it would work, and isn't too hard to setup.
Once you have everything working, then transfer all your work related things to the new computer and then put that Windows Box to rest.
Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:3, Informative)
Well Synaptic [nongnu.org] is a fairly universal install frontend for all distro based software - it runs on Debian (and all debian based distros), Fedora, SuSE, Connectiva. All you have to do is install the damn thing (it comes by default with several of those distro options). As for third party packages, try Autopackage [autopackage.org]. Yes they're still finishing things off, and yes, it's going to take developers bothering to package their software with it, but the promise it offers is, I think, enough that we can expect to see it become fairly standard over the next couple of years.
KDE vs Gnome wars: put an end to it.
Um, it is [freedesktop.org]. Or are you going to say all the GNOME developers have to go and work on KDE (or vice versa)? So who says who "wins"? And who really cares if there are 2 seperate desktops if they integrate increasingly well via FD.o standards?
Jedidiah
The interesting talks were... (Score:2, Informative)
Linux in the Motion Picture Industry
He showed clips of 'The Last Samurai', Bad Boyz, etc. He said Shrek2 had a 2,500 cpu render farm and was fast approaching their deadline. They contact HP for an additional 1,000 cpu render farm and sent their info to them so that could finish. Like in last samurai he said no arrows were shot in the whole movie they were painted in. Also the shot with thousands of arrows the actors had them stuck in their legs and the digital effects people had to reverse trajectory paint them in. Pretty neat stuff.
Mitch Kapor lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of eff.org, working on chandler
I really liked his talk...he really is a visionary. He basically just sees it as a matter of time till open source blows over but his time frames are like 10 to 15 years.
Brenno de Winter
This guy single handedly wrote an op-ed and had the Dutch goverment stop a 160 million Microsoft contract of 5 years for something like 25,000 desktops. Instead he had redhat, suse, etc. summit alternative bids for like 7 million dollars. Anyway he now has minister and politicians asking him about DRM, etc. I stood next to him while I was buying like 25 firefox and thunderbird cds but didn't say anything. He's really a funny guy. He kept belting out s-word and b-word, etc. totally hilarious.
Gary Edwards like a co-ordinator for openoffice OASIS. I almost didn't sit through this talk cuz I was like what the hell is OASIS? But boy oh boy this is really gonna revolutionize all office suites and the way business share documents.
He said last 3 years OASIS (open document) has been in the making. Microsoft objected to it being called 'openoffice document' so they settle on 'open document'. It'll be in Openoffice 2.0. It supports XML, Xforms, UBL (universal business language...bills of lading, etc.), compound documents. Say Abiword opens a compound document with some word processor format with spreadsheets and it'll gracefully handle it just saying it can't display the spreadsheet portion.
Barry is totally in the know and I couldn't get enough of what he had to say. Other talks I liked were Doc Searls and Simmon Phipps who is a Sun guy and anyway.
I really got the feeling that Novell and Sun are embracing it slowly but surely. Anyway about those Linspire 4.5 and Linspire 5.0 beta...I guess they just don't like my little shuttle box. I guess I'll have to wait till they send me a japanese version (hey Scott) of 5.0 and hopefully I'll have better luck with that one.
I did try that Novell 9 Linux Desktop 60 day trial and yeah it's basically suse but with an administrator's perspective to make it easy to manage hundreds and thousands of workstations. Kinda cool.
Now they said they were videotaping all presentations but for the life of me I can't find squat online. I got that cd from Kim Brand (opensource in small schools) but it doesn't seem to have 25% of what was in the whole slideshow presantation.
Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:1, Informative)
I havent tried SUSE personally. Im posting this from Ubuntu Hoary. Ive never configured Samba - except to set my workgroup. Needless to say, I'm vissible and the rest of the network is vissible - and actually faster for me than for my MS-centric colleagues.
What I disagree with you about is getting Linux into schools. People keep on using what they are familiar with.
We have a project in South Africa, sponsored by Mark Shuttlewoth that does just that. See TuxLabs [tuxlabs.org.za]. More than 80 schools is already involved. People donate their old hardware to a pool that goes to the schools. Installation and setup is done by volunteers.
Microsoft, of course, tried to donate software. This didnt help them much, because most of these schools didnt have hardware to begin with and they would need to purchase the "donated" software after two years in any case. The result: South Africa use a lot of opensource in schools. Your average kid is familiar with Linux - not Windows. You stay with what you know.
Disclaimer: I live in South Africa. It is not exactly as third world as you would expect. Computers are commonplace, even for the relatively poor.
Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:3, Informative)
I use XFCE 4.2. I can load both KDE and GNOME programs that minimize to the taskbar, and they're handled perfectly. Cut-&-paste behaves as it should as far as i've experienced (no more "this pastes here but not there"), and the GNOME metadata i wrote for file handling is seen fine by XFCEs file manager. I can drag and drop files between programs and they're handled fine aswell - i do it all the time with Opera (QT) and my file manager (GTK+).
Granted, it still has it's rough edges. But (again, IMHO) the Linux desktop is not the mess nowadays some people tend to beleive. And it's only getting better.
Re:Oh I DO hope.... (Score:2, Informative)