KDE 4.4.0 Ushers In New Innovations To The Desktop

KDE 4.4.0 Software Compilation codenamed Caikaku has been released. KDE 4.4.0 brings an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users which enhances their experience while using KDE Desktop.

Adobe AIR 2 Beta for Linux Released

Adobe AIR 2 beta (runtime and SDK) has been simultaneously released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities and even tighter integration with the desktop.

GIMP going to get the boot in Ubuntu Lucid

It is heard that GIMP is going to be left out of the default selection of packages bundled with the next version of Ubuntu aka Ubuntu Lucid. There is an interesting write up about this at omgubuntu.co.uk.

The following are the reasons provided against inclusion of GIMP in the default installation of Ubuntu Lucid.

Fedora 12 Released with Huge Improvements in Tablet Support

Fedora 12 has been released. This release touts huge improvement in support for tablets accompanied by tweaks to our favourite software such as a new pen preset tool in Inkscape, Brush dynamics tool in Gimp, Handwriting recognition tool named Cellwriter, a notes taking application (Xournal) to name a few. The following are some of the other new features you will find in Fedora 12.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Released

Ubuntu today released its latest offering namely Ubuntu Karmic Koala version 9.10. Ubuntu Karmic Koala comes with lots of new features.

Abicollab.net - A free web based collaboration service

A collaboration service allows multiple people spread across the world to remotely get  together and edit a single document simultaneously. AbiCollab is one such service. What is interesting about AbiCollab is that it is based around the popular open source wordprocessor Abiword.

Google Search will now include Twitter Tweets

Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include real time tweets from Twitter in Google search results. All the more reason to take tweeting and tweets seriously.

Sir Tim Berners Lee apologizes for forward slashes in web addresses

Sir Tim Berners Lee - the creator of the World Wide Web (WWW) has apologized for the mandatory forward slashes in web addresses. He says he could easily have deviced web addresses without the forward slashes.

This apology was made in the mist of a light hearted talk with a Times newspaper reporter.

However, Berners Lee need not be unduly worried. Most modern web browsers assume the http:// part and prepend it to an address when a user type a web address.

Is Linux kernel getting bloated ? Linus Torvalds says Yes!

A lot of bloat is creeping into the Linux kernel. This was the startling revelation made by none other than Linus Torvalds - Founder of the Linux kernel. He said this in his talk at LinuxCon - an event that brings together Linux gurus and open source leaders to provide collaboration and education space for all matters on Linux.

GNOME vs KDE - Income and Expenses

Being avid users of GNOME and/or KDE, have you ever wondered how much revenue these well known open source projects generate ? If popular perception is taken into account, GNOME should generate far more revenue, in-turn more profits, than KDE. But reality is somewhat different.

The following are some nuggets of information gleaned from the quarterly reports that give a birds eye view of the income and expenses of GNOME and KDE respectively.

Tornado - An open source web server, courtesy of Facebook

Facebook has released one of its core piece of infrastructure called Tornado under an open source license.

From the Facebook announcement:

Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.

Opera 10 - A first look at this fabulous web browser

Opera 10 has been released. This release of Opera sports a number of alluring, new features, many of them not seen in any of its contenders. The enhancements to look out for in Opera 10 are as follows.

Slackware 13.0 released with 64 bit support

Slackware 13.0 has been released. This new version of Slackware is considered a landmark release and contains many new features. The most prominent are as follows ...

1. An official 64-bit port of Slackware
2. Linux kernel 2.6.29.6 is the default kernel in Slackware 13.
   
3. KDE 4 (version 4.2.4) is the default desktop. Previous version of Slackware had KDE 3 bundled with it.
   

Windows 7 Sins - An FSF campaign

Preceding the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows 7, FSF is spearheading a campaign highlighting the 7 sins being committed by Microsoft in monopolizing the OS market. The campaign outlines seven major areas where proprietary software in general and Microsoft Windows in particular hurt all computer users:

Who writes Linux and Who supports it

A study was conducted on the Linux development statistics by the Linux Foundation and these were its findings.

• More than 70 percent of total contributions to the kernel come from developers working at a range of companies including Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel, Oracle, Fujitsu, among many others.

GIMP 2.7.0 has been released

GIMP version 2.7.0 has been released. GIMP 2.7 is the first step towards GIMP 2.8 which will be a stable release. GIMP follows the Linux kernel approach to version numbering in that all odd numbered versions are unstable and even numbered versions are considered stable.

Some of the notable features in GIMP 2.7.0 are as follows :

1. Text editing with text tool is done in the canvas like you do in Adobe Photoshop and not in a separate window.
   

KDE 4.3 released with incremental innovations

KDE 4.3 has officially been released. Code named Caizen, this release builds up on the previous release of KDE (4.2) bringing with it new innovations mainly on the desktop, applications and development platform.

Watch the following video to learn more about the fabulous new features in KDE 4.3.

We will never kill Mono - Says Microsoft

Microsoft has applied the Microsoft Community Promise to it's C# initiative. What this means is - anyone can develop a C# compiler and use it to create applications in C#.

In layman terms,here is how the Microsoft Community Promise work -

VideoLAN - VLC 1.0.0 has officially been released

VLC media player - A universal media player which plays video and audio files of any known format has reached the version 1.0 milestone. I especially have a liking for this media player because it is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS and BSDs. And, in my experience, I never ever had to hunt for media codecs once I installed VLC on my machine. Heck, it even plays Flash (.flv) video files.

Google Chrome OS to officially make it's debut in 2010

Google has eventually come out with the announcement that it is developing a unique Operating System - called the Google Chrome OS.

It will be Open Source, light weight, speedy, simple and secure. Google says the new OS will be targeted at Netbooks and will make it's debut sometime next year (2010). As the name suggests, Google Chrome OS will in all probability be a browser centric OS; in that, most applications will be residing in the cloud. The OS will run on x86 and ARM architecture.

Really exciting news for sure.

[Source : Official Google Blog]