January 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
XiTi Monitor provides the latest statistics for web browser usage share: Firefox continues to gain in Europe and everywhere else in the world.
While just a slight rise in the past few months, it reverses the slowdown in growth from the previous quarter. It was also enough to add another country to the 40% or higher club, which now includes Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. (Several other countries are close to reaching this plateau as well.)
XiTi reports, “After a period of stabilization from June to September 2007, Mozilla Firefox’s visit share, for the average of European countries of the XiTi perimeter, is again growing at the end of the year. Thus, over a one year vision, it gains 5 points in order to reach 28% in December 2007.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on XiTi Monitor: Firefox Usage Grows Again
January 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Open source proponents have long theorized that extremely inexpensive PCs running Linux would eventually undercut the lowest possible price for Windows systems. That price may turn out to be $199, as there are now three Linux machines available at that point.
ZDNet discusses the available options in “Five reasons not to fear a $200 Linux PC.”
“At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, small form-factor PC maker Shuttle debuted its $199 KPC… Then last week, Mirus and Linspire collaborated on the Mirus Linux PC, which is now for sale at Sears.com. It’s $299 (although an included $100 rebate brings it to $199), and is preloaded with Freespire 2.0, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution… But the beginning of the low-cost computer trend actually started last fall. The Everex gPC showed up on the shelves of Wal-Mart for $198.”
ZDNet explains that as more applications go online, the operating system shrinks in importance, and the web browser grows. Thus for normal home computer users, Linux serves just as well as Windows, at a far better price. The current surge in extremely inexpensive Linux PCs is just the start, and we should expect to see many more for sale in the near future.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on $199-Linux PC Roundup
January 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Since the KDE 4 Release Event, it’s been a week full of KDE news and reporting, both for me and across the web.
In that vein, Ars Technica provides some news on the KDE 4.0 release as well. They also seem pretty excited about the cross-platform capabilities it introduced.
Author Ryan Paul writes, “The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.”
While he encountered minor issues testing KDE applications on Windows, most were just user interface glitches, and Paul is enthusiastic about what a cross-platform KDE will bring to the world:
“Broad support for Windows and Mac OS X is an ambitious goal, but the KDE development community appears to have made a very good start in that direction. Many of the new abstraction layers in KDE 4 are geared towards increasing portability and reducing dependence on platform-specific mechanisms. KDE definitely enriches the Windows and Mac OS X software ecosystems and will likely be welcomed by many.”
For Mac users, Paul provides a few helpful links which I’ll simply quote here: “For additional details about the Mac OS X port, check out this recent blog entry written by Reed. The binaries can be obtained via BitTorrent from the KDE TechBase page for the Mac OS X port.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on Ars on Cross-Platform KDE 4.0
January 24th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
At the KDE 4.0 Release Event last week, Inge Wallin presented KOffice 2.0, a major forthcoming upgrade to the suite that leverages numerous KDE 4 technologies.
KOffice is the broadest office suite available today, with 11 components at present. It includes project management, vector and raster graphics programs, desktop database, word processor, slideshow and spreadsheet tools, and a handful of others. New components including a mind map tool are also being added.
KOffice adopted ODF even before OpenOffice.org supported it, and OpenDocument Format has since become KOffice’s native file format.
One of KDE 4.0’s biggest additions is the ability to run on Mac OS X and Windows, as well as Linux. Thus, KOffice 2.0 will be available on Linux, Mac and Windows when it’s released. (Alphas are already available for testing users now.)
Some other cool features coming with KOffice 2.0 include:
- Integrated into KDE; can be embedded in Konqueror browser.
- Each application is scriptable. The codebase is modular, allow for extensions to be built as complementary pieces to the core KOffice code.
- Sophisticated color management supports CMYK color space, and mixing colors in different color spaces (not for 2.0, but soon afterward).
- Like other KDE 4 applications, KOffice 2.0 offers more features with a smaller footprint in terms of system resources needed.
It’s great to see the explosion of ODF-capable suites hitting the marketplace. Soon, users will be able to choose between OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and IBM Lotus Symphony on any one of the big three OS platforms. All of these suites have strong feature sets, and all are free of cost or open source.
These new contenders are going to bring major changes to a market that has been stagnant far too long!
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on KOffice Notes
January 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A formal press release should be coming soon to announce that OpenProj has surpassed 200,000 downloads.
The preview I’ve seen announces, “Projity Hits 200,000 Download Milestone with OpenProj”.
This “Open Source replacement of Microsoft Project has been downloaded over 200,000 times and is now being used in over 132 countries. OpenProj is rapidly becoming a standard on Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows environments.”
OpenProj is the most mature open source project management tool I’ve seen on the market, and makes a good complement to OpenOffice.org for individuals and offices that are starting to realize the wisdom of open source programs on the desktop.
Projity CEO Marc O’Brien has begun to measure the influence OpenProj has already had on the market’s incumbent players: “The 200,000+ downloads are just part of the story, many organizations are deploying hundreds and even thousands of OpenProj copies from their initial downloads. Projity is having a highly disruptive effect on Microsoft and other proprietary vendors while benefiting worldwide users.”
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on OpenProj Surpasses 200,000 Downloads
January 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Today at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley is the largest day of presentations and meetings for the KDE 4.0 Release Party.
We flew in from New York to participate in the conference sessions, invited to help cement the collaboration efforts between many projects around the ODF standard. (Used by OpenOffice and KOffice, among many others, ODF provides a shared meeting ground for many open source communities, as well as corporate entities.)
Aaron Seigo’s presentation gave us an overview of the new additions to KDE. One of the features that I was most interested in learning about is the cross-platform capability of KDE 4.0 applications. With 4.0, Mac and Windows users will be able to run KDE applications natively on their platforms. Demos of Marble, KStar and a few other apps really impressed me–and I’m very much looking forward to using KOffice on my MacBook in the near future.
Memory footprint is also much more efficient in KDE 4.0. The Eee PC, with 512 MB of RAM and a 1 Ghz processor, can run KDE 4.0 with all the visual extras turned on. Aaron said many applications will run with 30-40% less RAM using KDE 4 than they did with KDE 3.
KDE 4.0 is targeted primarily at early adopters, distributions, testers and developers. KDE 4.1, scheduled for the middle of this year, will focus on end users and is clearly going to be a watershed in the global move to open source.
Posted in Announcements, Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on KDE 4.0 Release Party at Google
January 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The BBC reports on the OLPC’s plan to launch in the USA.
“The OLPC has set up a US office and has begun talking to state governments about ways to get the laptop into the hands of the poorest American children.
“The organisation said it would formally launch its XO programme in America later in 2008.”
I can’t wait to see it happen! There are good reasons to offer XOs in the US. It will benefit the students who receive them, the schools that will be able to supply computers to more students, and the OLPC itself, as it increases overall production volumes, and reduces costs. Finally, it will result in a larger ecosystem that will draw in more users and developers to further improve the platform. This is a wise move, and I wish the project much success.
Posted in OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC Planning US Launch
January 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
LinuxWorld Australia writes, “Hard cash, cold logic: Linux,” covering Elcot (Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu)’s migration of 30,000 desktops to SUSE Linux.
First, the managing director of Elcot installed Linux on a new laptop for testing purposes. Then, “within weeks, the Rs 750-crore Elcot was undergoing a enterprise-wide migration to Suse Linux. A year later, Umashankar and his team had moved 30,000 computers and 1,880 severs belonging to some of the state’s schools to Linux — creating possibly the largest Linux rollout in India.”
While Elcot’s 30,000 computers represent a huge migration, it is only a fraction of the state government’s total complement of desktop computers. Following Elcot’s success, the rest of the government is observing and possibly planning to migrate to Linux as well.
“Umashankar expects the entire operations of the government to gradually switch over to Linux/OpenOffice.org over the next 12 or 18 months. “Give it two or three virus attacks and you’ll see a faster migration,” he says tongue-in-cheek.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “Hard cash, cold logic: Linux”
January 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization responsible for the Wikipedia, has announced plans to support ODF export from the MediaWiki wiki engine.
From the press release:
“This technology is of key strategic importance to the cause of free education world-wide,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “It will make it possible to use and remix wiki content for a variety of purposes, both in the developing and the developed world, in areas with connectivity and without.”
In this multi-stage project, the last will bring support for ODF.
“The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. “Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer,” Sue Gardner explained. This work is funded through a US$40,000 grant by the Open Society Institute.
“The technology developed through this cooperation will be available under an open source license, free for anyone to use for any purpose. It ties into the MediaWiki platform, the open source technology that runs Wikipedia. As a result, thousands of wiki platforms around the world will have the option of providing the same services to their users.”
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Wikipedia to Support ODF
January 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Mary Lou Jepsen, the founding CTO of OLPC, recently left the project to help commercialize some of its innovative hardware in a new company she founded, Pixel Qi. One of its goals is to produce a laptop for $50 to $75!
Groklaw runs an interview with Jepsen about her plans.
Jepsen explains her plan: “I’m starting a company called Pixel Qi. Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras. Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO, while leveraging a larger market for new technologies, beyond just OLPC: prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of the key technology advances. Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use.”
A great article, a fascinating person, and a world-changing idea!
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | 2 Comments »