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Stallman attacks Oyster's 'unethical' use of Linux (ZDNet)

Richard Stallman is not known for pulling punches, as he demonstrates in an attack on the Oyster payment system for the London Underground railway. ZDNet has the coverage of his complaints, which are based on very real privacy concerns that have little or nothing to do with Linux. "Online payments cannot be made anonymously, so anyone paying online or linking their Oyster card to a credit card for automatic top-ups is handing their travel information to the government, Stallman argued. He also warned that the RFID chip on the card might be read at other times, allowing information to be gathered besides details of Tube and bus travel."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

KDE at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KDE presence at LinuxTag, which was held recently in Berlin. There were two booths, one for KDE and another for Amarok, plus multiple talks in the KDE track. "Both main booths were well manned and even better visited. The interested crowd asked zillions of questions and was very eager to see the latest features, goodies and eyecandy of KDE 4.1 which we showed on all computers at the booth, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Other visitors came by to share ideas or suggestions, and altogether they gave wonderful feedback."

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Companies

Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net)

c|net looks at Acer's shift toward Linux-based laptops. "In an interview with VNUNet.com, Acer Vice President of Marketing Gianpiero Morbello said his Taiwanese PC maker has big plans to develop the market for Linux, not only on its low-cost ultraportable, but on the company's laptops as well. The Acer Aspire One is just the beginning of Acer's foray into the Linux world, according to a company exec. The reason is because of the cost and operation of Microsoft's operating system over open-source Linux. "We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," said Morbello. "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market.""

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Google Gadgets for Linux appears (ZDNet)

ZDNet reports on the availability of Google Gadgets for Linux, a set of mini-applications for the desktop. "Zhuang invited developers to view the source code for the entire project. "For Gadgets for Linux, we don't just want to simply release the final offering, but we also want to give everyone a chance to tinker with the code powering the gadgets," Zhuang wrote. "For this project, fostering a transparent and lively developer community is just as important as serving our users." Google Gadgets for Linux are compatible with those written for Google Desktop for Windows and the "Universal Gadgets" on iGoogle. Therefore, according to the company, "a large library of existing gadgets [is] immediately available to Linux users, [and] gadget developers will benefit from a much larger potential user base without having to learn a new API"."

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Resources

Add multitouch gesture support to a TouchPad-equipped laptop (developerWorks)

IBM's developerWorks has an article describing how to detect multitouch gestures using a Synaptics TouchPad on Linux. "This article provides tools and code needed to add some of this new gesture support on older Linux®-enabled hardware. Building on the output of the synclient program, the Perl code presented here allows you to assign specific application functions to 'Three-Finger Swipe,' as well as open- and close-pinch gestures."

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Reviews

KDE 4 Progress: New plasmoids, Akonadi, KRunner and more (polishlinux.org)

PolishLinux.org looks at a KDE 4.1 snapshot. "In spite of fragmentary information about changes, that I've published since my last insight (like the Amarok 2 visual changelog), I've decided after all to gather them all in one place. Hence, I invite you to the next insight of KDE 4. The revision of the day is 811150." (Found on KDE.News)

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Linux captures the 'green' flag, beats Windows 2008 power-saving measures (Network World)

Network World takes a look at power consumption by comparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1, and Windows Server 2008 on four different servers. "The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board."

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