KDE.News has
announced
the first year anniversary of the KDE community forums.
"Exactly one year ago, on October 12th, the KDE Community Forums were founded. It was about time to give users a place for discussion and support beside the mailing lists, which were mainly used by developers and other contributors. A lot of time has passed since then, and the forums have grown into a healthy community, contributing to the KDE landscape as a whole. Here people can ask KDE-related questions, help other users, find useful information, or just discuss whatever comes to mind."
The X.Org Foundation Board annual elections have been announced.
"The next annual election of the X.Org Foundation Board of
Directors will be in November---nominations start right
away."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning TI to stop harassing
its calculator customers over a DMCA issue.
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
warned Texas Instruments (TI) today not to pursue its
baseless legal threats against calculator hobbyists who
blogged about potential modifications to the company's
programmable graphing calculators.
TI's calculators perform a "signature check" that allows
only approved operating systems to be loaded onto the
hardware. But researchers were able to reverse-engineer
signing keys, allowing tinkers to install custom operating
systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators'
hardware."
The 2009 version of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap has been
announced.
"This Roadmap is a projection of the influences that will affect FLOSS until 2020, with descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by an international workgroup of 40 contributors over this period of time and highlights 7 predictions and 8 recommendations."
The October 12, 2009 edition of the FSFE Newsletter is online
with the latest Free Software Foundation Europe news.
Topics include: "1. FSFE to EC: Don't waste an opportunity with a hasty deal
2. The Fellowship interviews: Andreas Tolf Tolfsen
3. The Second Fellowship Jabber meeting, 22 September
4. Celebrating the Software Freedom Day, 19 September
5. FSFE uses Free Software micro-blogging on Identi.ca
6. Welcome to Hugo Roy and Lena Simon: new Berlin interns".
AMD has released an updated R5xx 3D programming guide.
"The new version offers expanded coverage on texture memory layouts,
some notes on implementing anti-aliased lines/points/polys, and some
additional registers."
The mysterious new project being pursued by OpenMoko founder Sean
Moss-Pultz has now been unveiled: it's a small gadget called "WikiReader,"
which appears to be a simple device containing a full copy of Wikipedia. "WikiReader takes our original ideas of openness and accessibility to
an even greater realm. WikiReader is so amazingly simple. There really
is no interface. You turn it on and instantly become immersed in the
rich world of reading specific topics or the serendipitous pleasure of
discovering something by chance." More information on the WikiReader site, but
it's sparse. In particular, one might assume it's a Linux-based device,
but there's no information on the operating software or how it might be
extended.
cnet
reports on Cisco's entry into the Linux market.
"In what might have looked like a publicity stunt around a $100,000 prize for Linux developers, Cisco's Linux development contest was actually a major clue as to just how serious it is about becoming a leading server vendor with a global development community--and soon.
Today, Cisco announced the winners of its "Think Inside the Box" contest. The three winning applications are very interesting, but the bigger story here is what Cisco's contest just demonstrated:
Most of Cisco's 7 million installed Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) are now servers, for all intents and purposes.
The contest proved that server-side Linux developers who know C/C++, Java, or Python can now write applications to Cisco routers with little or no knowledge of routers."
Lifehacker takes
a look at Hulu's new Linux version. "Hulu has taken their designed-for-widescreen, remote-friendly Desktop viewer and released it for Linux-powered systems, giving anyone with an open-source media center or Linux laptop an easier way to watch streaming video clips and movies on their much bigger screen."
ZDNet Asia presents
an interview
with Intel's director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou.
"You're about to release Moblin v2.0. Can you tell us more about that?
[As a] release from an open source perspective, it's a milestone more than it is a product release--product releases come from OS vendors and OEMs [manufacturers]. Soon you will start to see OEMs shipping netbooks with Moblin. You will see an announcement over [time].
It's still in beta--right now we're in the very final phase. Very minor but critical bug fixes are being done based on input from OEMs and OS vendors. We don't want to call it a release until someone actually ships a product with it.
The final version will be available for download over the next couple of weeks. Once that happens, we will go on a regular cadence of a release every six months to make it easy for people to be able to have predictability in terms of time schedules."
The Register reports
that @linux.com mailing addresses are available from the Linux Foundation
for a one-time fee. "Previously, members needed to keep up with their yearly membership payments in order to hold a @linux.com addy. But as Zemlin tells us, folks kept requesting a way to hold on to their "geek street cred" without being tied to their membership status. With the change, current members can now secure the email from a one-time fee of $150. New members will need to pay $250 for a one-year membership along with the lifetime benefit."
The Inquirer covers
Nokia's port of Qt to Maemo 5. "According to Nokia, there are
currently community created ports available, which the company used to help
create the official upcoming port. The port itself will be based on Qt's
upcoming version 4.6, a beta version of which is expected to be launched
next week at the Qt Developer Days conference in Munich."
Ars technica looks forward to Maemo 6 and the devices that will use it. "DRM enforcement and access to protected content will only be available on stock ROMs that can be validated with code signing. Users will still be completely free to hack their devices and install custom ROMs, but they won't be able to play protected content if they do so. The specific mechanism has not yet been described, but Nokia says that users will be able to switch between the DRM-mode and the open ROM mode (except, potentially, on carrier-locked devices)."
CIO interviews Lennart Poettering. "One should never forget what we are doing here. We took an audio system that followed the low-level design that was current in the early '90s and brought it in one big step to what is current today.
We inserted an entire new layer into our stack right in the middle, so that we can catch up with the more advanced audio stack that Mac OS X or Windows provide right now. Doing something like this, of course, will trigger problems at many places. Criticism hence must be expected."
A team of 35 students from Cornell University won the recent Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition with a submarine running Debian. In addition, Debian was used to design the electronics, and various other free software tools were used for image processing and video capture. "The competition takes place in a large acoustic testing pool operated by the US Navy SPAWAR
Systems Center. It calls for entries to pass through a gate, follow a
path, ram a submerged buoy, fire through a square target with small
torpedoes, drop markers into bins containing simulated targets, recover
a PVC target and surface through an octagon shape, all without human
intervention."
KDE.News has
announced the winners of the Social Desktop Contest.
"The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API."
Winning projects include:
"ExtendedAboutDialog for KDE apps" by Téo Mrnjavac,
"Knowledge base widget" by Marco Martin,
"libopengdesktop" by Guido Roberto and
"PyContent" by Ni2c2k.
The Call For Tutorials for PyCon 2010 ends October 18.
"There is still time for you to get a proposal on your
favorite Python topic and teach a 3-hour class (with breaks and
refreshments) to your colleagues on the Wednesday or Thursday before the
conference ("Tutorial Days")."
The 8th Medical Open Source Software Seminar has been
announced.
"It is a pleasure for me to announce the 8th Medical Open Source Software Seminar (MOSS8) in Tokyo, Japan as follows:.
* Date and Time: October 31, 2009, from 13:00 to 18:00
* Location: Waseda University, Building 19, Room 610".
pyTexas takes place in Ft. Worth, TX on October 24-25.
"The format is scheduled talks on Saturday morning followed by open space
talks driven by the attendees in the afternoon. On Sunday there will be
sprints on various projects and, in parallel, a Python Lab that tests
the attendees with interesting programming puzzles."
Linux.com has announced that videos of many of the presentations from last month's Linux Plumbers Conference are now available for viewing.
"A lot of LinuxCon attendees stuck around for the Plumbers Conference, to delve deep into the kernel, utility, and library programming that surrounds Linux. This is deep-topic stuff, and attendees I spoke with were not disappointed.
[...]
Now you can view for yourself, as we've just posted the first batch of videos from the Plumbers Conference on the LF Video site. This set of videos includes discussions on SELinux, networking, clustered filesystems, video processing, and more."