About three years ago we had a look at how Gambas speeds database development. Now that Gambas 2.0 is being prepared for release, it’s time to see what the new version can do now. One cool feature is its ability to create a chart.
Category Archives: news
Mandriva is the only Linux maker that offers a version of its distribution packaged with and designed to run off a USB stick. True, you can install virtually any Linux distro onto an external USB device, but Mandriva Flash 2008 offers you a complete solution, including a USB stick with pre-installed version of Mandriva Linux and a CD containing a few useful tools. It’s a worthwhile package, though not without room for improvement.
Didn’t notice, but it came out few days ago. If you are not happy with Digikam (which I like) or F-Spot, or have been using the previous Picasa 2.5 version, then check out the preview of the upcoming release of Picasa 2.7.
New Features:
- Upload to Picasa Web Albums
Use the new “Web Album” button to post your best photos online to share with friends and family. - Save edits to disk
Save edits, undo saves, and revert to the original file with ease. We’ve got batch saving too! Picasa will even match the jpeg quality of the original. Right-click on your saved files to try the new “locate original” feature. - Folder hierarchy views
Browse through folders Explorer-style. Use the button at the top of your Albums List to try them out. - Improvements to Import
Import into an existing folder- we know you’ve wanted this feature for a long time! We’ve made importing photos from your camera faster too. - Better RAW support
Now you can work with RAW files from the Canon 30D, the Nikon D200, Adobe DNG files, and more. - Many other enhancements
Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, special “Starred Photos” album, search by ISO and focal length.
Please see http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/testrepo.html for information on using Google’s Linux Software Testing Repository to install Picasa for Linux, otherwise download one of the following corresponding to your Linux distribution:
- rpm, for Red Hat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva i386 or x86_64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/testing/i386/picasa-2.7.3736-7.i386.rpm - deb, for Debian/Ubuntu i386 and amd64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_2.7.3736-7_i386.deb
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_2.7.3736-7_amd64.deb
The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0.
While progress on the quality and completeness of what is to become the KDE 4.0 desktop has been great, the KDE Community decided to have another release candidate before releasing KDE 4.0 on January, 11th. The codebase is now feature-complete. Some work is still being done to put the icing on the KDE 4.0 cake. This includes fixing some major and minor bugs, finishing off artwork and smoothening out the user experience.
With this second release candidate, the KDE developers hope to collect comments and bug reports from the wider KDE community. With their help, we hope to solve the most pressing problems with the current KDE 4 codebase to ensure the final 4.0 release is stable, usable and fun to work with. We would like to encourage anyone who is willing and able to spend some time on testing to find and report problems to the KDE developers. It is recommended to have a current snapshot of the codebase handy. That makes trying things easier, it also helps the process by not having to hunt down bugs that have already been fixed and makes it easier to test patches proposed by developers.
More Here (with screenshots)
281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month.
The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:
- level of contribution
- reasons for participating
- attitude towards Novell
The results are now ready and can be found here:
The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.
– openSUSE news
Korneliusz Jarzebski has done the numbers and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up.
The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it’s worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. With more tweaks and optimization, at least we can hope that it will, if not much faster, slower than KDE 3.5 on the same specs.
Also check out a small and interesting post: KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel
Although China’s Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China’s Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.
Paldo Linux is a cross between a source-based and binary distribution. It installs as a binary system to provide a quick and easy desktop. Once it’s running, users can either build packages from source as they would with Gentoo, or install binary packages, as is common with Debian, openSUSE, or Mandriva. Paldo’s main features are an easy hard drive installer, GNOME desktop environment, and Upkg package management system. Stable version 1.12 was released last month. I found it to be one of the more interesting and promising distros to come along in a long time.
Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides. While you can pipe the output of ls to grep, that doesn’t show you the whole directory with the matched files highlighted in a different color. I create a small script to do just what I want.
Admit it — you put off your holiday shopping this year and now it’s crunch time and you don’t know what to get everyone on your list. Because we feel your pain, we’ve put together a last-minute shopping guide with ideas for some of your geekiest friends.