Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.
There are three well-known open source clients for managing PostgreSQL databases: psql, pgAdmin, and phpPgAdmin. If you use Postgres in a collaborative team, however, you should get to know phpPgAdmin, which is expressly designed for such environments. It lets users and administrators create user accounts, databases, tables, sequences, functions, and triggers.
Android is a newly released software stack for mobile devices from Google that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. It’s open source and based on the Linux kernel and on version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.
I. Installing and running Android Emulator
To try out the Android emulator, download and unzip the Linux SDK package. The emulator executable is located in the tools subdirectory. Run the emulator executable and Android will boot up. Run ./emulator -help in a terminal to see a list of options. The -skin options lets you select a skin from the tools/lib/images/skins directory.
Optionally, you can add $SDK_ROOT/tools to your path: edit your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file. Look for a line that sets the PATH environment variable and add the full path to your $SDK_ROOT/tools to it. If you don’t see a line setting the path, you can add one:
export PATH=${PATH}:
Adding $SDK_ROOT/tools to your path lets you run Android Debug Bridge (adb) and the other command line tools without needing to supply the full path to the tools directory. Note that, if you update your SDK, you should remember to update your PATH settings to point to the new location, if different.
II. Installing and running APK files on Android Emulator
By installing APK-files to an Android device emulator you will be able to test already now all new application which will start to appear soon. When the actual Android-powered devices will appear (approximately beginning of 2008), they must be also compatible with already available till then applications. You do not need Eclipse or Eclipse-plugin the Android Development Tools (ADT), unless you are planning software development for Android, but are not necessary for application evaluation on emulator.
Download and save locally a APK-file which you want to install/evaluate on the emulator. We recommend to save the APK file directly in the $SDK_ROOT/tools directory.
Note: APK probably stands for “Android package”. It’s an application distribution unit in the Android environment. If you are coming from the Windows Mobile world, this of APK as of CAB-files.
Ok, now start the console (”Start -> Run… -> type ‘cmd’” for Windows computers). Type-in the following command: adb install $APK where $APK is the name of the APK file. For example: adb install Snake.apk
If you receive a “path not found” error, then you probably either didn’t add path to the $SDK_ROOT/tools directory to your system PATH settings or the application you are trying to install is not in the $SDK_ROOT/tools directory.
If all went without errors then you should be seeing your newly installed APK on the emulator.
Here is a cool video of Android Emu running on Linux:
Thanks to Android team for the info. For more info head to official page.
P.S.>> Wondering if it will be possible to run it, via flashing (in future), on my HTC Artemis P3300 phone.
Little old stat but still … Distrowatch Weekly Newsletter noted back in it’s 13th August 2007 issue that Asia is fast catching up with the readership of Distrowatch.com website, which roughly translates to a keen interest in keeping in touch with, and downloading, various GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. The following table should shed some light on this development:
| Rank | Country/Territory | 2006 | 2007 | % Change |
| 1 | Japan (JP) |
328,336 | 347,879 | +6.0% |
| 2 | China (CN) |
151,915 | 209,203 | +37.7% |
| 3 | India (IN) |
80,889 | 137,702 | +70.2% |
| 4 | Indonesia (ID) |
72,668 | 112,998 | +55.5% |
| 5 | Turkey (TR) |
67,465 | 101,789 | +50.9% |
Number of visits from Japan were very high even in 2006 but the increase in visits from India over just seven months since then is remarkable. The above four countries(other than Japan) have registered around 50% increase in the same period, India leading the table by a big margin. This is what Distrowatch has to say about it:
“While Japan has been maintaining the top position since the beginning of this web site, it’s interesting to note the dramatic growth of readership in the two most populous countries in the world – China and India. With a handful of exceptions, the number of readers visiting DistroWatch has been on the increase and a total number of Asian-based readers have grown by more than 20% since a year ago.”
Source – Distrowatch
Just few days ago Miro, billed as ‘Groundbreaking Internet TV software“, the open and free video player, has gone 1.0, and launched in a polished, slick package for Linux, Mac and Windows. Miro (formerly Democracy Player) is the open and free alternative to Joost, Windows Media Player and iTunes for getting, watching and organizing your video. In place of DRM and proprietary formats, Miro uses the VLC video-engine to play practically every video format under the sun. It has over 2,700 channels of free content, and it uses BitTorrent to download, which means that the creators you love won’t get clobbered by bandwidth bills when their videos get popular.
Miro allows you to search, subscribe to, and view any number of video podcasts. A handy guide is built right into the client so you’ll never be without content, but if you can’t find something that strikes your fancy there the ability to search across a number of video sharing sites is also baked right into the app.
Miro 1.0 also takes a bold stand against main competitor Joost. The revamped front door of the site has a huge banner reading “Better Than Joost.” (Miro vs Joost comparison) [I personally haven’t tried Joost, but liked Democracy Player]
Here’s run down of some new features:
- Video Format Support — Miro claims it can play just about anything, MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and more. I’ve yet to encounter a file that didn’t play in Miro.
-
Video Playlists and Watched Folders — if you aren’t grabbing all your video content through Miro, just tell the app where you’re storing it and it’ll show up in your playlists regardless of where you got it.
- BitTorrent and RSS support — Miro can download individual BitTorrent files and torrents that are in feeds and you can subscribe to any video RSS feed you like. There’s even a setting to auto-download new videos whenever they show up in a subscribed feed.
- Saved Search Channels — like smart folders essentially. If you search for a something specific across sites and you like the results, you can add it as a channel and new videos will appear that meet the saved search criteria.
- Social site integration — Got a video you like and want to tell the world? Every video in Miro has quick links to post to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Video Bomb.
Miro is created by a charitable foundation called the Participatory Culture Foundation, an organization that also makes complimentary, free packages like Broadcast Machine (for publishing your own video channels) and VideoBomb (like Digg, but for video). The foundation pays programmers to improve the technology, and it’s entirely free to use and improve.
“I love Miro because it just works, no other video on the web is like that,” said John Lilly, COO of Mozilla and a PCF board member. “Miro represents a great blend between a web application and a desktop application.”
Miro allows you to organize your subscriptions in channels, create playlists, and much more. Miro is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Link
Spend few hours of your this weekend trying out this great new and finalized killer application.
Miro’s launch comes at a crucial time in the fight for open media. Net neutrality, media consolidation, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) are all causing controversy online. Miro comes down firmly on the side of openness.
UPDATE to my Previous Post: After tweaking a little with the position of the camera and playing around with the light source, and then later returning back webcam to it’s original position, the view is much better, I mean the brightness/contrast, compared to what I got from my initial experience. I am not sure whether this has something to do with UVC driver, Skype or them together. Still, I’d like Skype to include webcam controls in it’s next release.
There is another problem though. When seeing/watching other persons webcam, in status window I see only around 1/4th of the whole picture (upper-left corner), and to view the picture completely the only option is to make the video full screen. Switching to double size mode, it only zooms that 1/4th of the screen while leaving the rest intact/out of view. Here is a rough idea of what I mean:
Looking forward to a better release with bugs resolved and few more features added. I can surely say that Skype is now perhaps my number one Video IM for now, as Kopete still has a lot to add, and Pidgin got no video option as of today.
Another Update:Â The problem definitely seems to be in UVC driver in conjunction with Skype. I tried quiting Skype and loging off from KDE and then again relaunching Skype,and the picture again was very dark. Launched Kopete and then manipulated with webcam settings there, and bam, all good, the picture is now good back again in Skype. So as I said before, add tweaking/manipulation in Skype under webcam settings tab.
Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Quality Assurance leader, announced a preview of the Spread Firefox 2 site that will be the future home to all Firefox enthusiasts out there.
On October 28th, Intel released the reviews on the new “Penryn†Core 2 processor, specifically the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX9650. The QX9650 has a lot of new features and welcomes a new generation to the Core 2 processor family. So what are these features and how will they equate into benefits to the consumer and, more specifically, Linux users? That’s what Linux Hardware is here to unravel. In this review I’ll cover all the high points of the new “Penryn†core and talk to a couple Linux projects about the impact on end-user performance.
Intel Core 2 “Penryn†and Linux
Reviews of Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Processor – The 45nm Era Begins:
- HardOCP
- Techgage (A couple of Linux benchmarks)
- Madshrimps (Almost 5GHz overclock!)
- The Tech Report
P.S. I am still waiting for AMD’s Phenom X4 processors, hoping that they can overclock well and can compete with latest Intel offerings (price/performance), though am quite sure that it won’t be able to beat them.
How To Enable Multiple HTTPS Sites For One IP On Debian Etch Using TLS Extensions
This how-to is Debian specific but could be ported to other
distributions since the concept is the same.
In order to use TLS Extensions we have to patch and recompile apache2
and recompile OpenSSL with the enable-tlsext directive.
Since TLS Extensions are relatively new, some internet browsers will
not work so the apache2 server will deliver just the default site as
http 1.0 does on an http 1.1 server.
How To Upgrade An Ubuntu 7.04 Server (“The Perfect Setup” + ISPConfig) To Ubuntu 7.10
This article explains how you can upgrade an Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) server to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). I’m using an Ubuntu 7.04 server, set up according to The Perfect Setup – Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) and with ISPConfig installed, with web sites, email and ftp accounts, databases, DNS records, etc., and upgrade it to Ubuntu 7.10.