Trying Chromium

It has been a a while since i did some blogging here, but since I am having a look at Cromium for Linux, I thought it would be a good idea to make some notes.

Chromium can be enhanced with extensions and themes. I changed my theme to Earthy and added 2 extensions, one for the weather and one for blocking ads.

The theme I chose matched nicely with my Ubuntu theme. (I use ArchLinux) A nice feature in the settings it that you are able to hide the system bar, and use gtk+ theme.

There is no clutter in Chromium, the tabs look smooth, and its a pleasant browser to work with.

If you want to browse anonymously you can simply open an “incognito window”.

It hardly uses any resources, even with the 9 tabs I have opened opened.

I like Chromium, it might become my default browser.

Tuxicity.

Dutch develop open source smart card for public transport

The initially developed (closed source) smart cart is hacked and finally people, (in this case NLNET Foundation and Radboud University in Nijmegen), are developing an open source smart card.

SourceForge Opens 2008 Community Choice Awards

SourceForge.net is proud to present the 2008 Community Choice Awards. This is the third year of the awards program, and it’s going to be the best yet.

read more | digg story

Free software menus reinvented

Free software programmers are fond of saying that they’d prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Apparently that attitude no longer applies to desktop menus, considering all the new options springing up.

read more | digg story

Nouveau Driver Developers Answer Questions

A Q&A with the developers of the Nouveau project. For those out of the loop or new to Linux, the Nouveau project aims to provide an open-source 2D/3D graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware. After collecting a number of questions from our readers, KoalaBR and Marcheu have answered these questions. The questions range from whether there will be open-source SLI support to asking if NVIDIA has ever contacted the Nouveau developers.

read more | digg story

Open Source Products Just Are Not As Good?

Well, allow me to poke some holes into that theory, generally made by people who have yet to ween themselves from closed source dependency.

read more | digg story

Why Upgrade to GPL Version 3

Version 3 of the GNU General Public License will soon be finished, enabling free software packages to upgrade from GPL version 2. This article explains why upgrading the license is important.

• Read the rest here… 

New software licensing agreement will undermine deal between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc.

In an interview Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said:

“We need to make sure such deals don’t make a mockery of the goals of free software,”

“The Free Software Foundation will seek to undermine the Microsoft-Novell patent deal by incorporating language that will accomplish that goal into the new license agreement that will cover rights to much of the code in Linux.”

“They found a way to effectively proprietize free software by offering patent promises to Novell,” Brown said. “Whenever a new method comes along to effectively turn free software into proprietary software, we will adjust the license.”

• Read the whole story here.

Linux, Open Source Software Pay Off for PayPal

A story about PayPal and how it uses Linux to make the system secure, reliable and cost-effective.

Paypal uses Red Hat Linux.

A few quotes:

“When you’re buying lots of Big Iron, as I did in other places I’ve worked, your upgrade path is US$2 million, US$3 million at a clip. You just had to buy big chunks of stuff to scale,” he says. “Here at PayPal, our upgrade path is 10 US$1,000 no-name servers, slapped into the midtier of the platform. And we just keep scaling it that way. It’s unbelievably cost effective.”

“Rather than have a monolithic box, or an impenetrable fortress that never breaks, we just have so many [nodes] that the breakages are irrelevant,”

“The combination of Linux and open source allows us to do the modifications we need to scale and have that extreme rigidity of security,”

“Sometimes we feel a little schizophrenic,” he says. “We’re a Web company; we’re a real-time payment system — oh, dear. So doing both is very hard.”

• Read the whole story here. (linuxworld)

Open-source e-mail systems biggest threat to Microsoft Exchange

According to a Yankee Group report that will be published next month, the real threat to Microsoft Exchange isn’t IBM — it’s Linux- and open-source-based e-mail servers.

Cost, complexity and “difficulty in maintaining and managing Exchange,” according to the study. “Those three factors, according to 23% of the survey respondents, far outweigh the myriad integrated benefits offered in the Microsoft Email and messaging platform and make Linux and open source solutions more attractive to their respective businesses,”

• Read the Original story here.