RockBox on My Sansa
This past weekend, I took the plunge and installed RockBox onto my Sansa e280 (8GB). After fighting with my Vista PC and the RockBoxUtil (used for simple button click install), I finally switch over to my company provided Dell laptop with Windows XP still installed on it and was able to use the RockBoxUtil program [...]
RE: Squandering one of the industry’s best open source talents
Now, one thing that Mr. Asay seems to either a) forget or b) fail to recognize is that the concept of rapid application development (RAD), was pretty much completely non-existent on Linux prior to the Mono stack. Engineering a .Net solution for Linux desktops, Miguel and the rest of the Mono team has successfully brought RAD to Linux in a big way. Several of the more popular Gnome applications are Mono based (Banshee, Tomboy, and Beagle).
Big Companies & Open Source
Last week, IBM announced that they would put somewhere around thirty developers on OpenOffice to help improve the product through bug fixes, new features, and collaborating with the OpenOffice team. The reason IBM says they are doing this is because they are seeing wide adoption of OpenOffice and it’s ODF (Open Document Format) by governments and companies the world over. But what makes this interesting is the fact that IBM is paying employees to work solely on an open source project, giving away features, code, and resources to a project that long term, makes them next to no money (if any at all). Big Blue seems to be doing this a lot lately. Why would a company do this?
GTK# Ribbon Library
Miguel de Icaza just posted about the new GTK# Ribbon Library that came out of the Google Summer of Code program, completed by Laurent Debacker. He even links to a screencast. Below is a screenshot (click to enlarge).
Desktop Searching on Linux
Last week Google entered the realm of Linux desktop searching with their release of the Google Desktop for Linux. This is big news for Linux users because it brings the extremely popular desktop indexing and searching tool to their desktop. However, it also means that they have yet another choice in the field of applications they can use to index and search their data.
Customizing Your Gnome Desktop (Conclusion)
We have completed our latest series entitled “Customizing Your Gnome Desktop” and it was a nice one. We talked about customizing your background while touching on customizing your icons. We looked at window borders and GTK2.X controls. And to top it all off we went over customizing the Gnome Panel.
Customizing Your Gnome Desktop: Gnome Panel
For the final part of our series on customizing your Linux Gnome desktop, we are going to look at the Gnome Panel. The Gnome Panel are the bars that hold your menu and window list. They can be made to hold other components as well. They can also be customized to blend into your desktop and by doing so they can really tie the whole look of the desktop together.
Running Compiz Fusion
I made the switch from Beryl to Compiz-Fusion just now. Overall I like the fact that I have some of my favorite Beryl plugins in Compiz and that there is finally a Compiz Settings Manager so that I can easily set up the plugins to my liking.