Mozilla announced last week the availability of Firefox for Maemo 1.0, the first official release of Firefox Mobile for Nokia’s Linux-based smartphone operating system. It offers adequate browsing performance, support for add-ons, and a finger-friendly user interface that includes popular Firefox features like the AwesomeBar.
This Firefox variant is based on the Fennec project, which was originally launched in 2007 with the aim of bringing the full Firefox browsing experience to modern handheld devices. In the time that has transpired since the inception of the project, advancements in mobile computing hardware have significantly boosted the performance of smartphones. That factor, coupled with Mozilla’s aggressive optimization efforts, have made it possible for Firefox to become a mobile browser.
The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit.
The alpha release introduces a few new applications, including the Pitivi video editing tool and the GBrainy game. Some of the other planned changes to the default application set have not yet been made. The GIMP, which is scheduled for removal from the default installation during this development cycle, is still included in alpha 2. Some other applications that are planned for inclusion in 10.04, such as Gwibber, aren’t ready yet and have been pushed back to alpha 3.
Pity the small office when it comes to technology. With anywhere from several to several dozen employees, there’s often no budget for an IT director to manage all the network services required for a modern company of any size. Offices may need to handle email, file-sharing, calendar and contacts hosting, collaboration tools, and other matters.
Especially in this economy, how can an office of that size—perhaps your office?—afford the technician needed to install and keep a Microsoft Server 2008 installation on the rails, plus the initial cost in per-seat licenses. Unix and Linux distributions may be free or have relatively inexpensive purchase and service contracts, but you pay for that in requiring more expertise in house or on demand.
Sugar Labs announced this week a major update of Sugar on a Stick, a Linux-based computing environment for education that runs from a flash storage device. The new version brings an improved user interface and several new applications, including an integrated e-book reader.
Sugar Labs was established last year by Walter Bender, the former president of software of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. Dissatisfied with OLPC’s lack of direction and increasingly ambiguous platform strategy, Bender created Sugar Labs to ensure that OLPC’s Sugar learning environment will continue to advance. His team’s vision is to bring Sugar to a broader audience by making it available in a format that can be used on conventional hardware.
For anyone who does 3D graphics, the high-end NVIDIA Quadro cards are the shiniest of red bicycles. At the top-end, they’ve got more memory than most gaming cards, but they’ve got a price to match their premium features. At $1799 retail, the Quadro FX 4800 Mac Edition is over $1300 more than the 1GB Geforce GTX 285 and is the only Quadro option available to Mac users. Considering the lack of reviews by 3D professionals who know how to test the card, that’s an expensive leap of faith that a potential customer would have to make. As someone who bought a Quadro FX 5600 for one of my older Mac Pros and Maya, that leap turned out to be quite an expensive letdown. So we thought we’d take another look at the faster Quadro FX 4800 to see if much has changed.
One thing has changed since then: NVIDIA has taken over official support of the Quadro cards and the drivers. Previously, the Quadro was supported by Apple, and while it was obvious NVIDIA had a hand in driver development, it was anyone’s guess as to who was responsible for the lackluster speed. Since the Quadro cards are all about drivers, giving NVIDIA some time to get the Quadro up to speed on the Linux and Windows sides seemed only fair.
Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, climbed down from the tree last month with new features and updated software. For five years and eleven releases, the Ubuntu Linux distribution has delivered a capable desktop operating system built largely on open source software. The new version is another important step forward for Ubuntu and its corporate backer Canonical.
The new version offers a user experience that is incrementally better than its predecessors, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Some of the new software introduced in Ubuntu 9.10 feels incomplete and will need a lot more work before it can really shine. This review will take a close look at some of the most significant new features, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu One service and the new Software Center application management tool. We will also examine some of the upstream software from GNOME 2.28 that plays a role in defining key parts of the user experience in Ubuntu 9.10 and give you some technical insight into various architectural components of distro, such as Ubuntu’s unique CouchDB configuration.
The community behind the Fedora Linux distribution has announced the availability of the Fedora 12 beta. Fedora 12, which is codenamed Constantine, is scheduled for official release in November. The new version ships with updated software and adds a number of improvements to key system components. It also brings a lot of nice virtualization improvements.
One of the major goals for Fedora 12 is to boost the quality of the distro on netbook devices. Changes that help fulfill that goal have been made throughout the entire system. The 32-bit x86 packages are now compiled for i686 by default and have a number of optimizations that will provide a performance increase on computers with Intel’s Atom processor (-mtune=atom). You can see an interesting discussion about the implications of this change in the IRC logs from a Fedora Engineering Steering Committee meeting.
Today, Opera has announced the release of the Opera 10 Web browser for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. Are the new features and performance increases enough to beat out other popular browsers? The answer: it depends mostly on your choice of platform.
Canonical has launched a new project called Quickly that aims to simplify the process of developing and deploying Linux applications. It provides a command-line framework for generating code projects, storing changes in version control, building packages, and releasing finished software.
Quickly uses a template system that allows specialized behaviors to be defined for different kinds of software projects. The default template, which is called ubuntu-project, will help users build applications with Python and Glade. It defines several high-level command operations, including edit, save, dialog, glade, and package. These operations, which are invoked with the Quickly command line tool, will use other software and command line tools to help the user complete the relevant tasks. It serves as a simple command abstraction layer that insulates the user from having to learn and understand the underlying components.
Novell has launched a new Web service called SUSE Studio that simplifies the process of building Linux-based software appliances. It provides a convenient interface for creating custom versions of Novell’s SUSE Linux distribution with specialized configurations. The service is part of Novell’s broader SUSE Appliance Program initiative.
Enterprise software deployment comes with a lot of serious technical challenges. Getting a complex piece of server software up and running on backend infrastructure often requires system administrators to wrestle with dependencies and configuration issues. Software appliances are increasingly viewed as a compelling solution to this problem.
