Not too long back, I had a reader ask me whether or not it was worth it to try one of the Linux distributions released for 64bit architecture vs that of 32bit. I thought the question was rather timely, as I had recent purchased a new notebook from System76.com that happens to run Ubuntu 8.04 64bit by default.

As you will see from this video below, not only does Java and Adobe Flash work, they work great.

To recap however, there are a few things to be aware of:

• The easiest way to get Flash working is to browse to a website that requires it. When prompted, install Adobe Flash. As far as getting PulseAudio working with Flash, do yourself a favor and install padevchooser. Then set it to autostart from Sessions. You might also want to make sure you have pavucontrol installed as well.
• Java IceTea was provided on my system, but I wanted needed Java JRE for my WeatherBug Linux application. So I made sure that my Multiverse repository was enabled from software sources BEFORE trying to install the WeatherBug application. This ensured that I would have the app working without any issues at all. This way there was no need to do any manual installation of Java whatsoever.

About the WeatherBug application:

Tested a while back here as the then beta app, Tempest, WeatherBug for Linux has proven to be a stellar weather application for those looking for more control over their weather application on this platform. Most significant difference with WB vs other Linux apps:

• You pick from a number of local weather stations instead of having one thrust upon you based on your zip code.
• Friendly to use with your proxy server, manually setup the data update frequency and even change layout the UI to best meet your needs.
• Only auto-starts when you choose to make it do so.

Independent game developer KarjaSoft announces the Linux version of Spandex Force, a tongue-in-cheek puzzle game with RPG elements.

Spandex Force is a superhero-themed puzzle game that lets the player create his or her own hero to clean up the crime-infested town of Vigilance Valley. The game features many different kinds of minigames including, but not limited to, match-3 battles in which common criminals and wacky supervillains must be defeated. The battles are similar to those of last year’s hit game Puzzle Quest, but feature superpowers rather than magical spells.

Previously available for Windows and Mac, KarjaSoft now brings superhero puzzle gaming to Linux as well, officially supporting Ubuntu Linux 7. More information, screenshots, and downloads can be found at the official Web page.

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Gnomie Cassiel Angelus writes:

Here are a few links I thought might interest you or your show’s Linux-savvy viewers!

Ext2 Installable File System: This Web site contains a download that will allow NT4.0 / 2k / XP / 2003 / Vista users to be able to write and read Ext2 formatted partitions. It could be very handy for people who dual boot Linux and Windows but want to be able to share files between either OS (if thier partitions use Ext2 or its newer brother Ext3, which is also supported by this driver). I’ve tested it myself and I can confirm it installs quite fast and is very easy to use — in fact, I’m using Ext2 filesystem for my XP Pagefile partition!

andLinux: This is something I come across today and it looks very interesting. From what I’ve been able to tell, it is a project that will eventually allow all Linux applications to be able to run inside Windows. It seems you will need some knowledge of Linux at least — even if it’s just from messing about in Kubuntu. According to the site:

“andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. CoLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows. Although this technology is a bit like running Linux in a virtual machine, CoLinux differs itself by being more of a merger of Windows and the Linux kernel and not an emulated PC, making it more efficient. Xming is used as X server and PulseAudio as sound server.”

coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS): This is another interesting project I’ve come across a couple of times. It’s a free software project that aims to replace the proprietary BIOS found on nearly every PC motherboard.

This is someone’s YouTube video on how they installed coreboot on thier motherboard. Apprantly LANL, AMD, coresystems, Linux Networx, MSI, Gigabyte, and Tyan have all contributed to coreboot according to one comment. From what I can tell, this is going to be one for the Linux power users and probably ones who don’t use Windows (although it does support booting into Windows).

Anyway, hope you enjoy the links!

Gnomie Bryan Tidwell writes:

1. Use Ubuntu. Debian is too hard, especially for a beginner (take it from me)! If you’re not afraid to install codecs, you are golden.
2. Use forums — they are there for your benefit! Don’t be afraid to post multiple threads — if anything, this just puts more documentation out there for other people.
3. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. If you have a kernel prior to 2.6 and an old version of ALSA, your day will be terrible.
4. Keep an open mind. Don’t be afraid to install (or uninstall) various packages. there are many failsafe commands, and if you go bleeding edge, keep your files on a different partition
5. Keep trying. I just finished trying for about a month to get a sound card working. I tried the front port, and it turns out ALSA recognizes an out port in the back of my HP Pavilion — silly me!

“Just in time for the holidays, NVIDIA has released a new Linux display driver, which is a stable version of their previous 169.04 beta last month. In addition, the new NVIDIA 169.07 Linux driver has a few changes, while most of the release highlights were already found in the 169.04 release. We are preparing additional Linux tests with this new driver, but for right now we have the details on this proprietary display driver.

The NVIDIA 169.04 beta driver had introduced GeForce 8800GT support a month ago, while in this 169.07 driver the support is officially there as well as for the GeForce 8800GTS 512MB and GeForce 8800M. Another feature originally introduced in 169.04 was improved mode-setting support on Quadro and GeForce 8 graphics cards and addressing some stability concerns (including for SMP users). This driver also has some performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series.”

Read the rest of the article here

Linux.com is running this story explaining why the KOffice stance against OOXML isn’t political, it’s practical:

“In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft’s OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that “major KDE developers” had announced “their rejection of OOXML” and urged GNOME to do the same. More recently, a widely linked story on ITWire used the same article to declare that KDE has taken a “principled stand” against OOXML. However, if you go the source, the story is more nuanced than these claims suggest.

Read the rest of the article here

DesktopLinux.com is reporting that Dell will now be offering DVD Playback with their Ubuntu 7.10 PCs:

“Dell has told DesktopLinux.com that it will be announcing later today, Dec. 19, that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs.

Ms. Camden continued, “Possibly in the ‘more importantly’ category, we are now pre-installing DVD movie playback all Ubuntu 7.10 systems — a feature we feel will resonate with … Linux enthusiasts as well as the mainstream consumer market. In fact, one of the key requests from customers interested in Linux is the ability to watch their favorite DVD movies.”"

Read the rest of the article here

LifeHacker is carrying a story on how you can slim down and speed up your link installation:

“While Linux is pretty efficient with a computer’s resources out of the box, there are still ways you can make it run leaner and meaner on your desktop. Using a little bit of know-how, a willingness to run a few terminal commands and a mind for efficiency, you can get every last bit of power from your Linux box, or get more life from an older system. Read on for a roundup of ways to slim down and speed up Linux that any level of user can implement.

More importantly, if you’re unsure of anything, don’t do it.”

Read the rest of the article here

Look, SVN is a step up from CVS, but it’s still a pain in the ass to manage large projects through SVN. In steps GNOME Developer Kit, which is supposedly better than SVN:

“The difficulty and frustration of building GNOME from source is a major impediment for many new contributors. Installing the dependencies, getting the tools working, and compiling major components of the desktop environment is a burden that detracts from time that could be spent making patches. In order to resolve this problem, the developers from rPath have created the GNOME Developer Kit, a complete environment for testing and developing GNOME.”

Read the rest of the article here

Just a few days after exposing that Iran has built an AMD-based supercomputer, they’re now trying to cover up this little fact:

“The Iranian computing research center that says it built a supercomputer with Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Opteron processors has removed from its Web site photographs showing a possible link to the United Arab Emirates as a source of the chips. But something that can’t be removed so easily are longstanding U.S. concerns about the UAE being a conduit for sending technology to Iran and other banned countries.

U.S. antiterrorism trade restrictions bar the sale of technology developed here to Iran. But as Computerworld reported last week, the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC) claims on its Web site that it has assembled a clustered system with 216 Opteron processing cores for use in weather forecasting and meteorological research. On another part of its site, the Tehran-based IHPCRC had posted a photo gallery that included snapshots of what appeared to be staff members working on the servers and racks of the supercomputer.”

Read the rest of the article here

Andrea Cimitan implimented transparent widgets in the GTK theme engine. Finally. OK, well, maybe not finally, but it’s about time GTK caught up with 2004:

“GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA.”

Read the rest of the article here

Open Source Society has put up an extensive interview with Ken Breback, author of two books and multiple articles covering Linux. In this interview Ken discusses what the future holds for Linux:

“Recently I had the unique pleasure of communicating with Kim Brebach. You may recognize him as the author of “13 Reasons Why Linux Won’t Make It to the Desktop”, and “13 Reasons Linux Should be on Your Desktop”, as well as a series of insightful articles on the state of Linux as a desktop operating system for DesktopLinux.com. He is a technology consultant with Technoledge, a technology marketing group based in Sydney, Australia. I contacted him to see if he would participate in a short email interview for OSS, and he very graciously agreed. Here are his thoughts on some of my questions.”

Read the rest of the article here

CarloTheMan at the Ubuntu Forums on how you can get Veoh Player working in Ubuntu. The trick is setting Wine up properly (and that’s always the trick, isn’t it?).

“As we know, Veoh Networks is a great place to trade productivity for entertainment, but usually, we as Linux users, feel a bit left out after five minutes at the most.

* Ubuntu Feisty Fawn & Wine [Please install this via Synaptic, apt-get, …]
* Mozilla Firefox for Windows, Version 2.0.6 (Yes, for Windows) [Download]
* Veoh Player for Windows, Version 3.2.1.1073 [Download]
* A Veoh.com account [Create]
* Approximately 50MB disk space (plus several GB for videos)”

Read the rest of the article here.

ArsTechnica is reporting that Verizon has been hit with a copyright lawsuit for violating portions of the GNU General Public License, for using an open source package in a wireless router:

“Open-source software is very attractive for companies looking to expand their services or quickly get new offerings to market, in part because it’s free. Unfortunately, some companies tend to overlook the software license commonly attached to open-source software, the GPL. Verizon is the latest company to do so, and its use of an OSS package in a wireless router has led to a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Software Freedom Law Center.”

You can read the rest of the article here

Howto Forge has a great article up on how you can make your own custom Ubuntu LiveCD with Remastersys:

“This guide shows how you can create a Live-CD from your Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon or Linux Mint 4.0 system with a tool called remastersys. Remastersys is available in the Linux Mint romeo repository. You can customize your Ubuntu/Linux Mint system and then let remastersys create an iso image of it which you can then burn onto a CD/DVD.”

Check out the tutorial here

TechWorld is reporting that red Hat has launched a real-time version of Linux, aimed at mission-critical applications that require a near real-time, predictable responses called Red Hat enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid).

“Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) includes features such as high-speed inter-application messaging based on the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), whose performance RH reckoned it had improved 100-fold. At the UK launch, RH VP Scott Crenshaw could not confirm how this was achieved, representatives said that details will be available on the company’s blog.”

read the rest of the article here