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The popular open-source browser Firefox hit another milestone on Friday when it passed the 400 million download mark. The browser, distributed by Mozilla, appears to be enjoying exponential growth in terms of downloads. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads. Advertisement In a message posted on its Web site, Spread Firefox, Firefox's community marketeers, thanked users for helping to achieve the latest download figures. "With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world's most powerful companies can...

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10. We spoke with Phil Hester, senior vice president and CTO at AMD, and Chris Schlaeger, director of AMD's Operating System Research Center, along with Jon Carvill, AMD's manager of public relations. They confirmed the rumors reported earlier on Slashdot, that everything necessary for community-driven and -maintained 2-D and 3-D drivers for ATI Radeon X1000 and HD 2000 graphics will be made...

Redmond works with Novell to port 'Flash killer' Robert Jaques, vnunet.com 05 Sep 2007 ADVERTISEMENT Microsoft is to make its recently unveiled Silverlight 'Flash killer' plug-in available on Linux. The commercial release of Silverlight 1.0 is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the web. Microsoft confirmed that it will work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, based on the project started on mono-project.com. The Redmond giant unveiled Silverlight at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference in April and released the beta version to the public in May. Silverlight claims to significantly...

Sun seeks to apply the lessons of Linux and turn open source Solaris into an operating system to rival Linux and to be as commonly used as Java. Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavour to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS. Sun's Java programming language, which debuted in 1995, is present in most of today's PCs, mobile devices and...

GPLv3 will help FreeBSD take some users away from Linux, according to the founder and vice president of The FreeBSD Foundation. Writing in the FreeBSD Foundation's August newsletter, Justin T. Gibbs said "GPLv3 is a critical concern for many current commercial users of open source software. "Against the backdrop of GPLv3, the stark difference between the BSD licensing philosophy and that of the Free Software Foundation are only too clear," he said. One difference Gibbs saw was future-proofing the licences. "A GPL proponent might argue that a licence for free software must be upgraded periodically since we cannot anticipate what...

The Word “LINUX” is inappropriate in XBOX Live September 3rd, 2007 · 67 Comments I love Linux and the XBOX 360, so yesterday I tried to include the word “LINUX” in the motto section on XBOX Live. I was stunned when I got a message saying “Your motto contains inappropriate language. Please try again”. Come on Microsoft is that really inappropriate? Maybe only to you guys.Here is the screenshot: Try it out and check it for yourselves !

Student, prof build budget supercomputer August 30 , 2007 When Tim Brom 07’ set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England. Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet. “It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom. This may prove...

HP launches RedHat Linux desktop PC 30th August 2007Dan WarneLinux, Open source, PC Hardware HP Compaq DX2250: cheap, cheerful and Linux-basedHewlett-Packard, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop will come pre-loaded on the HP dx2250 desktop computer -- an AMD-based model.The PC itself comes with a range of AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core, Athlon 64 and Sempron processors.“With the cost of proprietary systems continuing to rise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop minimises acquisition and ongoing deployment costs, leaving more money and resources for...

How hypervisors can defeat GPLv3's "anti-tivoization" Aug. 27, 2007 This guest whitepaper explains how hypervisors can isolate proprietary software from GPLv2 and GPLv3-licensed software. Authored by a Trango product manager, it uses Trango's hypervisor as an example, showing how the technology could help safeguard copyright-encumbered multimedia content in a video playback device with a user-modifiable Linux OS component. Spread the word:digg this story The paper was written by Bruno Zoppis, a former Sun Microsystems software engineer who now manages products for Trango. Alongside Trango's "Virtual Processors" technology, Zoppis appears to consider products from VMWare, IBM, and Sun Microsystems as falling...

It was a long time in coming. But Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness.On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the “Get the Facts” site, replacing it with a new Windows Server “Compare” site.The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face,” a company spokeswoman said. “It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people’s experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will...

Rave: Two months with Ubuntu Linux and loving it by RickGeek posted on August 22, 2007 2:45 pm In late June of this year, I made a type of executive decision. I have been a software developer by trade throughout my entire professional career. I began programming commercially in 1987 and have followed the progression from MS-DOS 3.31 through 6.22, then Windows 3.x, 95 and up. I’ve moved from the library of custom-developed tools in C and assembly during my MS-DOS days to the GUI + libraries present in Windows OSes. Still, even today, I continue to code for Windows...

Haiku Turns 6! Submitted by Michael Lotz on Sat, 2007-08-18 17:00. Tags: birthday We are excited to announce that having reached the 18th of August, 2007, the Haiku project is now six years old! Read on for some more details... When the decision to start Haiku these six years ago was made (then still called OpenBeOS), the motivation to reach the goal of creating a functioning BeOS clone was very high. Over time this motivation has seen many ups and downs, and there have been times where development was really stagnant, but there were always the other times in which...

Aug. 22, 2007 [Updated Aug. 23] -- Analysis -- According to DesktopLinux.com's just completed survey, the number of Desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year, and Ubuntu remains their Linux distribution of choice. Spread the word:digg this story Since DesktopLinux.com's recently completed survey is a self-selected group, we can't claim scientific proof that the number of desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year. Still, this year's survey produced 38,500 votes versus 14,535 votes over the same number of days in a similar survey one year ago. Part of the increase undoubtedly was...

It is nice to see the open source projects' progress in Microsoft world, especially it is been extremely fast growth after the Codeplex launched, and also GotDotNet suggests their hosted projects to move on to Codeplex. As you might remember, I have submitted a post about Codeplex a few weeks ago; Microsoft Open Source Projects. This time, it is proud to list most popular and active top 25 projects that has been hosted in Codeplex. AJAX Control Toolkit - a collection of samples and components which make it easier than ever to build and consume rich client-side controls and extenders...

Stellarium features a 3-dimensional sky in much the same way as if you were looking up at the sky in real time. So if you’d like to discover what’s beyond our planet, go on tours around the Solar System and the Milky Way, travel in time back to when other galaxies formed, or become a witness to the formation of other stars billions of years ago, now it’s your chance to experience it. All you have to do is to decide on a destination, set the coordinates and go. With this “virtual planetarium”, one may calculate the positions of the...

You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser. The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard...

What's your opinion? Comment on "Fedora vs. Vista" in the Forum Every few months, a pundit asks, "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" The implication, of course, is that it hasn't been -- at least, not until very recently. Yet those who actually use a GNU/Linux desktop know that the operating system has been ready for some years. Considering that much of the early design of desktops like KDE and GNOME were based on what was happening in Windows, that readiness is hardly surprising. In fact, development of the GNU/Linux desktop has reached the point today where it not...

The VMware house of cardsBloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux. Updated: Added link to archived copies of Torvalds’ quote regarding hooks to binary modules. Clarified that ESX has two kernels that run directly on the hardware (some readers [...]'; Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux.Updated: Added link to archived copies of Torvalds’...

Community Hosted Servers Compromised This last week, 5 of the 8 servers that are loco hosted but Canonical sponsored, had to be shut down due to reports that they were actively attacking other machines. These servers were found to [WWW] have a variety of problems including, but not limited to, missing security patches, FTP (not sftp, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, and no upgrades past breezy due to problems with the network cards and later kernels. Loco teams will be given a choice to: a. migrate to the Canonical data center, or b. stay on the...

The company has no interest in becoming the next SCO Group, according to a spokesman. "We're not interested in suing people over Unix," Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said. "We're not even in the Unix business any more." A US judge on Friday upheld Novell's claims to Unix copyrights that SCO has claimed to own. Those copyrights were the basis for SCO's highly controversial and ongoing Linux lawsuit against IBM. Lowry said the ruling means "the cloud has lifted over Linux." Users and distributors of the open-source OS finally can breathe a sigh of relief that they are not in violation...