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Daily links for 03/09/2010

  • “Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).”

    tags: novell, w3c

  • “Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

  • “HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”

    tags: HTML

  • “ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”

    tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Really setting the default browser on a Mac

I was having a problem last week with my Mac: even though I set my default system browser to Google Chrome, one application just refused to believe it wasn’t Firefox any longer. (And no, that application wasn’t Firefox itself!)

Though I tried several times within Chrome and Firefox to toggle the system browser to end up being Chrome, that one application was being recalcitrant.

Today I got an email from my friend and IBM colleague Kelvin Lawrence with the workaround to the problem: go into Safari and under Safari > Preference > General toggle the browser to something non-Chrome and then back to Chrome. This seems to do something a little extra and it did the trick. That one application now opens web pages in Chrome.

Thanks for the fix, Kelvin!

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Daily links for 03/06/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 03/02/2010

trout

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/26/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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The 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems, May 30 to June 2

OSS 2010, the 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems, will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, USA, from May 30 to June 2.

From the conference website:

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organisations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. OSS has challenged the conventional wisdom of the software engineering and software business communities, has been instrumental for educators and researchers, and has become an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives. OSS is a complex phenomenon and requires a interdisciplinary understanding of its engineering, technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics. The goal of OSS 2010, the first IFIP WG 2.13 conference to be held in North America, is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public administration can come together to share research findings and practical experiences.

Evidently I am on the Program Committee.

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Daily links for 02/25/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/24/2010

  • “Two areas where Thadani said he believes Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization currently has an advantage over VMware are price and application support. Exact costs depend on the number of hosts and machines being virtualized, as well as the operating systems concerned. However, using RHEV instead of VMware could result in between 40 percent and 80 percent costs savings, he claimed. Red Hat guarantees that, because RHEV is built from the same kernel as RHEL, any Linux application that runs on RHEL will also run in a RHEL virtual machine virtualized on RHEV. If it doesn’t run properly in this way, Thadani said Red Hat will provide support to fix it so that it does.”

    tags: vmware, red-hat, virtualization, kvm, rhev-h

  • Novell continues to push beyond the SUSE Linux market. Among the major moves: The company is beta testing Novell Cloud Security Service, which is scheduled for general availability in May or June, according to Novell sources attending the Parallels Summit in Miami. Here are the implications for hosting providers and cloud integrators.”

    tags: cloud, novell, security

  • “Here’s an interesting tutorial that we would like to share with you on Daily World Buzz. It was written by Jun Auza of TechSource from Bohol. It’s a simple step by step tutorial with screenshots of how to install Safari 4 and use it in your Ubuntu Linux OS.”

    tags: safari, ubuntu, linux, browser

  • “Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux desktop virtualization, today announced that 30,000 schools worldwide have chosen Userful virtual desktops to reduce computing costs and improve computer-to-student ratios. Microsoft recently announced its own multi-seat solution, Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, seven years after Userful pioneered the technology on Linux back in 2002.  Another classic case of Linux vs. Windows, only this time Linux has the upper hand with Userful having already sold 750,000 seats.”

    tags: linux, desktop, virtualization

  • “During our conversation, I began thinking about what it would be like if someone designed a content management system in three dimensions. Think about how useful it would be to get all your company’s content laid out in front of you in a graphical view in which you could literally walk inside the system. How cool would that be?”

    tags: content-management, 3d, virtual-world

  • “While more cost-effective than physical marketing events, virtual events offer another huge advantage: detailed information. As opposed to physical events, where often the only lead data consists of business card content, virtual events enable marketers to track and evaluate every move of each attendee within the environment, resulting in highly qualified sales leads.”

    tags: marketing

  • “We keep using the web because we already know the answer to the why question — we use the web for destination sites, for locating information, online shopping, etc. etc. With a service that looks and acts like the world, the why question is more profound, and overwhelming. It’s why I believe an achievement system, or even an leveling ladder with experience points for exploring the world, creating content, and so on, is necessary. Not to turn Second Life into an MMO, but to give new users an activity structure that will inspire them to get the full breadth of Second Life and its possibilities.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

  • “And search won’t solve the what-to-do problem. The only solution is to connect newcomers with like-minded people. The best communication mechanism for Second Life is the oldest one on the planet: Word of mouth. You find out about things because your friends tell you about them.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

  • “When it comes to working on creative projects, even professional designers need a little help now and then. There’s no shortage of Web sites they can turn to for visual inspiration and advice. And, for the most part, civilians like me can take advantage of those very same resources. Whether I need specific technical instruction or just some good ideas, these five sites are where I turn to first.”

    tags: design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Thinking about open source: There are three types of software ...

Most of these kinds of discussions that say that there are two kinds of people or ten best ways of doing something are extremely subjective and involve gross simplifications. I plead guilty here but want to make a few points about the nature of software today and how people think about it.

There’s a tremendous amount of buzz in the industry today about open source software, but there is, of course, a huge amount of use of “that other kind of software” that variously goes by the name of “proprietary,” “closed-source,” “traditional,” or “commercial” software. None of those terms work well in practice.

Let me break down software into three categories:

Continue reading Thinking about open source: There are three types of software …

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Daily links for 02/23/2010

A little overagressive on the links today, but there’s a lot going on …

  • “The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) — developers, stewards, and incubators of 138 Open Source projects — today announced the 15th anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server.

    The ASF’s first project became the world’s most popular Web server software within the first six months of its inception. The Apache HTTP Server today powers nearly 112 million Websites world-wide.”

    tags: software, apache, open-source

  • “Last week, eWEEK Labs published their picks for the top 25 technologies that changed the decade. They judged their selections on the impact the technologies had on the past 10 years, while also considering the affect that these technologies will have on the future of IT. Among the winners – which included innovative technologies such as the iPhone, the Blackberry, Blade Servers and Bluetooth – was our leading operating platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

    tags: linux, red-hat

  • “Write a book about building community the open source way… and write it with a community, the open source way. Meaning, open the text up, allow interested users to contribute, and see what happens.

    Brilliant.

    The book is entitled The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors and you can access the current text here and the wiki for contributors here.

    I caught up with Karsten Wade, who is leading the project, to learn more.”

    tags: open-source, books

  • “This guide is for helping people to understand how to and how not to engage with community over projects such as software, content, marketing, art, infrastructure, standards, and so forth. It contains knowledge distilled from years of Red Hat experience.”

    tags: red-hat, open-source, community

  • “I really liked Metaplace and used it as part of my virtual worlds course here at Duke last semester. I’m so relieved that the shutdown happened between semesters! I’m also relieved that I didn’t invest much time in building Metaplace-based educational environments for my students (which I was seriously considering). The rapid fall of Metaplace really underscores that any effort to invest in a platform where content (or the organization of content) is stored on a third party’s servers is a very risky proposition.”

    tags: virtual-world

  • “Find information about how Chromium works, how to participate in the development of Chromium, or just how to build it yourself.”

    tags: Chromium, open-source

  • “The 2010 OpenOffice.org Conference will take place from August 31st to September 3rd in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.”

    tags: ooocon, openoffice.org

  • “Misys Open Source Solutions (“MOSS”), a division of Misys Plc (FTSE:MSY.L), today announced a partnership with Markit, a leading, global financial information services company, to promote the Misys Environmental Registry System (“MERS”), the new carbon management emissions reporting solution that will be released March 31, 2010.”

    tags: open-source, environment

  • “Viewer 2.0 is far more organized than before, and that makes it easier to use. It brings the most important functions to the surface, while less frequently used tools are hidden in menus, available when needed but not jumping out to confuse the beginner.

    The top of the viewer now looks like a Web browser, with an address bar that contains the 3D coordinates of your avatar’s location, in a form resembling a URL. As with a Web browser, you can embed bookmarks (“landmarks” in Second Life jargon), in the horizontal space below the address bar.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world, viewer, browser

  • “Overall, Linden Lab deserve kudos for delivering a significantly revamped viewer that should make using Second Life markedly easier for new residents in particular. Linden Lab have consistently stated their commitment to improving the user experience and this is one of the more concrete examples of how that is now being delivered. The proof of Viewer 2’s success will only come with widespread use, but initial impressions are positive. Of course, Linden Lab need to pull off a usability coup to ensure ongoing growth. Combined with potential improvements in grid performance, the horizon seems a little brighter than it has been in a while.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

  • “More to the point, it’s a step toward electronic textbooks, and away from the bizarre economy of print textbooks. DynamicBooks textbooks, which will accessible on an computer, as well as the iPhone (and presumably the iPad) will be much—about 50%—cheaper than print textbooks, which are sold at high prices with the expectation that they’ll later be resold.”

    tags: textbooks, macmillan, ebook

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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“The Future of FOSS: A Report from a Strategic Planning Session”

This just popped up and since it is tomorrow and will happen before my Daily Links are published, I though I would note it now. It’s for a webinar on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, at 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EST.

From the registration page:

On February 10, 2010 the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Initiative held a Strategic Planning Session for lawyers active in support of adoption of free and open source software. The purpose of the meeting was to identify key legal issues that will impact the development and adoption of free and open source software in 2010 and beyond.

Karen Copenhaver, partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and Counsel for the Linux Foundation and Mark Radcliffe, partner at DLA Piper and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI), hosted the strategy session. Karen and Mark will report on the key topics that were discussed, who participated, and conclusions. In addition, we will focus on the status of developing a standard approach to delivery of information on the different components in software packages, the so called “Bill of Materials”. The effort is being led by FOSSBazaar with Black Duck’s support

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Daily links for 02/22/2010

  • “The result?  F/OSS has achieved a significant victory that will provide comfort to developers that their expectations will be satisfied when they contribute code to a software project.  This is particularly significant for projects that adopt so-called “restrictive” licenses, such as the GNU General Public License, which are intended to prevent exploitation of the work of community developers for unauthorized commercial purposes.”

    tags: open-source, legal, copyright

  • “Microsoft has made several changes to a Release Candidate version of Office 2010 made available to testers recently. One change in particular prompts users whether they want to use Office Open XML (OOXML) or OpenDocument (ODF) document formats. The prompt only appears in European SKUs of Microsoft Office 2010.”

    tags: microsoft, odf, ooxml

  • “Gedit can be a really awesome editor if you give it a few plugins and an open mind. Here are a few of my favorites.”

    tags: open-source, editors

  • “A game developer invites you to take an all-expense-paid trip to visit their studio and review their upcoming MMO. They promise a free copy of the game and lifetime account, as well. Would you do the review? Explain why or why not.”

    tags: mmorpg

  • “First, the users remained very evangelistic. Second, corporations like IBM found other uses for its islands and kept investing (they now use these islands for training and replacements of expensive conferences). Third, the technology has been steadily improving. Fourth, the company has found new ways to bring new users in and make the experience easier to get into.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

  • “When you think of Second Life (SL), a web-based, user-created virtual world where people remake their own identities, clothing, appearance and lifestyle, you might think of anti-social geeks sitting at home in their mothers’ basements, communicating with other “avatars” and creating a charmed virtual life that in no way resembles their own. And for some users you probably wouldn’t be too far off.

    But what started out as a virtual universe where users can create alter egos, interact and actually participate in a virtual economy is being used by universities in Arkansas and elsewhere as a cost-effective, easy-to-use learning tool.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GoOpen conference – Oslo, April 19 and 20

The GoOpen conference will take place in Oslo, Norway, on April 19 and 20 this year.

From the website:

GoOpen is a two-day event located in Oslo, organized by the Norwegian Open Source Competence Center, founded by the government. We expect 500 participants from Norway and Nordic countries. The target group for this event is decision makers within public sector in Norway, IT professionals, ICT business, private sector, politicians, students and the press. GoOpen will take place in the city center of Oslo. The conference consists of keynotes, tracks and break-out sessions. The conference is arranged in cooperation with among others; ministries, The Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, ICT Norway in Norway.

More conferences are listed in my Upcoming Linux, Open Source, and Virtual Worlds Events page.

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Daily links for 02/21/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/20/2010

  • “A massively multiplayer online game requiring players to employ mathematical concepts could revolutionize the teaching of mathematics at the middle school level, according to Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin. That’s the age when math and science proficiency plummets among U.S. students. Devlin says the game project would be so complex and expensive that the federal government would likely have to spearhead it. But, he said, a pilot project showed such a game would be doable.”

    tags: stanford, mathematics, education, virtual-world

  • “With a lack of open source 3D graphics support on ARM devices impeding Ubuntu’s use in ARM-based netbooks, Canonical turned to the Enlightment project’s libraries to add visual panache to 2D interfaces. The Canonical project to use the open source Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) was announced in a blog post by in Canonical Ubuntu Mobile Developer Jamie Bennett, and then echoed by a post at the Enlightenment project. Bennett’s blog post posted two examples of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) interfaces based on the EFL technology that should appear in the Lucid Lynx Ubuntu release in April.”

    tags: linux, ubuntu, arm, remix

  • “In 2008, Nicholas Carr took to the pages of The Atlantic to make the provocative case that Google might be “making us stupid.” His basic worry was that a reliance on the Web was rewiring his brain, that he was skimming along the surface of links, facts, and ideas, but now had trouble engaging in more focused thought and in reading longer pieces of text.”

    tags: google

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Life with Linux: Adapting to the smaller screen on a netbook

This last week my son and I were on vacation and I took along a Simmtronics 10.2 netbook running Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Remix along with IBM Lotus applications like Notes and Sametime. I brought it so I could have reasonable access to the Internet and check in to see if there were any urgent emails I needed to respond to for work.

The screen, as you might guess from the name of the netbook, is slightly larger than ten inches measured diagonally. This is smaller than most laptops but larger than the first generation of netbooks. The screen resolution was 1024 x 600 and the display itself was quite vibrant.

After a few days on Remix I decided I wanted to go back to the regular Ubuntu Gnome desktop and so when I got home I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala.” There’s nothing wrong with Remix, it’s just that I’m used to the regular desktop and I decided the screen was large enough to support it.

Here are some observations about getting the most of that smaller screen while running the Ubuntu desktop.

Continue reading Life with Linux: Adapting to the smaller screen on a netbook

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Daily links for 02/19/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/18/2010

  • “In general, we know that Sun’s software product catalog will be cut back and that many Sun staffers will soon be laid off. Historically, when Oracle acquires a company, deep cuts are the rule. For example, Oracle fired about 5,000 workers after acquiring PeopleSoft. This time around, Oracle is saying that there will be only about a thousand layoffs. In particular, although no one is going on record, it’s feared that Sun’s open-source groups will take the brunt of these cuts.”

    tags: open-source, sun, oracle

  • “At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Research In Motion announced an overhaul of its Blackberry phone web browser. Like the iPhone and Android systems, the new browser is WebKit based and is expected to be available on Blackberry devices later this year. in interviews Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of RIM said “You’ll see how quickly it downloads, how quickly it renders and how smooth it scrolls and zooms in”.”

    tags: open-source, rim, blackberry

  • “In recent months, there seems to be a mad rush of companies trying to one-up each other with how open-source they are. Twitter is the latest, as they have launched a directory of all the open source projects they’re currently working on and/or contributing to.The list is fairly impressive. It includes open source projects in Ruby, Scala, Java, C/C++, and other various tools.”

    tags: twitter, open-source

  • “Over time, we’re certainly likely to see some consolidation in the smartphone OS market, because there probably isn’t room for 8 or 10 different systems. But for now, the competition is forcing the vendors into a game of leap-frog, adding new features and trying to figure out what will really make users happy. Not all the phone makers or software makers can win in that scenario, but as consumers, we all will benefit from the frenzied activity.”

    tags: mobile

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/17/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/12/2010

  • “Microsoft is the largest, most profitable software company in the world.

    And its profits are still being generated by the same engines that have driven Microsoft for years: Office, Windows, and its server division. (Meanwhile, its entertainment and devices division is only recently profitable again, and its online division is a money pit.)”

    tags: microsoft

  • “At this point, just catching up would be a leap forward.

    From 2008 to 2009, Microsoft’s slice of the smartphone operating-system market shrank from 13.1 percent to 10.7 percent. Meanwhile, Apple grew from 9.1 to 14.4 percent, and Google’s Android system started with half a percent and grew to 3.5 percent, according to IDC. Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, rose to 19.6 percent from 15.6 percent.”

    tags: microsoft, smartphone

  • “He said that after examining the project’s mailing list to gauge the activity taking place in KVM development, he found that there were some 884 unique participants in the mailing list, roughly equivalent to the number of active KVM developers. Those participants were spread across 382 unique address domains from somewhere in the range of 250 to 300 separate. According to Day, organizations that participate in KVM range from large corporations, to government and educational organization, as well as individual contributors.”

    tags: kvm, virtualization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/11/2010

Alistair Rennie

  • “IBM is spreading access to its Lotus social and collaboration software all over the various computing platforms. But what’s the big strategy here?

    I spoke with Alistair Rennie (right), IBM’s Lotus general manager, about trends like the consumerization of IT and the grand plan for his unit. Here’s the recap.”

    tags: lotus

  • “Big Blue is expected to announce Thursday at Macworld San Francisco that it will soon be delivering its enterprise social platform, Lotus Connections, and Lotus Quickr team collaboration package for use with the iPhone and Mac.”

    tags: ibm, mac, iphone, lotus

  • “There is an article by Mark Webbink, Esq., “Packaging Open Source”, in the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, Vol 1, No 2 (2009) that I think you’ll find interesting. It compares various FOSS licenses and how they handle compilations and collective works. The context of the article is specifically packaging Linux with an application into a software appliance, but the descriptions of the licenses and how they work are broadly useful in other contexts as well. I am republishing the article here because many of you face choices about what license you will use on your works, so you also need to understand, and others of you are lawyers who would like to understand FOSS licenses better.”

    tags: open source

  • Red Hat released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, providing memory allocation enhancements to the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. RHEL 5.5 also introduces new storage and WiFi drivers, and supports new AMD, IBM, and Intel processors, says the company.”

    tags: red-hat, linux, kvm

  • “So one of the things that’s clear is that even though the room represents hundreds of open source conference and journal papers, few of them have read any of the social science research on open source.”

    tags: open-source, innovation

  • “For instance, beyond open source’s licensing components is the idea of its community, which in many cases can be the ultimate arbiter of the success or failure of an open source effort: Simply making an application available under an open source license may not necessarily be enough for a project to succeed, nor is adopting an open source license some kind of magic pixie dust that you sprinkle onto a project to make it successful.”

    tags: open-source, community, license

  • “Interestingly, the OpenECP project chose to license it under the Affero GPLv3, and we’re watching licensing moves to see if cloud computing prompts more use of AGPL.”

    tags: cloud, GPL, open-source

  • “The Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer is Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon’s pet project. The idea behind the project is to enable developers to write quick, scratch-an-itch application and making development on Ubuntu fun and more accessible.”

    tags: ubuntu, linux

  • “Yale owns two islands. But you can’t get to either of them by air, land or sea.

    They exist only in Second Life, an online universe where people can buy land and trade services.

    The University purchased its first virtual island, Elihu, in 2007. While the second island lies fallow and Elihu Island currently has only two projects, people involved with the projects said Yale’s presence on Second Life is a cost-effective teaching tool — each island costs $700 to buy and $147.50 a month to maintain — that they hope the University expands.”

    tags: second-life, virtual-world, yale

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Virtual Life with Linux: Standalone OpenSim on Ubuntu 9.10

As a complement to my Life with Linux blog series, I’m introducing another series which explores what I can do in virtual worlds and immersive Internet environments on Linux.

Last night I decided to play with OpenSim, aka OpenSimulator, which is, according to its website:

OpenSimulator is a 3D Application Server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. OpenSimulator allows you to develop your environment using the technologies you feel work best – we’ve designed the software to be easily extendable through loadable modules to build completely custom configurations. OpenSimulator is released under a BSD License, making it both open source, and commercially friendly to embed in products.

I’ve fiddled with it before, but never really got something up and running very long. My new plan is experiment with opensim locally and then install it on my SliceHost account so I can access the virtual world regions from anywhere. My goals for last night were simple:

  1. Download and install OpenSim on my desktop running Ubuntu Linux 9.10 “Karmic Koala.”
  2. Create four regions arranged in a square and start them off with perfectly flat terrain. I planned to call the four regions Zeus, Hera, Athena, and Poseidon.

Continue reading Virtual Life with Linux: Standalone OpenSim on Ubuntu 9.10

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Daily links for 02/10/2010

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Daily links for 02/09/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily links for 02/07/2010

  • “Have you ever watched a BBQ cook-off on television, or gone to one of these live events and thought that judges at these events had the best job in the world? Well they do. However, to get one of these coveted non-paying positions you have to become a Certified BBQ Judge, and this article will show you just how easy it is to meet this requirement.”

    tags: bbq

  • “BuddyPress is a bundled collection of plugins and themes for creating a social network service around an installation of the popular open source blog engine WordPress MU.”

    tags: buddypress, wordpress, social-networking

  • “The OpenLuna Foundation seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost, and to do all of this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.”

    tags: space, luna

  • “Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.”

    tags: apple, google, chrome, safari, browser, webkit

  • “The Linux and open source community does not want to find itself back where it was in the mid-to-late 90’s, where it was relegated to servers and the desktops of fan-boys and uber-geeks. This is not where Linux wants to be. The last five years has blessed Linux with so much growth. But if Linux can not gain a foothold in the tablet PC market, that growth could wither away.”

    tags: linux, tablet

  • “It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.”

    tags: linux, gnome

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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