Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 18, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Ubuntu makes playing Proprietary Formats easier and legal

One of the perpetual pains of desktop Linux is dealing with DVDs and proprietary video and audio formats. Ubuntu, like the other Linuxes, have the same problem. Now, however, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has made it easier for Ubuntu users to legally play DVDs and files encased in proprietary formats.

In a Canonical blog, Gerry Carr , Canonical’s marketing manager, explained how Canonical is making this possible. Carr wrote, “For the first time we are making codecs for media playback and a DVD player, from our partners at Fluendo and Cyberlink, available through the Ubuntu store.”

Fluendo, a Spanish open-source company, offers a commercial set of codices in the form of Gstreamer plug-ins. These allow any Gstreamer compatible media player, such as Banshee and Totem, to play media files in Windows Media, MP3, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), MPEG2 and MPEG4 formats. Once you buy the full codex pack, for $39.95, you can download and install it. You can also buy a version that only supports the Window Media formats and MP3 for $24.96.

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September 18, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Mozilla Revises Linux Firefox Agreement

“OK, OK, We get it.” No EULA (End User License Agreement) for Firefox on Linux,” isn’t what Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker said in her recent blog posting, but she might as well have.

Ubuntu Linux users made it really, really clear that they didn’t want to see anything that even looked like a Firefox EULA in their favorite desktop Linux. While some Ubuntu users screamed for Firefox to be kicked out of the distribution, cooler heads, like Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth urged calm and started working with Mozilla to find a solution that would work for everyone. Baker, in turn, rapidly backed off the idea calling the original EULA a ‘giant error.’

Now, Harvey Anderson, VP and General Counsel of Mozilla Corp. has released a new Firefox licensing proposal for community comment. Anderson wrote, “The commentary overwhelmingly indicated the proposed approach wasn’t good enough (that would be an understatement). We looked at it again, incorporated suggestions from the community at large and from some of the Linux distributors.” Besides Ubuntu, and its parent company Canonical, Red Hat, and its community branch, Fedora, also contributed to this draft.

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September 17, 2008
by sjvn01
11 Comments

Mozilla to remove Firefox EULA

Ubuntu users who couldn’t stand the idea of a EULA (End User License Agreement) for the popular Firefox Web browser are going to get their way. The Mozilla Foundation‘s chairperson, Mitchell Baker, has agreed to entirely remove the Firefox EULA.

In her blog, Baker wrote, “We’ve come to understand that anything EULA-like is disturbing, even if the content is FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) based. So we’re eliminating that. We still feel that something about the web services integrated into the browser is needed; these services can be turned off and not interrupt the flow of using the browser. We also want to tell people about the FLOSS license — as a notice, not as as EULA or use restriction. Again, this won’t block the flow or provide the unwelcoming feeling that one comment to my previous post described so eloquently.”

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September 17, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

I want a real Linux and Mac version of Chrome

CodeWeavers, best known for making its CrossOver programs that use WINE to run many popular Windows applications on Linux and Mac OS, has just released a proof-of-concept version of Chrome that runs on Linux and Mac systems.

The free CrossOver version of Chrome, CrossOver Chrome, is based on Google’s open-source Chromium code. It’s not, however, an actual port of Chrome to Linux or Mac OS X. Instead, using their expertise in bringing Windows applications to other operating systems, the CrossOver developers have ported the Windows version of Chrome to Linux and Mac.

It’s a neat trick, and it does work. While others at ComputerWorld got it to work on Mac OS X, albeit with fits and starts, I’ve been running it for over a day now on one of my openSUSE 11 PCs without a hitch. That said, as the CrossOver Chrome FAQ says to the question: “Should I run CrossOver Chromium as my main browser? Absolutely not! This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do.”

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September 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Shuttleworth urges calm in Firefox/Ubuntu flap

Grumpy Ubuntu users are snarling about Mozilla including a largely open-source irrelevant EULA (End-user license agreement) with the latest version of the Firefox Web browser. Indeed, one user went so far as to file an Ubuntu bug report about the EULA.

The bug report read, in part, “STARTING UP A CERTAIN 3.0.2 VERSION OF FIREFOX BROWSER MAKES AVAILABLE TO YOU A VERY CAPITAL END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT. THIS AGREEMENT IS OBNOXIOUS and largely irrelevant to Ubuntu users.” This immediately sparked up a flame war in Ubuntu circles.

Some users are demanding that Mozilla drop the EULA. Others are saying that Ubuntu should switch to another standard browser like GNOME’s Epiphany. Others think Ubuntu should follow Debian Linux’s lead and, while continuing to use Firefox’s code, use IceWeasel, which is the Firefox program without Mozilla’s trademarks or logos.

IceWeasel came from a similar fight. In its case, the Debian developers decided that Mozilla’s restrictions on the use of the Firefox logo were too obnoxious to live with, so they come up with IceWeasel their own, logo-less, Web browser. I think the whole IceWeasel affair was dumb. It’s a trademarked logo! Of course, you can’t modify it. Who would want to!?

Now, some Ubuntu users seem to be on the same path. Yes, the Mozilla EULA is essentially pointless. Who cares? It’s not like it’s the original Chrome EULA, which included a section that gave Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through” Chrome. Now, That was a bad EULA, and Google quickly dumped that obnoxious section.

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September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

The 21st century mobile application

A few years ago, we knew exactly what the future of mobile computing software development would be like. It would be powered by WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), a set of specifications designed to provide low-speed wireless devices with limited screen space, with a means to access information and to communicate and interact with Web services via WAP gateways that bridged the gap between telephony networks and the Internet.

We were so naïve.

Today, with 3G, 802.11g/n and Mobile WiMax (IEEE 802.16e) wireless networks, mobile devices have access to TCP/IP network speeds above 100Mb/sec. The devices of 2008 are as powerful as the PCs of only a few years ago.

Apple’s iPhone, for example, has a 620MHz ARM processor with 128MB RAM and up to 16GB of flash memory running Apple Mac OS X. As John Sullivan, manager of operations for the Free Software Foundation, said of Apple’s closed development system, “The iPhone is not a ‘phone’ any more than my laptop computer is a phone. The iPhone can make phone calls, but so can my laptop. I could call your phone using my voice-over-IP system, and you wouldn’t know the difference. I can even put a card in my laptop that enables communication over a cellular network.”

The same is true of other mobile devices. While they’re not quite the same things as PCs, many of them have all the power of a computer from a few years ago. Other devices—such as Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet and Intel Atom-powered netbooks like the Asus EEE 901, MSI Wind NB U100 and Acer Aspire One—completely blur the difference between PCs and mobile devices.

This is not a small matter. According to Juniper Research, “The global market for Mobile Web 2.0 will be worth US$22.4 billion in 2013, up from $5.5 billion currently.”

What’s a developer to do?
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