Fedora Core 6 is now available as a live CD. This is great news to the old fedora fans out there. Fedora is a project that is sponsored by RedHat and is contributed by many developers around the world. These people create high quality open source software which can be used by anyone.
It was a great distro back in those old days. But after Ubuntu came along, it lost its place. I haven’t tried FC for the past 2 years and this live CD would be a nice way to try it.
The live CD is available for i386 architecture only and you can download it from the official website or from torrents. It is about 683mb.
Performancing is a popular blog network which released Performancing for Firefox - an extension for Firefox for bloggers. It also has various other services for bloggers like Metrics for tracking the visitors of your blog. It also an advertising network called Performancing Partners. Even I use these services and you too can advertise on this blog by clicking on the ad in the sidebar.
There is another good news for the FOSS community as Performancing will be releasing the code for Metrics as Open Source. It is great to see that we get such quality software and hope many developers continue to enhance it.
Here is a quick review of what happened all the days that I weren’t here.
- Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 released on October 26. This release wasn’t so satisfying as there were numerous problems with upgrading and still there is no proper flash support for 64bit. I am planning to reinstall Edgy 386 instead of the 64bit version.
- Novell made an agreement with Microsoft to boost the interoperability of their competing software products on Nov 2.
- Later Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said that Linux uses Microsoft’s intellectual property. Microsoft will pay Novell $440 million in coupons for a year worth of maintenance. Novell will have to pay $40 million for using the IP of Microsoft. For this money all Novell users can say that they paid properly for the intellectual property.
- But Novell says that this agreement has nothing to do with any infringement.
Rails Day 2006 is an event for all Rails enthusiasts to write some nice application using Ruby on Rails. The only catch is that you must do all this in 24 hours. You can have upto 3 members in a team and there are lots of prizes to be won. Just visit the site for the rules. By the way, the contest is on 17th of June. Is there time for me to learn Ruby(from scratch) and also learn Rails and participate in this contest? Is Ruby so easy that one can learn it withing 10 days and also create a great app with it (and hope to get a prize?).
I was thinking of learning Ruby this holiday and I think its the time to start.
Update: I have updated the site’s theme just to show that I have started learning Ruby.
There has been a long complaint of Linux users that there is no flash player released for the platform.
Elephants Dream is a movie made using open source tools for production. It is done primarily using Blender which is a great open source tool for making 3D modelling and animation. You can download the movie in various qualities and it can be viewed in VLC Media Player or MPlayer. The project files are also released under the Creative Commons License.
Installing java platform on your favourite GNU/Linux distro can be very hard to do because it was licensed in such a way that it couldn’t be packaged along with your distro CDs. All that will become history as a group of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers, Sun lawyers have devised a new binary license form so that it could be bundled along with your CD. So, all you have to do is to do an apt-get install sun-java5-jre.
Other famous distributions like Gentoo, NexentaOS, Belenix, OpenSolaris will also have it soon.
Source: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=jdk_on_gnu_linux_something
Google has announced the Summer of Code this year too. Summer of Code is a program started by Google last year to make more students to develop Free/Open Source Softwares. The students will be aided by organisations which develop Open Source softwares. Each student will be assigned one mentor and will also get stipend. If a student is selected in the program, then Google pays $500 initially. Then during the middle of the program (if sufficient progress has been made), then it pays $2000, and at the end of the program, will pay $2000. The mentoring organisation will also get $500 for every student it helps. So, Google spends $5000 for every student. Last year of the 8744 applicants, 419 students were accepted into the program and more than 80% of them succeeded, which means they received the full stipend of $4500. This year, Google plans to take in more students.
This is a nice oppurtunity for students to showcase their coding skills and also contribute to the open source community - also get paid for it.
google, summer of code, open source, free software
Found this news in Reddit where Jay Barnson has created a simple Role Playing Game(RPG) within a week(40 hours). He didn’t have any big budget or great tools. He used only freely available tools with basic APIs to create the game. His toolset is:
Code:
Art:
Sound:
- Audacity plus a microphone or free sound samples.
This looks like a nice project to be done. I am downloading the game to try it out.
games, python, pygame
Red Hat India is having a scholarship program, conducted jointly with eKALAVYA program of Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay. The first prize for this would be Rs.2 Lakhs - approximately 4400 USD. The problem now is that I need some ideas to propose for this program.
