Author: Chinmoy Kanjilal

North Korea has had its own internet from a long time now. Their internet is free of any American influence and now, they have their own operating system to power that internet. The Red Star OS is a Linux based OS, developed by orders from Kim Jong-il.

The OS has been developed by North Korean IT specialists to meet the needs and requirements of the North Korean people and the government, respectively. News of its release and existence got known, thanks to a student from North Korea’s Kim Il-sung University. The student is a Russian individual and writes a blog from the Russian embassy in Pyongyang.

Although Kim Jong-il is willing to go forward with this Operating System, it is not exactly the people’s favorite. It still needs a lot of polishing according to the local populace. For this reason, they still prefer using Windows XP and Windows Vista over this snappy OS.

Red Star is available for $5 and comes in the Server and the Desktop edition. Though, the apps available for the OS are selling at twice the price and need to be bought separately.

The language of the OS is “Korean only” and it takes around 15 minutes to install. The minimum system requirement is 256 MB of RAM and a Pentium III processor coupled with a 3 GB hard-disk space. Ironically, the web browser is named “My Country” which is actually a Firefox fork.

You can give Red Star version 2.0 a test run, provided you take a test flight to North Korea and get hold a copy from the nearest information kiosk.

[ Via: rt.com ]

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Canonicals is working hard on it’s Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. The next release of the Ubuntu distro will bring new and exciting features and some new software. The latest in this list, is a software which makes scanning of documents simple and easy. The application is simply named “Simple Scan”.

Robert Ancell is the lead developer behind Simple Scan and the application has recently been accepted to be included in Ubuntu 10.04. Not only does it allow scanning of images, you can also attach them to your favorite email client in a few clicks.

Simple scan is the simplest and easiest alternative to other software ,which allow you to scan images besides doing an array of other things. The application has been written in C. The development page gives more information on download, release dates and bug fixes.

Besides scanning, Simple Scan has some intelligent features like saving files as image sequences and pdf files. You can also apply crop images before saving them. These features come in very handy when scanning books and multi-page documents.

Though utterly simple,Simple Scan is not the best scanning software. If you are interested in some advanced options, you would find Simple Scan extremely restrained. In that case, you can go for XSane as an excellent alternative.

[ Via: Starry Hope ]

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The World Bank has managed to pull off an excellent humanitarian relief effort, thanks to open source maps which could help them get an idea of the affected areas. Tom Buckley and Schuyler Erle are the team advising the World Bank on the use crowd-sourced mapping through the Open Source program openstreetmap, which is proving extremely helpful in relief and recovery effort in Haiti.

Erle has remarked on this, saying:

Since mid-January, we’ve seen a whole set of interlocking technical communities swung into gear to piece together geographic information to help relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti: OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, CrisisMappers, and so on.

Erle is an expert on map making and has authored famous books like Google Maps Hacks. The map was a community driven effort where people from different parts of the world came together to build a map for the affected area from aerial pictures and satellite views. Erle remarks on this, saying:

With basically no one calling the shots, while a thousand people painstakingly build a map database of Haiti drawn from aerial and satellite imagery that’s so detailed that the Ushahidi volunteers have to ask for a simpler version.

This effort has proven that Open Source is all about passion. This time, it was the passion of helping. As for other times, it is always the passion of free and open thinking.

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Oracle has plans of merging the two JVMs available for Java, namely the Sun HotSpot and the JRockit. The news of the merge surfaced through a webcast this week. It is said that the merge will take roughly eighteen months to two years. On this development, Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s principal engineer has said that the company would continue to develop both platforms in the short term.

Although the decision is believed to have been taken some time ago, the news of such a possibility was floating from last month when Oracle mentioned this at a conference. HotSpot was Sun’s own implementation of JVM while JRockit was acquired by Oracle along with BEA systems.

On this merge, Reinhold said:

It’s not an easy problem taking the best of each, figuring out what the long-term convergence plan is. We’re not going to just stop doing one of them. Customers have things in production on both, taking advantage of specific features in both. We’re not going to cause an earthquake and make systems fall over. At some point in time, I expect there will be one VM,

While the HotSpot has a better runtime compiler, the JRockit has a better garbage collection. The merger will create a powerful virtualization with the best features of both.

[ Via : linuxworld ]

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Ubuntu has been using the Humanity theme right from the first version. The theme blended in as an integral part of the default OS. This time though, Mark Shuttleworth has some better plans for the default Ubuntu theme. In an interview on February 19 2010, Shuttleworth suggested that the Humanity theme will possibly be replaced by a new “light theme”, from Ubuntu 10.04 onwards. The exact quote as appeared on the blogspot of MadsRH, was given as:

…we’ll have some new styling which is going to be the starting point of another five year view. We’ve been Human for the last five years and now we’re gonna be light oriented.

From this quote, it might be inferred, that Mark Shuttleworth is referring to the Elementary theme for Ubuntu. The Elementary Theme is popular for its set of breadcrumbs, which are much better than in any other theme available for Ubuntu.

Clearly, nothing has been explicitly mentioned in this speech. Further, at the AskMark session at Ubuntu OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth talked about changes in the boot process and the login process but nothing about any new GTK theme.

If this change gets through, it will be a remarkable change in the UI and will mark the end of an era.

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Firefox is the world’s most customizable browser. It has got awesome add-ons, it has an awesome cloud based backup solution for all your bookmarks and personal data and it just got even more awesome with the release of a Mobile version. With the mobile Firefox Fennec for Nokia N900, you can use all the popular features from the desktop browser right into your Nokia N900 mobile. This comes as a boon for those of you who are die-hard fans of Firefox.

This release of Firefox for mobile recently got officially accepted by Nokia to be put into the Ovi Store. The Ovi Store approval process took around two weeks, though it is finally through and available for download right from the Ovi Store.

The Ovi Store also features the closest competitor of Firefox for mobile, the Opera Mini browser. The Store introduced Firefox with the lines,

The world’s best Web browser has gone mobile. Get it now on your Nokia N900.

This approval allows uses to direct their web-browsers to the store and download the application for their N900. The addition is a remarkable milestone in the development and growth of Firefox for mobile which had created a huge buzz and has lived up to it as well. You can see the Ovi Store page featuring Firefox for mobile at this link.

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Have you heard of the famous Plants Vs. Zombies game? If not, it is an awesome game which takes you through varied levels of adventures to protect your home from Zombies who are trying to “eat your brains”. The primary defense mechanism for your home is implemented through plants who protect the house with their powers.

The zombies get more evolved with each stage and the plants get more powerful against the zombies. There are a good number of constrains like number of plants you can use and the time interval between which you can plant the same twice. This is again determined by a factor of items collected. These items are called suns in the game and you are supposed to maintain a number of suns to be able to plant each plant. In short, it is a resource management game like one of those strategy games. You have to maintain defences and protect your home. The levels are intriguing and the game-play is sheer fun. The game is suitable for all age groups and three of us authors at Techie-Buzz here love the game already.

The good news though, is that the game was available only for Windows all this long but now, you can play the game on Linux too. Simply head over to this official site to download the game. You can also play it online if you wish. Playing from the desktop has advantages like full screen support. The game is provided as a Flash game and requires no Internet connection to save scores and stages. Enjoy.

CodePlex foundation, a Microsoft backed Open-Source foundation dealing in hosting and supporting Open-Source projects, is quite notorious. Some accuse it of supplying code to be put as proprietary windows codes while others regard it as an attempt by Microsoft to pacify FOSS fans. Either way, Microsoft is working with Open-Source and it is a good sign.

Moving ahead on this, yesterday, the CodePlex foundation accepted its first non-Microsoft project, the MVC Contrib. This project aims at providing the developers of ASP.NET applications to run and test their UI. It simply runs the developed apps on top of the ASP.NET MVC framework. This makes testing of web-design UI elements a lot easier.

The project is headed and supported by Eric Hexter and Jeffrey Palermo, who are employees with a software development firm from named Headspring.

In a statement from CodePlex, Eric Hexter, the Director of Open Source software initiatives remarked,

By contributing the MVC Contrib project to the CodePlex Foundation, we are stepping up to help bridge the gap between corporations and the open source community.

CodePlex has become famous over a small time span with the .NET developers. The credit goes to the thousand .NET fans and the million FOSS fans who helped spread the word. The CodePlex sees this hosting as a major improvement to its expansion prospects beyond Microsoft projects.

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I was stumbling through the Ubuntu customization websites yesterday and found this awesome wallpaper which changes with the time of the day.
The wallpaper pack can be downloaded from this location. It is from Gnome-Look and is totally safe to use.

Using the wallpaper is as simple as it can get.

1. Unzip the file named AllDayLong.tar.gz to a convenient location on your hard drive.
2. Navigate to the folder created as “AllDayLong” or a custom folder, in case you created one.
3. Open a terminal window in that location. If the option is not available, navigate to the location from your terminal.
4. Execute the command

   sudo sh install

   This will generate an XML file in your folder( the present working directory in the terminal) and will generate the output as shown.
   

5. Now, go to your desktop, right click on an empty space and select Change Desktop Background.
6. In the window that opens, select add and from the file selection dialogue, select the XML file we just generated.
   

From now on, your wallpaper is animated with the color and the wallpaper changing with the time of the day.

If you liked this customization, you might want to check our previous tweaks and software compilations at this post.

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US based software firm Adobe, now is officially a part of the Wireless Linux group LiMo. LiMo focuses on the development of Linux for mobile devices, especially hand-held devices like cellphones.

Linux is the current dominant OS with regard to development and growth. Nokia released its high end N900 based on Linux, we have the Linux based Android platform fast being accepted by major players from HTC to Samsung. Not only this, the competition from Symbian OS has been dampened to a huge extent given the level of customization and hacks possible on a Linux based cellphone OS.

The head of Limo,Morgan Gillis has remarked correctly in saying,

No other operating system now matches the vendor coverage of Linux — it is being commercially deployed by virtually all leading mobile device vendors from the largest downwards.

Limo includes some of the worlds biggest players from the mobile section including Samsung, Vodafone and now Adobe. The main aim of LiMo is to give telecom operators a greater say over the software development for mobile platforms.

Adobe, being a company which deals in widely popular web-based technologies, forms an integral part of LiMo with its close to 1.6 million developers.

More and more operating systems based on Linux creates more and more support issues for telecom handset developers. In coming years, resolving this redundancy issues will be a prime target for LiMo.

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