September 28, 2008
Last week, Google unveiled Android 1.0.
The first device that will feature this OS is going to be HTC Dream.
The Android platform is Google’s reply to Apple’s iOS.
Or, at least, this is my read on the matter and the meaning I’m giving it in this article.
The main difference between Android and iOS is that Android will allow multiple companies to create competing Android devices.
On the one hand, this will create more options for the consumers; on the other hand, it will create a less coherent experience.
Read More 
May 14, 2008 - Sebastopol, CA, US
I’ve already talked about the NBLUG in a previous blog post.
Yesterday night I presented at NBLUG an Introduction to KDE4.
In the talk, I’ve shown KDE4 features as well as look and feel.
New features that will land in 4.1 also were discussed.
After the talk, the people in the audience did ask some questions.
I appreciated the interest of the present people in the new updates in the KDE and desktop space.
Read More 
September 12, 2007 - Sebastopol, CA, US
Yesterday evening I went to the NBLUG for the first time.
Actually, this is the first time I have gone to a Linux User Group event at all.
The evening started with a presentation by Kyle Rankin on how DNS works.
The presentation was very interesting because we use DNS so frequently in our lives, but it “just works” for most people, and they have no idea how and why it works.
I think tech people must understand how those base technologies work since, a lot of time, an issue can be pinned to something at an underlying level.
In my experience, all abstractions in information technology are leaky abstractions.
Therefore it’s critical to understand the whole stack to understand behaviors at a certain stack level.
Read More 
January 15, 2007
Back in October, Oracle announced Unbreakable Linux, a re-packaged version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat quickly replied with a stunt playing on the similar sound between Unbreakable Linux and Unfakable Linux to point out that Unbreakable Linux is just a copy of RHEL.
The reasons Oracle created their own distro are undoubtedly multiple, but I think the leading one is to provide their customers with a single vendor solution.
I think that the fact that Oracle decided to base their version on RHEL is the most sensible decision.
In fact, most of their customers are already using their products on RHEL.
RHEL is, therefore, already a very well-supported platform for Oracle products.
And, finally, RHEL is the leading Linux in the enterprise space.
Read More 
November 4, 2006
On the 2nd of November, Microsoft and Novell announced an agreement to share some patents, cross-marketing, and collaborative development.
The deal is very recent, and it is difficult to say what exactly it includes and what consequences (if any) it will have.
From the information currently available, it seems there are multiple parts to the deal:
- Both companies will work on the compatibility between their OSes and the other company’s virtualization solution (Windows on Xen and SLE on Viridian).
- There will be a collaboration between the companies to improve the compatibility between OpenOffice.orf and the Open Office XML Format.
- Novell and Microsoft will provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products.
- Microsoft will officially recommend SuSE Linux Enterprise to their customers that will enquire about Linux options.
I find this deal not favorable for the Open Source community for many reasons.
Read More 
April 23, 2006
About one year and a half ago, I tried Fedora Heidelberg (Fedora Core 3), but it did not last too much on my machine because I was eager to test Ubuntu Warty Warthog.
Fedora Bordeaux (Fedora Core 5) got released about one month ago, and I immediately installed it.
It has been a month now since I’ve installed it, and I like it.
I feel that I’ll be using Fedora for a long time because I found an environment that feels right to me for the first time.
Read More 
October 25, 2005
Last week, OpenOffice.org 2 was released.
This is a major release of the office suite, but I think it’s also a major accomplishment for the project.
There are two main aspects I think make this release very important.
The first aspect is the default use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to save files.
I believe that the future of office documents should be the ODF format, even if most probably it will not.
Currently, the de-facto standards are the Microsoft Office ones (doc, xls, ppt), but those are not official standards, and therefore interoperability is very hard if not impossible.
I hope that we will have official international standards for these kinds of files over time and that everyone will use them.
To achieve this goal, I see as an excellent first step this default setting in OpenOffice.org 2.
Read More 
June 15, 2005
A couple of weeks ago, Debian Sarge become stable.
Even though I was already running on it for many months, since Debian Testing was Sarge, I decided to re-install it from scratch to re-start with a clean environment.
When you install it, the first thing you can notice is that the installer is entirely new.
Compared to the previous stable (Woody), many changes have been integrated with thousands of new packages, including OpenOffice.
Read More 
December 3, 2004
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty Warthog”.
Even if the version can make it feel like something already battle-tested, this is the first release of Ubuntu.
The 4.10 version indicates the year and month of release using the YY.MM schema.
Mark Shuttleworth has sent the Ubuntu release announcement.
He became a millionaire by selling Thawte Consulting, a Certificate Authority that he founded in 1995, to Symantec in 1999.
His most famous achievement has probably been being the second paying space tourist and the first South African in space.
In the Linux space, Shuttleworth contributed to the Debian project in the 90s and created the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2001 to support social projects that are free and open source.
Recently has founded Canonical Ltd, which is the company behind Ubuntu.
Read More 
January 14, 2004
Yesterday, Novell completed the acquisition of SuSE Linux AG, the company behind SUSE, for $210 million.
Novell is a public company from Provo, Utah, and the creator of NetWare.
Interestingly, IBM got involved in the deal paying $50 million of it.
I’m personally not sure if this is good or bad for the Linux space, but there are a few considerations that I’d like to make.
On the positive side, the fact that IBM contributed to the deal means that there will probably be more collaboration between IBM and SUSE, and therefore SUSE might be able to gain traction.
Also, Novell has recently bought Ximian, another Linux company focusing on GNOME.
Those facts set Novell on a path to become a Microsoft competitor.
Read More 
(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog