Mono ’s 2.0 grand release has finally arrived. For this release you must use Firebird DotNet Provider 2.5 with Firebird 2.1 . Here are my notes on Ubuntu Intrepid but could be applied to any Mono 2.0 install (on Hardy or any other distro )

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve?

Let’s set the record straight: The OOXML saga has been corrupt from start to finish. Will anyone try to challenge the strong and extensive evidence? Good luck with all that. As a matter of fact, even the man on top of the process has already admitted that it had gone awry.

Back in March we looked at the AMD Radeon HD 3200 graphics with AMD's 780G Chipset and found it to be a reputable performer. Its performance was almost identical to that of the discrete Radeon HD 2400PRO graphics card and was capable of running some Linux games at a playable frame-rate. Now though AMD's top-end IGP is 790GX Chipset with Radeon HD 3300 graphics. We have been testing an AMD 790GX motherboard from Elitegroup Computer Systems for the past several weeks and today we are delivering our Linux benchmarks of this newest AMD integrated graphics processor.

For quite a while Ubuntu had been including example-content packages with its releases that contained the same content: some audio and video data to test the playback, including a video of Nelson Mandela. Ubuntu contributor Jono Bacon had been calling for renewed content and announced a competition that ended September 4. The competition is now over and Bacon presents the winners.

It didn't take long for NetSuite to cozy up to Google. Shortly after the Web conglomerate rolled out its open source browser Chrome last month, the SaaS suite provider announced its support. Support for Chrome may prove especially intriguing for its customer base -- primarily because it is so Ajax-friendly.

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures. It has a nice interface, can be controlled from the desktop or a remote control or via its built-in web interface, and it can be extended by custom scripts. This guide shows how you can install XBMC on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.

FreeBSD is a Unix-like open source operating system that can trace its ancestry back to the original Unix. It's well known and well respected in the server marketplace, but until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu. I came away a little disappointed. PC-BSD offers the stability and security of FreeBSD but pitches itself as "a complete desktop operating system, which has been designed with the 'casual' computer user in mind," so from the start my expectations were high. I downloaded the CD ISOs (three in total; a single DVD version is also available) and booted a test machine. The installation is straightforward and the PC-BSD guide gives detailed installation instructions if you get stuck anywhere.

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve? Thanks to the efforts of its supporters worldwide, ODF has become the format of the future, a truly open standard that has achieved growing popularity and support in a variety of software products, bringing to an end the era of closed formats that have kept users tied to a single vendor’s products.

The Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday. Mono 2.0 offers complete API compatibility with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications, and is compatible with desktop and server components of Microsoft’s 2.0 version of its .Net Framework. Mono 2.0 lets users develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux and other operating systems. It also features the Mono Migration Analyzer, which helps determine changes applications need for .NET-to-Linux migrations, if any.

Over the past couple of days the online media has been full of stories of dissatisfied Linux netbook users returning their computers. Bloggers and journalists quickly picked up on the fact that return rates for Linux-based netbooks were apparently much higher than for Windows-based machines. It seems the origin of the story is an interview with Laptop magazine in which MSI’s Andy Tung said that the “return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks that Windows XP netbooks”. MSI is the maker of the Wind netbook.

Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.

I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling. But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually. So I wrote a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits.

Iconv makes character set conversion easy. Remembering all of your character sets can still be hard. Today's topic was obliquely referenced in yesterday's post on using the online multilingual dictionary from the Bash CLI. Yes, after I woke up around 1 am and thought about it, the results did seem odd. It turns out, when I went to the page, that the multilingual dictionary on reference.com is actually house within a frameset under the online Thesaurus. My belated apologies for getting the name incorrect, although, if you think about it, it's not even a multilingual dictionary (not really).

Linux breaks out with Mono 2.0 today. You can develop and run all your .NET 2.0 applications on Linux.

As I had predicted earlier this year LinuxWorld is no more. Well not quite. LinuxWorld the big Linux show that occurs ever year in San Francisco is morphing into a new show called OpenSource World. The re-naming follows a move by O'Reilly to bring the OSCON conference to San Francisco earlier this year

I recently got the chance to talk with Gentoo Catalyst/Genkernel Release Engineering Lead Andrew Gaffney and developer/council member Donnie Berkholz about Gentoo Linux, the challenges it is facing, and the work that is being done by the community -- from veteran developers to new users -- to overcome them.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code. It was a fun class to teach, so I'm hoping that the subject translates into interesting reading.

I must say I have always loved SUSE for the desktop, but after a month or so I always wind up switching back to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Distributions. Now OpenSuse always maintains it's beautiful look as always as well as the infamous YAST tool. In the end of this install it failed trying to install GRUB, since this is in Beta I would have to assume this is a bug but none the less OpenSuse is a great OS. Enjoy the ScreenShots below.

For various reasons, not everything is configured in the easiest way for a new user. Because of this, some simple and quick modifications can make the life of a new Ubuntu user much easier.