Internet is fault tolerant .... Not !

Internet has become a part and parcel of most of our lives. But I did not realize the extent to which I personally was dependent on the Internet till two days back when due to a major underwater cable breakdown in the Mediterranean sea, the Internet slowed to a crawl - well you can say it almost stopped. News reports say 60% of India was affected and over 70% of Egypt.

In India for instance, the three main service providers namely TATA owned VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel Ltd were affected. The repair of the sea cables is expected to take a minimum of 10 days even when conducted on a war footing. According to news reports, the cable snag occurred near Alexandria, off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday affecting ILD and Internet traffic to Europe and the US.

Checking email which we all took for granted was a big chore with opening a single email taking close to an hour. Most sites were not accessible. It did not help that over 90% of the popular sites on the Internet are hosted on a server based in the United states with no cross continental mirroring plan to meet such a scenario.

An exception was Google search which did not see any slowdown because it has data centers in every part of the world and is prepared to meet such emergencies.

This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the Internet for carrying out even the most mundane but critical tasks like banking, paying bills and booking tickets. Now a days, more and more people are working from the safe confines of their home. As days go by we are getting more and more enmeshed in the online world and acquiring alternate identities. And keeping the Internet fault tolerant is turning out to be a very important factor in our personal wellbeing.

Nokia cell phone giant acquires Trolltech

Here is news which will be interesting for all Linux users. Nokia the cellular giant headquartered at Finland has acquired Trolltech the Norwegian company which is developing the Qt library. The deal is believed to be worth around US $153 million. While many of us relate to Trolltech via the ever popular Desktop environment KDE which is built using the Qt library, a lesser known fact is that Trolltech's product is also used by other popular software such as Skype, Google Earth and Adobe's Photoshop Elements just to name a few.

What does that mean for us Linux enthusiasts ? Well, in the future we can look forward to better cell phones and devices from Nokia with a slick user interface powered by the Qt library. Nokia is a big supporter of Open Source. For example, it has released the N770 and N800 Internet tablet in the past which is powered by Linux. Trolltech has also released an open cell phone dubbed the Greenphone.

So in all respects, this acquisition bodes well for the Open source and Free software community at large.

You can read the Official press release at the Trolltech website as well as a joint statement (PDF) by Nokia and Trolltech CEOs to the KDE and Open source community.

Install KDE 4 on Windows

Not even a month has passed since KDE 4.0 has been officially released. Already the Windows port of KDE 4.0 is functional. Nay, you can really install many KDE 4.0 applications on Windows 9x/2000/XP (Vista users please excuse) via an installer.

The installer as such is a small piece of software which pulls the required packages from the remote repository and installs them on your Windows machine. It also automatically downloads any packages which are required to satisfy any dependencies which makes it very user friendly.

The download for me took a long time since the installer had to pull in over 400 MB of packages. But once all the necessary packages finished downloading, the installer then proceeded to install all the packages in the specified location. In my case KDE 4.0 applications were installed in C:\kde4 directory.

There are a number of applications already such as the KDE games, KWrite, Konqueror, Dolphin file manager and so on and all of them worked on my machine. I have to concede that other than the KDE games which played quite well, most other software is at the least, still buggy. Konqueror and KWrite guzzles up memory like there is no tomorrow. The Konsole (KDE terminal) has yet to be ported to Windows and so you cannot access the terminal from within Konqueror. Dolphin complains that it cannot find the home directory each time I open it in Windows. KWrite is a lot slow in opening up and so on.

But these chinks are sure to be ironed out soon. The complete build system of KDE 4 is ready. KDE 4 on Windows currently support two compilers namely Mingw and Microsoft Visual C++. Since Qt 4 is truly a cross platform library and KDE 4 being built using Qt 4, it is only a matter of time before you see people using KDE applications on Windows. Who knows, perhaps this could be one more reason which will prompt more and more people to embrace Linux.. or maybe not.

Check out a few screenshots of the installer and KDE 4.0 applications running on Windows. You can download the installer from windows.kde.org

Fig: KDE 4 Windows installer

Fig: Basic setup - choose the installation mode

Fig: Select proxy settings for your machine if any.

Fig: Select the most appropriate mirror

Fig: Choose the packages

Fig: The installer settings (most important section of installer)

Fig: The installer does automatic dependency resolution.

Fig: Installation completed dialog box

Fig: Dolphin file manager and a card game running natively in Windows XP

Fig: Two KDE4 games and KWrite

Fig: Konqueror running natively in Windows XP

Asus EeePC - the consumer friendly laptop with Linux preloaded

Asus is a Taiwan based hardware manufacturer which is known the world over for their superior motherboard designs apart from many other products they manufacture. It has been ranked No.1 by the Wall Street Journal Asia for best quality products in Taiwan. Recently Asus grabbed the news headlines when it unveiled what is now known as the EeePC, which is a 7" screen laptop notebook with a slew of technologically advanced features built in. But what is most important and exciting is that it is pre-loaded with a customized version of Xandros Linux. The three E's in EeePC stand for "Easy to learn", "Easy to work" and "Easy to play".

You can choose between 4 models of EeePC depending upon the size of hard disk and memory. The EeePC feature a built in card reader, an integrated web cam (this depends upon the model), speakers and microphone which helps clear up a lot of wire clutter. It comes with a shock proof design. Has a standard 4 cell battery (replaceable by the user of course) which gives anywhere between 2 to 3.5 hours of uptime depending upon the model you choose. It has a built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g that automatically detects and connects to the internet at any hotspot. As far as its storage space is concerned, it has a solid state hard drive in sizes of 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. The EeePC also comes with either 512MB or 1GB memory depending upon the model you choose.

Fig: Left side of EeePC contain an ethernet port, firewire port, a USB port and interfaces for voice in and voice out.

Fig: The right side contain a card reader, two USB ports and a VGA port.

Because there are no moving parts, there is less chance of data corruption when moving around and it is dead quiet when in use.

Fig: Specifications of the EeePC laptops

As I said earlier, the EeePC comes loaded with a heavily customized version of Xandros Linux desktop. It has a specially designed intuitive graphics interface which makes use of tabs. The interface is very cleanly laid out with pretty icons. You can also switch to a traditional KDE interface if that is more to your liking.

Fig: EeePC comes preloaded with a variety of games.

The applications bundled with the EeePC are an eclectic collection of open source software which allows the user to do just about any thing he or she intends to do on a PC. For instance it has the latest Firefox, OpenOffice.org, a plethora of games, Skype to make calls from your laptop, WebCam software and much more. Check out the screenshots of the EeePC GUI below to get a fair idea about what to expect.

Fig: Internet tab of EeePC GUI

Fig: Play tab of EeePC GUI

Fig: Settings tab of EeePC GUI

Fig: Work tab of EeePC GUI

Lastly we come to the most important criteria when choosing a laptop namely the price. It is surprising that with all these features (hardware and software) included, the EeePC ships with a price tag in the range of $299 to $450 which is very cheap when you compare the price of an average laptop. It weighs a measly 0.92 Kg and can be comfortably handled while on the move. Having seen its specifications and the fact that there is a waiting time to get your EeePC laptop when you order online due to heavy demand, one can correctly deduce that laptops with this form factor and with such rich features have a huge demand in the market and Asus having made the plunge is already reaping its benefits.

There is also a rumor floating on the net that Asus has plans on the anvil to unveil an 8.9" EeePC laptop sometime this year (2008).

Here is thumbs up for a people's laptop.

Keynote address by Aaron J Seigo at the KDE 4.0 release event

On January 18th 2008, Aaron J Seigo, President of KDE e.V. and its lead developer gave a keynote address at the KDE 4.0 release event held at Google campus in Mountain View, California. This is a video recording of this august event. In his talk, Aaron gives a birds eye view of the different features in KDE 4.0 as well as a glimpse into the future of KDE 4.

The video is in streaming format and unfortunately Google has not provided a download link with it. So for those who are interested in downloading the video to view it in their free time, can do so using the 'wget' utility as follows :

wget -c --output-document=kde4keynote.mp4 "http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=twAAANo77xYbVm8VXV5rhG_qPPpRNCbSEwfixV2tMd2j4Uo4ntmtDVLDPHv8b_tQPoUJLJU8lvIfj47OgHJ7bJ4RRwep_TFHvSGSreO8JGQSiA1OxXR4qiGM8upVqU__NCUyGZLbQ1xofY2aPsatvJBqPpJjooYujsvezZduVlne8N2e2jgrjNJkf5JlwHBHpMBkCbzReaQPOoPrQMFpRTM9jkLcsAGjye2-MJbx_0ydYM3cfayiofNm3hE1SmvOtnBW8g&sigh=eklYkc_l10OrI60da0Ybj7O8_oY&begin=0&len=466236"

Those who have a broadband internet connection can watch it below.

Also take a look at the talks given by a number of other delegates at the KDE 4.0 release event.

Wordpress upgrades free space for blogs to 3 GB

Wordpress.com is the alter identity of Wordpress.org, where anyone who is interested in blogging can start his or her own blog for free. What is more your blog can use as much bandwidth as needed; you could even host your blog on wordpress.com servers using your own domain albeit for a nominal yearly fee. Till date though, the free users availing the services of Wordpress.com were limited to using only 50 MB of space to save their photos. This meant that most users were forced to use third party tools like flickr to host their images and then link to them from their Wordpress blogs.

Not any more. Now Matt Mullenweg reveals that Wordpress.com has hiked the free upload space from 50 MB to a whooping 3000 MB ~ 3GB. More over, you are not limited to uploading just photos but can also upload and link to a plethora of files such as PDF, ppt, odt, MS Word and many more. And your blog still gets all the bandwidth you can use.

Now compared to this, Google's Blogger.com provides just 1GB space via Picasaweb.google.com which is tied to your account and allows you to upload only images. Of course 1 GB is still a huge amount. And if multiple people are contributing to a blog at blogger.com, I presume each person gets 1 GB space each.

If you ask me, I think Wordpress is a superior blogging platform and blogger.com developers can imbibe a trick or two from Wordpress.

Richard M Stallman speaks on HD DVD, Blue-ray, DRM and other topics

You never tire of hearing Richard M Stallman speak; especially when he talks about his pet projects namely fighting against software patents and exhorting all people to use free (as in Freedom) software, thus safeguarding people's computing freedom. And each time he airs his thoughts, they get to you loud and clear.

Colin McGregor of 'Free Software Magazine' recently had the chance to ask RMS a couple of questions related to Free software, the GPL ver3 and the issues it adresses, the effect of DRM and so on which is published here.

On the question of which project he is most proud of, he answered on expected lines saying he is most proud of the Emacs project. Although the most challenging was GCC (GNU compiler).

He also exhorts all Freedom loving software users not to use HD DVD and Blue-ray since they have the potential to stiffle ones freedom. In his own words (and I quote ...)

We should never buy products that have DRM unless we have the means to crack it. Thus, don’t buy a DVD unless you have a free program to play it with—and never buy HD DVD or Blue-ray!

Trolltech is to release Qt library under GPLv3 license

Qt is a high-performance, cross-platform application development framework. It includes a C++ class library and tools for cross-platform development and internationalization. More importantly, Qt is the foundation on which KDE is built. From its inception till now, Qt has been released under a variety of licenses such as Qt Public License, GPL v2, and even a commercial license for developing for Windows platform (More here).

Yesterday, Trolltech's CEO Haavard Nord warmed the hearts of millions of Free software enthusiasts when he announced at the KDE developer conference that Qt will henceforth be released under a GPLv3 license (even for Windows platform), over and above the QPL/GPLv2 license it holds now.

Here is what Richard M Stallman the president of Free Software Foundation had to say about this news (and I quote) :

I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt available under GPL v3. This will allow parts of KDE to adopt GPL v3, too. Even better, Trolltech has made provisions for a smooth migration to future GPL versions if it approves of them."

You can download the GPLv3 licensed packages of Qt3 at the following location.

Another reason to love KDE even more....

Sun acquires MySQL

Sun acquires MySQL arguably the most widely used database on the net. Read the announcement here. Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun Microsystems, on his blog, has termed this acquisition as putting a billion dollars behind the 'M' in 'LAMP'.

Personally I feel this will turn out to be a very good thing for Open Source. I would rather it be Sun Microsystems than some other company. So does this sound the death knell for proprietary databases like Oracle?

Blue-ray vs HD DVD Format war move closer to an end

Blue-ray and HD DVD are two divergent high-density optical disc formats for the storage of digital information, including high-definition video. For a couple of years now there has been a war of sorts going on between the Blue-Ray and HD DVD camps to gain dominance over how people would view future digital entertainment.

Of late, the HD DVD format has taken a beating with Warner Bros. deciding to release all its movies exclusively in Blue-ray format. Now only Universal, Paramount Pictures and a few minor ones from the movie industry are still in the HD DVD camp with 20th Century Fox,New line, Sony Pictures, Buena Vista and of course Warner Bros firmly entrenched in the Blue-ray camp. This means that over 70% of Hollywood's movie output will be released in Blue-ray discs.

Fig: Industry support for HD DVD and Blue-ray formats

Blue-ray discs sales in the US is ahead enjoying 65% of the market over HD-DVD's 35% which is another factor which pushes Blue-ray closer to becoming the industry standard.

Fig: Blue-ray enjoys a 65% market share at present

HD DVD specifications

• Capacity : 15 GB (Single layer), 30 GB (Dual layer) and 51GB (Triple layer)
• File systems supported : ISO9660, Universal Disc Format (UDF)
• Region encoding : None
• Backward compatible : Yes
• DRM : Optional but can be incorporated.
  

Blue-ray specifications

• Capacity : 25 GB (Single layer), 50 GB (Dual layer)
• Region encoding : Yes (Divided into three regions)
• Backward compatible : Optional. Left to the manufacturers.
• DRM : Support for several layers of DRM
  

As you can see, Blue-ray has a clear advantage as far as the specifications are concerned. As an end note, here is a funny video clip featuring none other than Hitler ranting over the imminent demise of HD-DVD format.

Reasons why schools should exclusively use Free software

Richard M Stallman who is the father of GNU and Free Software movement provides compelling reasons for schools to decide to embrace Free software over their proprietary counterparts.

To put in a nutshell ...

• Using Free software will save school's money. And we all know that a majority of schools are always short of money.
• Will help society as a whole escape from being dominated by mega corporations because todays school students who are trained to use Free software will continue to use the the same software when they are adults.
• Free software permits students to learn how software works because they have access to the source code of the software.
• At a deeper level, Free software encourage people to be good citizens and good neighbors — to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software.
  

KDE 4 (version 4.0) released

Here is good news for one and all. KDE 4.0 has been released. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

Fig: KDE 4.0 desktop

Check out the visual guide of KDE 4.0 to get an idea of the depth at which changes have been wrought when compared with KDE 3.x. To put it simply, the visuals are stunning.

And if you are raring to take KDE 4.0 on a spin, download the Kubuntu LiveCD featuring KDE 4.0. Or if you are running Ubuntu, you can also download just the KDE 4.0 specific packages and install it along GNOME or even KDE 3.x. Or you could also download an OpenSuSE liveCD which contain just the KDE 4.0 specific packages. The choice is yours.

I am so excited about this new KDE release which will surely herald a new movement on the Desktop - err... I mean the portable desktop.

Getting things done - The two aspects of self management

David Allen is a world renowned Productivity trainer and consultant, who is obsessed with the twin topics of time management and productivity. He is the author of the best selling book titled Getting Things Done (GTD) - The art of stress free productivity.

Recently, he gave a talk at Google where he spoke on GTD and the two keys to sustaining a healthy life and work style. The basic premise of his talk is that a majority of us fritter our time doing senseless things when we should be putting in productive work. This is because we are not focussed and our mind is crammed with too many "what if" scenarios related to day to day life that we end up getting stressed.

Our mind is limited in its ability to manage commitments, because it is handicapped in its ability to remember and remind. And unless it trusts there is a better system, it cannot let go of the job.

David claims there are two aspects of self management namely :

1. Control and
2. Perspective.
   

He goes on to say :

If you want to get things off your mind, you must know that :

You don't do it by stacking it up, meditating about it or dreaming about it. But you do it by capturing, clarifying and organizing your commitments at all horizons. You will engage consciously with them as often as you need to.

Your ability to refocus, rapidly, on the right things at the right horizon at the right time is the master technique of knowledge work athletics.

He segregates people broadly into four roles depending on the level of perspective and control they display. And he calls it the matrix of self management.

              +-------------+----------------+
Perspective   |     Crazy   |     Master     |
              |     Maker   |       and      |
              |             |    Commander   |
              +-------------|----------------+
              |   Reactor   |    Micro       |
              |             |    Manager     |
              +-------------+----------------+
                 --------Control -------->

To be successful in the art of self management, one has to strive to fit in the role of "Master and Commander" as shown in the graph above which means you should have both high perspective and high control.

Do watch the talk he gave at Google campus. It's about 45 minutes duration but is worth every minute of it.

An in depth pictorial look at OLPC hardware

The One Laptop Per Child project is unique in many respects the most prominent of which is its philanthropic goal of providing a cost effective medium to further the education of poor children in third world countries.

But did you know that on the technology front, the OLPC laptop named XO-1 is the front runner to a number of innovations ? Consider these facts ... The XO-1 has been designed from the grounds up with the goals of survivability, serviceability, and robustness in mind. The mother board is located behind the LCD screen instead of below the keyboard as seen in traditional laptops. The LCD is a dual-mode display, both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3x the resolution. It is said to be one of the first devices to use the Li-Fe-P battery, which is considered safer than normal Lithium ions.

I came across this in depth article which details each and every part of the OLPC right down to the chipsets used, accompanied by a dozen or so high resolution photos of the parts. A very informative read indeed.

Neuros OSD - ushering in fresh air to the term Open Source Hardware

Simply put Neuros OSD is a device which allows you to digitize and playback all your media - be they audio or video from a variety of sources such as VHS tapes, DVDs, home movies or TV shows. What is noteworthy about this product is that the full documentation of the hardware specifications for this product has been released by the company (Neuros Technology International) as open source. This opens up avenues for skilled users to customize the device and pass on the improvements to other users. What is more, OSD is powered using Linux.

The main functions of the Neuros OSD are as follows :

1. Video Recorder - Record video in standard MPEG-4 formats from any device with standard (i.e. not High Definition) video outputs such as DVD players, Satellite receivers, Cable boxes,VCRs, DVRs, etc. to virtually any USB storage device (external hard drives, iPod™, PSP™, etc),any major memory card (SD, MMC, Memory Stick; Compact Flash, microdrive), or directly to your computer or network attached storage.
2. Video Player - Play recorded, downloaded, and streamed video (including YouTube) on your TV from USB storage devices, memory cards, computer/home network, and the Internet.
3. Music/Audio Player - Play music, podcasts, and other audio files directly on your stereo from your from memory cards, USB devices (MP3 players, external hard drives, etc), computer/home network, and the Internet.
4. Photo/Image Viewer - View photos and other images on your TV from USB devices (external hard drives, digital cameras, etc), memory cards, computer/home network, and the Internet.
5. Audio Recorder - Record audio in standard MP3 and AAC formats from any audio source to any major memory card (SD, MMC, Memory Stick; CF, microdrive), virtually any USB storage device (iPod™, external hard drives, PSP™, etc), or directly to your computer/home network.
6. Charging/Docking Station - The OSD will charge most USB devices that are plugged into it, so you can use it as a docking station for your iPod™ and other portables even while recording to or playing back from them.
7. Sharing - The OSD has features to make it easy for you to share non-copyrighted content from the comfort of your living room.
   

Fig: Neuros OSD side view

Fig: Another view of Neuros OSD

Note: Internet photo viewing, Audio recording directly to your computer and sharing of content might require a firmware upgrade which is automated if the device is connected to the internet.

The Neuros OSD doesn't have any storage option so you will have to use compatible storage media such as SD cards, compact Flash drives, micro cards, external hard drives and the home network to store your recordings.

But on the plus side, Neuros OSD is portable, does not require a computer to play back the recorded media - just plug in the storage device and you are ready to go, and its functions can be extended by third parties as it is based on an open platform.

The New York Times has a nice writeup about this device which sells for sub $200.

RPM 5.0 released

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix/Linux software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. [ For a short introduction to using RPM check out this guide ].

Exactly 12 months back, I had posted the good news of plans to revamp RPM.

New features in RPM 5.0

• The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely revamped from scratch.
• Configuration is now through RPM macros during run time instead of through rpmrc.
• The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin.
• RPM packages now also support LZMA compression apart from Gzip and Bzip2.
• RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files too. (Does this translate to automatic dependency resolution ?)
  

Read the official press release here.

Fedora 8 review

The first ever Linux distribution I used was not Debian or Slackware but Red Hat Linux. In fact, as I remember it, the version of Red Hat I used was ver 6.2. A couple of years back, Red Hat decided to demarcate its Linux offering into two separate entities namely the free as in beer and Free as in freedom Fedora and its paid version but still Free as in freedom offering namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The improvements that are made in Fedora, after they go through a period of severe whetting are eventually incorporated into Red Hat enterprise offering or so it seems.

Let me tell you a funny thing, even though I have been using Fedora for many years now, this is the first time I am putting down my thoughts on Fedora. The latest offering from Fedora namely Fedora 8 is in every respect an excellent Linux distribution past compare. As with all previous versions of Fedora, the hard work and quality which is the trademark of Red Hat shines through in Fedora 8 too.

There are numerous features that are incorporated into Fedora 8. Some of the most notable ones being ...

• Inclusion of an advanced sound server called PulseAudio which is compatible with nearly all existing Linux sound systems.
• A new Java environment called IcedTea which is derived from OpenJDK.
• Numerous improvements to tools which interact with other devices such as Bluetooth tool, network manager and so on.
  

Read the full list of features for Fedora 8 code named Werewolf in the official release notes.

But if you ask me, the pertinent aspects of Fedora which place it a cut above most other Linux distributions are for sure the seamless integration of GUI tools to accomplish complex tasks. For example, Fedora has a GUI tool to create and manipulate logical volumes on your machine. There are GUI front ends for setting up a firewall, a set of SELinux tools to view, create and modify policies and so on. And it has been Red Hat's and in succession, Fedora's aim to make sure the different desktops namely GNOME and KDE have a similar look and feel which is evident when you install GNOME and KDE on your Fedora 8 machine.

The installation as such was a painless affair - considering that (as far as I can remember) it was Red Hat which first developed a GUI installer for installing its Linux distribution. And Red Hat installer named "Anaconda" is a fine piece of software that has evolved over time and which does its job splendidly. Check out a slide show of the screen shots of all the installation steps.

Once you boot into Fedora 8, you come face to face with a new default theme called Nodoka which is both a refreshing change and a pleasure to the eyes. Fedora 8 also feature a spartan look and feel called Infinity. GNOME bundled with Fedora 8 is version 2.20.1 and KDE is version 3.5.8.

Shown below are a couple of well designed GUI front-ends which aid the end user in accomplishing a variety of complex tasks - these tasks can also be executed using the equivalent command line tools.

Fig: Dual head display settings

Fig: Advanced Firewall configuration

Fig: Logical volume management GUI tool

Fig: Printer configuration

Fig: SELinux management

Fig: Services configuration

Fig: SELinux troubleshoot browser

Apart from the GUI tools displayed above, there are also GUI front ends for user management, sound management, network configuration, setting up bootloader and so on.

Fedora 8 LiveCD comes bundled with Abiword word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet which are clean and lean alternatives to OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc. Of course you always have the option of installing OpenOffice.org if you deem it fit via Fedora's Applications > Add/Remove programs interface.

The Fedora team has also been innovating its offering by releasing tools which allow you to roll out (remaster) your own custom Fedora distribution with just the features and software you need. Check out several different spins, which are variations of Fedora built from a specific set of software packages.

On the other hand, Fedora team aka Red Hat is obsessed with making sure that its Linux distribution stays as Free as possible - much to the delight of Free software enthusiasts. A side effect for the end user is that it is not possible to play proprietary audio and video files on a default Fedora installation. If you want to, there is a round about way of enabling some third party repositories (rpm.livna.org and rpmfusion.org) and installing their custom build of multimedia players which are compiled with support for these proprietary file formats. Fedora also comes bundled with a new tool called Codeina which allows you to buy licenses for various multimedia file formats from Fluendo. The prices range from 7 Euros all the way up to 16 Euros for each set of codecs. I haven't installed them so am not in a position to comment on the quality of these bought codecs.

Fig: CodecBuddy (Codeina) allows you to buy licenses for proprietary file formats.

Fedora 8 does feature a GUI tool to easily enable desktop effects (namely Compiz). But then I was faced with a conundrum of sorts which was that without the proprietary Nvidia drivers (My machine has a Nvidia GEForce 2 card), it is not possible to enable the desktop effects. At the same time, it is a round about and messy process to install the proprietary Nvidia display drivers in Fedora; which may be possible if you are running SELinux in permissive mode.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a robust, secure and stable Linux distribution which stands out from rest of the brood in providing an innovative set of GUI tools for system and network administration but at the same time, you are also particular that you would like to use only Free software, then you should seriously consider taking Fedora 8 for a spin. You will definitely fall in love it.

Introducing Red Hat's New Virtual training programme

Are you living in a part of city or town where it is not possible to get trained in Red Hat Linux ? Then take heart as Red Hat has rolled out its Virtual training program.

Virtual training is real time training conducted remotely featuring Red Hat instructors. The classes are taken in 4 hour increments, Monday through Friday, over a two week period. All sessions start at 1 pm eastern standard time (EST).

The salient features of the virtual training are as follows ...

• Conducted by Red Hat's own specially trained instructors.
• Interactive sessions via real time chat with the instructors.
• You get your own copy of Red Hat enterprise Linux which you can access via a Java enabled web browser.
• You will receive all the printed study materials by post a couple of days before the commencement of the course.
  

Virtual Training is currently available for RHCE track courses - Red Hat Linux Essentials and Red Hat Linux System Administration.

Prerequisites for training program.

• Require a broadband internet connection and
• A willingness and sufficient motivation to set a timetable and learn on ones own.
  

Get more details of the virtual training program from the offical website. And here is the press release.