Thoughts on operating systems, software engineering and beyond
As you know Safari 3 is now beta and available for both Mac OS and Windows platform. However, it seems that Apple underestimated the development state of the Windows version. Developing software is like respecting the alphabet order, no letter (or phase) should be skipped. Apple should have thought twice about that before releasing there public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. It is hardly beta software.
Continue reading “Alpha, beta, gamma – or why Safari 3 should be Alpha”
Apple has announced the main features that will be shipped with Leopard, the next generation Mac OS. Together, they unveiled the next release of Safari. Safari 3 will be available on Mac OS and on Windows (XP and Vista only as it seems). A public beta is available for download on Apple web site.
If you want to learn more about Safari, click on read more.
Continue reading “Safari 3, beta is available for Mac OS and Windows”
As this is a French related software (a dictionary of French words), it will only interest people with a good level of speech in French. Therefore, this article will be one of the few written in French.
Si j’ai toujours mon Petit Larousse de 1988 en format papier, j’ai parfois besoin d’avoir accès à un dictionnaire directement depuis mon ordinateur, ne serait-ce que lors de déplacement. Depuis maintenant deux ans, j’achète le Nouveau Littré électronique. Le Littré est un célèbre dictionnaire de la langue française qui fut écrit à l’origine par Émile Littré. Les dictionnaires plus populaires, que sont le Larousse et le Robert, ont suivi la voie ouverte par le Littré.
La bonne nouvelle pour nous amis libristes (mot inconnu du Littré au passage 
) est la déclinaison multi-plateforme du Littré électronique. L’édition 2007, comme la précédente, est disponible sur les plateformes Windows, Mac OS X et celle de notre cher pingouin Linux.
Continue reading “Le Nouveau Littré 2007 aussi pour Linux (French)”
The nature is getting greener everyday, so why can’t we? I decided to invest a bit of my time solving a problem with Dell laptops running Ubuntu and the LCD brightness. The root of this problem is detailed in the Dell Latitude D600 laptop page on the Ubuntu Wiki. To shortly summarise the current release (7.04) of Ubuntu does not manage to talk with the Dell hardware properly to get the brightness state and to modify it. Therefore, Ubuntu cannot dim the LCD brightness to save energy on such laptop.
This post briefly offers some technical background before pointing to a guide in wikishelf, which will explain how to activate the control of the LCD brightness and take advantage of the Gnome Power Manager facilities to save some more battery life.
For other tips and tricks to lower your power consumption on Linux in general, try this article about Linux power management, how to optimise power consumption, most of these information are not specific to Dell laptops or Ubuntu, they can even be applied on desktop computers to save energy.
Continue reading “Increasing laptop battery life in Ubuntu”
I stumble yesterday upon a funny, not complex little game that resemble pretty much mine sweeper. 
It is a flash animation, so this has nothing to do with free software. But it is just fun to play. It is much like mine sweeper but with numbers. A number indicates how much golden tile there are adjacent to it. This make it pretty simple when the number is 0 or 4, or even 3 next to a border or 2 at a corner.
Easy but fun . 
Ideal to relax 2 minutes.
Ecology, this is a kind of marketing and political buzz word now-a-day. When someone says “I am an ecologist”, what does he really want to say? Thus, I will not use it but rather say that I love hiking and cycling, and the best place to do so is Nature, especially far from any road or city. Therefore, I love Nature (at large) and I am doing my bit and my best to protect it and today I was quite happy to read an article on future improvements on the power management of Linux.
To shortly summarise (I heavily advise you to read the above linked article): the new kernel (2.6.21 with the tickless timer) and Intel involvement will mainly help reducing power consumption. Also, it seems that KDE (another Linux desktop environment) has some nice improvements in sleep states area.
Now linking the article conclusion about AMD/ATI drivers and the dream that perhaps AMD/ATI will help the open source community creating new drivers. There are hopes to save even more energy.
Light Crafts is the commercial editor of LightZone, a multi-platform image editor. It supports mainly the Windows and Mac OS X platform, and it is not free: one has to pay for the software and it is not open source. LightZone integrates well into the photographer image work flow, offering a nice browsing experience and various tools to enhance zone of one’s photographs.
However, a Linux enthusiast (Anton Kast) at Light Crafts has managed to port LightZone to Linux and his company allows him to distribute this version free of charge. It is not free software, but that is still a really nice initiative from this company and its employee. Thank you Anton and Light Crafts
The new release, stamped 2.4, is available for download: LightZone 2.4 for Linux (
alternate link if the previous one does not work. Click on “Read more” for more information)
A bit more than a month ago Spring just started, but it is so hot and sunny now that it feels already like Summer. Summer means much more outside activities and fewer inside topics: less blogging and less playing with Ubuntu.
Anyway from time to time, I still find opportunities to discover a new side of Ubuntu and to write about it. Today is about a recent update in the Ubuntu repositories that enabled the first commercial package: VMware Server.
Continue reading “Commercial virtualisation product available for Ubuntu”
It is Spring and as every year it is time to do a bit of cleaning. Perhaps, you have recently upgraded your Ubuntu Linux from the release 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to the up-to-date 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). By doing so you might have some packages and residual files that are no longer needed, and by removing them you could free up lots of space on your hard disks.
To describe the various possibilities and reasons to do an Ubuntu Spring cleaning, I have started a wiki article. If you have any comments feel free to give them here, in reply to this post. I will try to take them into account.
Ubuntu Linux is designed for Human beings. It tends to be as easy as possible for all of them and to make things just work. A similar contender on this concept but in the web browser/e-mail environment is Opera. Sadly it is not open source but it is freely available to anyone and on many platforms and languages.
Opera features many enhancement regarding accessibility (and are/were pioneer in many of this area). They have integrated into their browser things like mouse gesture, voice control and many UI improvements (some were adapted in other major software) including: tabs, sessions, zoom and private data management.
It seems as if Opera has always tried to make their software more ergonomic with each new release. Something that was not really considered seriously until recently by the contenders.