Tag: open source

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Google Code Hosting now supports Git!

Great news to all developers out there! Google Code hosting service now supports Git in addition to Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial. Probably the top Google Code wishlish, I’m sure open source developers appreciates Google decision to offer Git support on its free open source code hosting service.

New and existing projects may continue to use SVN and Mercurial as version control and those who wished to switch to Git may do so from the “Administer” option in the Google Code Project Dashboard

Some note about Google Code Git support:

  • Requires at least Git 1.6.6
  • Repo size limit 4GiB
  • Push pack limit of 500 MiB (soon to be lifted)
Google Code Git

For more information about Git support in Google Code, please read: Google Code Git FAQ

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Scientist: How to attribute free software contributions in journal article, proceeding and monograph

Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.

Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.

Examples on how to attribute Free Software use in Academic Paper
1. Researchers/Academician may cite the software URL and the software author in the “Literature Review/Background”, “Methods”or “Acknowledgement section” in the articles.

2. The citation should include the software release number and the URL to download the software in order to help other researchers to replicate the work (publishing paper is all about guiding others to replicate the investigation)

3. If free software being used as the main tool in the investigation, it would be helpful if the academician/researcher could explain why this particular Free Software is chosen for the research, etc in their journal article or academic papers.

For more examples: Visit the Debian Free Software Guideline, there’s a section about attributing free software in scientific and academic papers.

Give credit to Free Software! Please share this post
If you are an academician or researcher, then please share this post because it will increase awareness about the need to properly attribute free software tools, software author and their role in scientific community.

Thanks!

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Goodbye 2.6.x – A downloadable archive of all Linux 2.6.x kernel releases

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux kernel 3.0-rc1, this marks the end of 2.6.x series line which has 40 releases since late 2003.

To mark this event, Con Kolivas has made a tarball archive (163MB) of all 2.6.x releases available for download. The archive uses lrzip compression which can be installed from the standard Ubuntu apt-get repository.

Note that the size of of the archive after decompression would reach 10.3 GB!

Happy downloading, and hello Linux 3.0!

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Buzz!! – Yahoo like IM shake with Pidgin Nudge plugin

I think most of you may have already migrated to Empathy, the default Instant Messenger client for the GNOME desktop environment. But I still use Pidgin IM because I like its functionality and its expandable plugin architecture.

I am a Yahoo Messenger user, and one thing that I miss about when using Pidgin (either on Linux or Windows) is the “shake-effect” whenever I receive “Buzz” or “ding” from my contacts. Back in 2003 (when Pidgin still was called Gaim) I tried replicating that effect, but to no avail. However, just a couple of weeks ago I discovered “pidgin-nudge“, a plugin that shakes conversation window when it receives “Buzz”,”nudge” or “ding” from contacts. Here’s how it looked :

Installing pidgin-nude on Ubuntu linux is easy! First make sure you have Pidgin 2.6.x and above installed. Then you have to install “pidgin-dev” package alongside with “build-essential” to compile the plugin source code, as shown in the example below.


sudo apt-get install subversion pidgin-dev build-essential
svn checkout http://pidgin-nudge.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pidgin-nudge-read-only
cd pidgin-nudge-read-only
make
sudo make install

Happy Buzzing!

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Microsoft Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD) video attacks on OpenOffice.org

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of agree with some points in this video even before it was published.

There are stories of organizations, school computer labs or home users that switch back to Microsoft Office after they have use OpenOffice.org. There is even a local (Malaysian) joke that poke fun at the amount of training and costs required to educate staffs to use OpenOffice.org which eventually exceeds the cost Microsoft Office Suite.

We have used a lot of open source software, libraries and components in our daily lives without realizing, In case of OpenOffice.org, I think the problem is just the process and familiarity with application. Microsoft has spend a lot of money to ensure every schools, university, computer labs used its products to educate our younger and future generations that eventually would be accustom to Microsoft branded products. It is a great business strategy, but the question is, who would benefit the most from this scheme?

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Play Urban Terror, a free Counter-Strike like game on Linux

Right now I’ve been playing Urban Terror (or UrT), it is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game similar to Counter-Strike. The game was developed using the open source Quake III Arena engine and can be played under GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

You can download Urban Terror binaries from Urban Terror Official Website

The game is available for 32bit and 64bit platform and is tested on Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) releases