Sunday, November 4, 2007

A second life for 'Second Life' with open source?

In the aftermath of the hype over the virtual world, a tiny group of developers presses on with building its Linux presence.


Until recently, the business news media fawned over the Second Life online virtual world. Stories fixated on Second Life "residents" who got rich brokering virtual real estate, or on the numerous corporations and consumer brands rushing to claim their presence within it (by building virtual kiosk centers or "islands"). Virtual world hype trumps open source hype, so little virtual ink has gone into discussing the open source initiative that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, established to further its development.

One of these projects is the Linux version of the Second Life client, the viewer application that runs on the resident's computer and lets the resident interact with the graphical environments of the virtual world. Ever since its release, the Linux client has remained in constant development by an informal team, usually three people. Their work could directly benefit the open source and Linux community beyond Second Life, in the aftermath of the hype.

Linden Lab declined a request for current figures on the number of people using the Linux client. Nonetheless, Jason Giglio, a developer and Second Life resident who actively works on the client, says he heard through the proverbial grapevine that about 5% of registered Second Life residents, or about 10,000 people, visit Second Life with the Linux client. Giglio does client code on a volunteer basis, but it is work related: He says he earns a living managing virtual land and doing contract programming gigs in Second Life.

Although the Linux population in Second Life is small, the official maintainer and lead developer of the client, who goes by the handle "Tofu Linden," likes to describe them as "amazingly involved and passionate." Tofu is an employee at Linden Lab and works on the Linux client as part of his job. The group has helped him and his volunteer developers, like Giglio, deal with vexing technical issues. Some of their work has helped not only the Linux Second Life client but also the other platform versions.


That is because the same codebase, which Linden Lab makes available under the GNU General Public License, is used for all three platforms, for example, the Microsoft Windows client. The company's FAQ page says it did so to "allow deeper industry and community collaboration, advise the development of market-driven standards, and may one day spur the development of the viewer to accelerate beyond the resources and direction of Linden Lab."


"Linden Lab always had a pretty enlightened view regarding cross-platform development," Giglio says. "It is all OpenGL, with a few compiler conditionals for the small parts of the code that must be platform-specific. I'd estimate 99% of the code is not platform-specific, however," he adds.

The Linux version of the client has been labeled as being in alpha for a long while now. Its development remains quite young compared to its Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X counterparts. Tofu wants to test it more thoroughly on a wide range of distributions and configurations before officially moving it to beta or final release status.

"[Linden Lab] had problems with stability and bugs since the beginning. They are transitioning to more of a focus on stability and code quality now. Open source is one way that they can improve code quality," Giglio says.

Presently the Linux client enjoys good stability and, like the other operating system versions, includes in-world streaming video and audio, and embedded Web pages. Voice-chat support is working very roughly as of this writing, but has not been deployed, partly because of licensing issues (it depends on a proprietary library).

"I've never really worked on a C++ codebase as large and complex as Second Life before, so I don't have a lot of basis for comparison. But the codebase overall seems to reinvent a lot of wheels: It doesn't take advantage of existing libraries as much as it could, and the various subsystems are not very well abstracted from each other," says Callum Lerwick, an aspiring video game developer, who works with the Fedora project and has been developing the Second Life client for that distribution.


continued

Thursday, November 1, 2007

What is a Linux distribution?

A Linux "distribution" is version of the Linux operating system made especially by a company, organization or individual. The one thing they all have in common is that they use the Linux kernel. From there on, each developer will add its own programs, tools and other applications. Some are dedicated to specific uses while others are intended for the general public. Again, you'll find more information at our Linux distributions page.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Using The Avant Window Navigator (AWN) On Fedora 7

This document describes how to set up the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) on Fedora 7. The result is an eye candy, dock-like bar at the bottom of the screen as a replacement for the standard gnome-panel. The Avant Window Manager provides an easy to use interface where you can configure/customize it to your needs. Launchers, task lists, and third party applets are supported.




This document describes how to set up the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) on Fedora 7. The result is an eye candy, dock-like bar at the bottom of the screen as a replacement for the standard gnome-panel. The Avant Window Manager provides an easy to use interface where you can configure/customize it to your needs. Launchers, task lists, and third party applets are supported.

http://www.howtoforge.com/avant_window_navigator_awn_fedora7








Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Video Editing Options for Linux



We know our video editing applications for Windows (read Adobe Premiere, AVID, Ulead Video studio etc) and Mac (Final Cut Pro!), but what about video editing on a Linux powered system? Well here's a list of video editing applications for your Linux


1. Kdenlive: Kdenlive is a non linear video editor for the KDE environment running on Linux. It is based on the MLT video framework which relies on the FFMPEG project.

The project was initially started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers. Kdenlive is available in English, French, German, Dutch, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian and Catalan.


2. OpenMovieEditor: Open Movie Editor is designed to be a simple video editor, that provides basic movie making capabilities. It aims to be powerful enough for the amateur movie artist, yet easy to use. The downside with OpenMovieEditor is that it only supports PAL at this point.

3. Blender: Blender is an all-in-one 3D modelling and animation suite. It can be used to produce computer-generated images and movies. It is open source freeware, so it costs nothing to use. It is available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

4. Cinelerra: Cinelerra does primarily 3 main things: capturing, compositing, and editing audio and video with sample level accuracy. It's a seamless integration of audio, video, and still photos rarely experienced on a web server.

Its crash prone, resource hungry, and really weirdly put together, but if when it works, it does a good job.

5. Pitivi: PiTIVi provides several ways of creating and modifying a timeline. Ranging from a simple synopsis view (a-la iMovie) to the full-blown editing view (aka Complex View) which puts you in complete control of your editing.

Other interfaces can be added via the plugin system, aimed at more specific uses like a SlideShow creator or a subtitling editor. It is even possible to use pitivi without a user interface in order to do batch rendering.

But open source video editing software still have a long way to go when compared with their Windows and Mac counterparts in terms of video resolution, additional features and program crashes.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Open source webdevelopment

Open source CMSs have been getting a lot of attention recently.
They are free and have a lot of useful functionality for building and maintaining a website.
With less effort a dynamic website can be made for the same cost as a static website.The three widely used CMSs are Joomla,mambo and drupal.
The modules are well structured that could be implemented easily and can be customized.
Thousands of free templates are available online that could be customized according to ones needs and implemented.There are lots of attractive ad-ons and components available to implement on the CMS based website.These CMSs have certain attractive tools for SEO too.
These CMSs have special modules that can be used to integrate the website with payment gateways to create an e commerce website.
Open source shopping carts are also there like OS-Commerce that can be used to create an online shopping website.These shopping cart CMSs are specifically used for creating online stores.
Different modules are there from product customization to payment gateway integration.
So, it's well worth choosing an open source CMS to create a website that will reduce cost and effort.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Vista versus Linux Search Battle...

Hello people, i am just giving some search results that are reflected back by Google and yahoo on some nice keywords regarding Vista and Linux...

* Who is Greater
"Vista is great"
137,000,000 results from Google
51,400,000 results from Yahoo

"Linux is great"
165,000,000 results from Google
48,500,000 results from Yahoo

* Which has more bugs
"Vista has bugs"
18,200,000 results from Google
4,920,000 results from Yahoo

"Linux has bugs"
69,700,000 results from Google
9,710,000 results from Yahoo

* Who suck more ??
"Vista sucks"
2,340,000 results from Google
6,530,000 results from Yahoo

"Linux sucks"
2,290,000 results from Google
5,180,000 results from Yahoo

* Stability
"Vista is Unstable"
1,720,000 results from Google
2,020,000 results from Yahoo

"Linux is unstable"
2,100,000 results from Google
2,430,000 results from Yahoo

* Who use what
"I use Vista"
461,000,000 results from Google
118,000,000 results from yahoo

"I use Linux"
450,000,000 results from Google
146,000,000 results from Yahoo

* Which is secure
"Vista is secure"
62,000,000 results from Google
21,700,000 results from Yahoo

"Linux is secure"
119,000,000 results from Google
30,600,000 results from yahoo



Amazingly, according to Google, there are more Vista users, while according to Yahoo, there are more Linux users.
One thins is clear, no doubt that Linux has much more bugs than Vista, but still people think that Linux is great than Vista.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

video comparing windiws vista and linux..

Linux is a very popular server platform. How's it doing on the desktop? Check this video that juxtaposes windows vista and Ubuntu linux!