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On the 1st of September, Google made an official announcement about its new Open Source project code-named Google Chrome. It sent shockwaves through the tech community and a barrage of rampant speculation over the future of Mozilla Firefox broke out with talk of Google out to hunt the much-loved fox. Mozilla’s CEO, John Lilly, responded (with notable nonchalance) on his blog by saying that comeptition from Google was inevitable given the scope and ambition of the Google operation.

Along side search engines and email clients, web browsers play a vital role in daily Internet usage. The web browser is quite simply the window onto the Web. Until now Google only had an indirect foothold in this huge market through its funding relationship with Firefox. Given that Google’s main competitor Microsoft has been at the forefront of browser application technology from the early days of the Web, there is a clear sense that by building a rival browser, Google is moving ever closer to Internet monopoly. In many ways Firefox has been Google’s guinea pig, a testing ground for the viability of an open source rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google’s relationship with Mozilla may not have been this way from the start, but Google’s decision to release the Chrome source code and the fact that Chrome inherits components from Firefox point to a very calculated move.

Google states that its main approach to building Chrome was to “rethink the browser” and create “a modern platform for web pages and applications” (source). In doing so it claims to have improved speed, responsiveness and functionality across the board. Part of this meant developing new frameworks to power so-called ‘next generation’ web applications – the V8 JavaScript engine is one example of innovation in this project.

So what is Chrome really about? Is it really about technological innovation, or is it a market share strategy through Firefox emulation? And does it live up to its ambitious remit as the browser that will power the ‘next generation’ of Internet interaction? In this review, I take a candid look at the Google Chrome beta release and ask whether this new web browser lives up to the hype. What can Google do that everyone else can’t and has Google laid down the foundations for the definitive Web browser? Click here to continue reading

A while back we featured an interview with members from the Blender Creative team discussing work on their upcoming open source game Apricot. The game has been in development since February this year and the team is reaching the final stages of production. The game is now called ‘Yo Frankie’ and you can see a 6 miunte video demonstration of the main game levels here. Needless to say that once the game has been released we will follow up with an in-depth review here on Sourced.

For this blog entry, I want to shift away from Blender’s gaming exploits and focus on the other strand of Open Source entertainment they pioneer: animation films. Below are two great Open Source animation films that demonstrate the level of professionalism behind the work at Blender: Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream.Both films were released under Creative Commons licenses and the animation source files are available for download from the Blender website as is all the software that was used to create the animation. So without further ado, it’s time to see the films for yourselves. Enjoy and let us know what you thought in the comment section. Click here to continue reading

Over the past decade, Open source software (OSS) has seen a surge in popularity. The combination of high coding standards, collaborative learning and minimal costs has attracted a new generation of users and developers, passionate about creating and sharing resources.

This newfound interest has led to crossovers in the application of open source ideas to real world projects; including everything from film making to fizzy drinks. But many of these non-software open source projects are met with skepticism by OSS purists. There’s a tendency to see this practice as a dilution of the original open source movement as well as a deviation from OSS guidelines maintained by organizations like the Open Source Initiative.

Should Open Source mean software only or should its ideas extend to all areas of life and creativity? The following list of real world open source projects should give you some great food for thought!

Click here to continue reading

Once upon a time, there was BeOS. It was a wonderful operating system (OS), built by Be Inc. in 1991. Back then it has all the hallmarks of a revolutionary OS, and while its punch may have weakened over the years, it still has the potential to be a great platform. It was originally optimized for digital media work, it squeezed the juice out of multiprocessor systems, used a nice 64-bit journaling file system by the name of BFS and used an API written in C++ (because of its ease of programming). Although BeOS is not a Unix derivative, it used the bash shell and was POSIX compatible. Unfortunately, BeOS was not viable from a commercial point of view, and the company stopped its development. Be Inc. was acquired by Palm Inc., and now BeOS fans are trying to bring it back to life once more. Projects such as Haiku for example, are trying to build a new BeOS, from scratch. Others, such as PC/OS are using Linux distributions as their basis.

So what is PC/OS all about? It’s a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which seems to be the epitome of all ‘user friendly’ distros lately), and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it mostly derives from Xubuntu given that it uses XFCE as the main desktop environment. PC/OS aims to provide a stable, easy to use, out of the box operating system. To say that it’s fool proof would be exaggerating given the various installation problems I encountered, particularly with sound and video cards, but I’ll leave that aside for now and move onto the mainstay of this review. Click here to continue reading

Apricot is the title of an open source game currently being developed by the Amsterdam-based Blender Institute. While Blender is perhaps best known in the open source world for its cross-platform 3D content creation suite of the same name, it is fast developing a presence in the multimedia entertainment industry too. In 2005/06 it launched Elephant’s Dream, “the world’s first open movie”, a short film made entirely from open source software and released with open production files. Riding on the success of this creative enterprise, Blender went on to make Big Buck Bunny, another open source animation film that recently premiered at the Amsterdam Film Academy. The characters from Big Buck Bunny will feature in the Apricot open source game.

The Apricot project was launched in February 2008 with a core team of six members covering all areas of design, artwork, development, scripting and level editing. It is a cross-platform 3D game and like its cinematic cousins, it’s built on open source software. The team use”Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together”. The fundamental aims of the project are to work in connection with the online community to deliever a piece of software that not only offers a compelling 3D game experience, but aims to “improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions”.

Curious to find out how Apricot was coming along and to hear some of the rationale behind creating an open source game, I put the following questions to the Apricot team and here’s what they said: Click here to continue reading

The guys at WineHQ have been serving up a lot of new ‘varietals’ of their application in recent months, particularly after receiving sponsorship from Google. With an average of 2 or 3 new upgraded versions per month, the developers released Wine 0.9.57 and 0.9.58 last month, and just yesterday they brought us Wine 0.9.59.

For those of you still wondering what the Wine application is, let me explain. Wine is an open source project that takes the Windows API and transposes it onto Mac and Unix based systems (OSX, OpenGL, etc). You can use it to run most current Windows programs, although there is still a fair number that don’t work at all. This is partly what the Wine team is trying to address with their frequent updates. Take a look at the OSLiving Archive entry on Wine for more details.

So, what’s new in this latest version? Let’s take a quick look. The WineHQ offical website states that the .NET framework has been given some ‘support love’, meaning that Windows apps running on Wine should generally work much better. A separate services.exe process will handle the services more efficient and in case you had some problems with http proxies, you’ll be glad to know that these issues seem to have been fixed (services.exe, or Services Control Manager is responsible for the system services, running/stopping and interacting with them). Click here to continue reading

WordPress is a widely used PHP/MYSQL blog platform or to quote directly from the source: “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” See the OSLiving Archive entry for more information.

In Retrospect
WordPress (WP) began in 2003 as a fork of the blog engine known as b2. The project was a joint venture by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. 2003 was in many ways a significant year in blog history; not only did it mark the launch of WordPress, but it was also the year in which Pyralab’s 4 year old platform, Blogger, was taken over by Google. And whereas Pyralabs had previously charged for a number of its services, Google stepped in and offered the ‘premium’ elements for free.

The third pillar underpinning the ‘blogopshere’ at that point was Movable Type (MT). It was only last year (June 2007) that the decision was made to release MT software under a GPLv2 license; prior to this it had been a closed source, fee-based platform. Then in 2004 came the release of version 3.0 and with it the famous/infamous decision to adopt tighter restrictions on licensing fees. This decision prompted a significant portion of the MT userbase to shift to the up and coming Open Source platform known as WordPress. Click here to continue reading

Dreamlinux is a modern and modular Linux system that can be run directly from a CD and optionally be easily installed onto your hard drive. See the OSLiving Archive entry for a quick overview.

The dev guys from Dreamlinux brought us the third release candidate for Dreamlinux 3.0, with the gnome-applets revised and a better installer. Some of the installer’s features were rolled back due to some security issues.

They say that they’ve tested Dreamlinux RC3 and no serious issues were detected, but to be sure, they are releasing it out in the wild, so the users can get their hands on the distro and check everything out. There will certainly be some things that ‘slipped through the testing net’.

I haven’t had the chance to seriously test the RCs, so I never encountered any problems with the reported Places and Desktop menu items that didn’t show up correctly – this now seems to be fixed. However, I did have problems installing the distro on my hard disk, due to the installer not using an entire disk and formatting it correctly. I had to manually edit the partition table and then use the partitions I made. I hope that the roll back fixes this annoying bug, since its enought to make a ‘normal’ user give up and choose a different distro.

There are a number of new codecs in this current release candidate, such as monkeys-audio and ape from xmms for example. AWN is much more user friendly now, with a nice set of applets set up by default. We now have a brand new service, called “Preload”, that optimizes memory usage on systems with more than 256 MB of RAM. You will have to turn it on manually, by going in to the Dreamlinux Control Panel – a very, very Mac-style thing – at the Services option. A restart is also required to make the changes available the next time you start your computer.

Dreamlinux’s own apps for detecting and managing the X.org configuration file for standard input/output devices got their share of improvements, thus making Dreamlinux a much more stable distro.

If you want to find out more about Dreamlinux, visit the official site or take a look at the release notes for Dreamlinux 3.0 RC3.

UPDATE: Dreamlinux 3.0 Final was released a couple of hours ago!! Read the announcement here. I’ll be covering the changes over the next few days, so stay tuned!

Welcome to part 1 of the OSLiving Log Book. This is a special category on Sourced that chronicles the development of the site since its inception. Piece by piece the log book will paint the picture of collaborative website building based on Open Source ethics and ideas. Part 1 in this series looks at the origins of the OSLiving site from fragments to initial development.

The original OSLiving started out in November 2007 as a simple html page listing some of the key components in the Open Source software field. The site was built as a consequence of an overflowing browser bookmark list and its purpose was to be a remotely accessible reference point – one step up from a bookmarks folder. There was no intention at that stage for it to be anything other than a series of personal references. Then one day in early December, I noticed a sudden shift on my hosting’s bandwidth readout in cpanel. Someone had submitted the page to Stumble Upon and within a few hours it had begun to spread virally. But it was met with a barrage of criticism about its lack of functionality, lack of aesthetics and lack of logic in including OSS and freeware side by side. That last point would become one of the most heated topics in the site’s short development history. More on that in the next Log Book entry.

This sudden surge interest got the blood flowing. There was clearly a demand for a new Open Source software list, particularly one that was simple and accessible, so I decided to build on it. I added categories and arranged the list into an intelligible multi-page strucutre. I began adding logo graphics and a basic summary for each piece of software and made use of an html template from Open Source Web Design.This took a week or so to construct and by then this ramshackle list actually looked like a website. I submitted the new site to digg with the hope that it would generate more interest and it did. The collective power of digg and stumble upon is astonishing to watch. It resulted in over 200 software recommendation emails, numerous offers for support and requests for involvment in the ‘project’. In the space of a few weeks OSLiving had gone from a mere list to a veritable project.

The next stage in the process was the addition of the community forums. This was partly a response to the email I was receiving by visitors interested in contributing to the site and partly a way of allowing the site to continue to evolve in as much an ‘organic’ way as possible. The forums brought me into contact with some of the people who now form the core OSLiving team. It worked as a sounding board to get critical feedback on development ideas and to steer the project in a direction that would turn this list of Open Source Software into a fully fledged archive.

In the next Log Book entry I will go into more detail on some of the key decisions that were made, including the points of contention, the ideas that sparked outrage and the working methodology that emerged as a result of collaboraion.