Tobi Waves

Asa Dotzler from Mozilla foundation on Linux on the desktop

There are 4 key factors to Linux success on the desktop

migration - the migration path for users must be as simple as possible. This means that there should be a way to copy complete user environments over from windows to linux, including bookmarks, last open files, everything.

stability - there must be a simple unified binary package format across all distros. Backward compatibility between releases must be absolute. API changes must not break existing applications. Mozilla today runs from Windows 98 to Windows 2003 with a single binary distribution.

simplicity - to multiple choices in setup and configuration frighten new users. Installers should not offer choices since new users can not answer these questions. In general the developers should offer a good solution instead of a bag of selectable ones.

comfort - fulfill peoples expectations of how things should work. And what people expect today is largely influenced by windows.

There is increasing incentive for people to move over from windows, because

a) constant expensive windows updates

b) windows is so malware ridden that it approaches the state of un-usability for average users.

So the time to bring more users to Linux on the desktop has never been better than now. The technology is ready.

In the QampA afterward, an Ubuntu person said that the next Ubuntu release will have full HW support for current DELL, HP and IBM laptops.

Edny on OpenSource Genetics

Edny makes a case for the difficulty in getting anything done at all in genetics today because of the devastating effects of patents on all sorts of tiny bits of genetic information. He mentions two websites that are working against this problem by sharing open genetic information: (parts.mit.edu ...) and (www.biobricks.org ...)

Danny O'Brien on CA releasing Ingress as OpenSource

After lenghty details about licensing choices there is an interesting QampA which boils down to: CA has NOT given up Ingress. They are building all their tools on Ingress today, there are more CA people working on Ingress today than before the release.

Tony Gaughan

Talks about creating instructions. He is on of the makers of Howtoons, a excellent series of cartoons on "How To ..." for kids: (howtoons.com ...)

by Yared

ActiveGrid is a IDE for building WebApplications. It is written in python, but it supports not only Python as a language but also PHP and Perl (in progress).

ActiveGrid has support for different databases and graphical representations for database structures, page flows. It uses stadard xml formats (mostly from w3c and oasis) for the representation of all the things you edit graphically. In contrast to other tools ActiveGrid is not a code generator, it works by looking at the structure of tables and processes and works out what todo at runtime. This allows to adapt to the browser that is using the app.

There is built-in support for web services. Web services can be accessed like databases. Or rather databases can be accessed like web services.

The server side runs on in python (currently), php (soon), perl (soon). There is also a special apache module called mod_activegrid. The server side has an elaborate caching architecture to minimize processing at every stage.

(www.activegrid.com ...)

by Aron Boodman

Greasmonkey grew out of bookmarklets where bookmarks contain little bits of javascript instead of webpage urls.

GM is a Firefox extension that lets users alter webpages as they come in. Since you can not really control what the website providers do, this whole website adaption process is a very fluid process. Sort of shell scripting for websites.

Greasemonkey scripts are just normal javascript with a special header section added that gives greasemonkey additional information about where to use the script.

// =UserScript=
// @name	 User Script Template
// @namespace	 (younpup ...)
// @description Test script
// @include     google.com
// @exclude     mail.gmail.com*
alert('Hello World')

Read more on Greasemonkey in (diveintogreasemonkey.org ...)

Get greasemonkey from (greasemonkey.mozdev.org ...)

Web site providers seem to like Greasemonkey since it gives them higher user loyalty. Some websites have eve integrated features that were pioneered by greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey has had several security issues in June, these were fixed with Greasemonkey 0.5. On top of that special changes made to Firefox Deer Park to further improve the security by protecting document and windows globals. Also in FF 1.5, Greasemonkey will be executed in a Sandbox that even better separates it from the influence of malicious documents.

The ultimate book on Javascript "JavaScript: The definitive Guide" (www.amazon.com ...)

Miguel de Icaza about Linux on the Desktop

Novel (5500 people) is moving itself away from Windows. The first stage with a move from MS Office to OpenOffice is already complete. The OS migration has progressed to 50% and should be at 80% by November. This dog food approach gives them a lot of insight into the linux on the desktop problem.

Major tasks are: Making Hardware work and implementing missing functionality in the OS.

All the new Applications Novel does for Linux are implemented in MONO this makes porting from Windows much simpler. MONO currently supports the following CPUs Itanium, Sparc, StringARM, x86-64, s390 and runs on Linux, Solaris, OS X.

Gnome is being migrated to Cairo based vector rendering and to further accelerate things, the X11 display is moved into running on top of OpenGL meaning all rendering is becoming hardware accelerated.

Miguel shows a number of neat demos of the new desktop. Like for example a mplayer windows wrapping around the edge of a 3d box shaped desktop (each side of the box is a desktop) as the mplayer window is moved from one desktop to another. The new desktop stuff will debut in SuSE 10 due in October.

Novell will start something called OpenSuSE in the next few weeks where you can download ISOs of the running system as it is being developed.