1st place:

2nd place (my favorite):

3rd place (also better than the winner imho :p):

Congratulations to these authors!

–

Extra (this movie was included in the 5 finalists, but unfortunately didn’t make it):

to download the ogg-versions of these movies, click here!

The CodeWeavers people have already put in great support for DirectX 9 in their latest version for gaming, and it seems they are planning to also include version 10. Other things include support for .Net & GDIPlus. All this should be included in their latest release, version 7.2. For the expected 8.0, they plan on revamping the Linux UI, but also the Mac version is going to get some new goodies. Further on, better support for IE7, Office and much more applications is to be expected.

While I haven’t used any of their products myself lately, I must say I’m quite impressed by their efforts. Since I use Wine myself on an almost daily basis, I can vouch for the fact that the program has definitely reached a mature state. However when using the ‘vanilla Wine’, be prepared for a lot of tweaking. This is where CodeWeavers jumps in. They have been able to provide all this tweaking for you, giving you a working product out-of-the-box.

I’m usually not so enthousiastic about commercial spin-offs of Open Source products, but this one really is worth it’s money. If you’re not willing to spend time on tweaking & troubleshooting Wine issues, or would like professional support when stumbling upon a problem, then consider this product, I’m sure you’ll love it!

According to its developers, Samba 4 is about to change all this. While it is true that there is still a long way to go, some nice things are to be expected. As previous versions required tedious configuration skills and reading through tons of manuals, version 4 should “just work”.  The DNS scheme is now being generated automatically, and the OpenLDAP back-end, if required, is being configured by Samba itself. Scripting has vastly improved, as now Python is being used as the default scripting language, however there are still bindings for other tools as well.

All good news, but there are of course a couple of disadvantages. For example, there is no real administration interface. In the past, Samba used to have a web-interface, but due to lack of support this has been removed. The door has of course been left open for the community to develop this, so I think we will see quite a few of these interfaces pop up soon enough. Another downside is that authentication for Unix clients and the print server, compared to Samba 3,  are not yet implemented. In it’s current state this would mean you’d have to run the two versions side by side.  Luckily, there seem to be plans to re-instate these features as soon as possible.

Of course there is still a lot of work to do. One of the things mentioned are domain trusts not yet implemented. This is still a bit of a set-back. However the fact that the Samba-team is working closely together with Microsoft is proving to be successful. Unfortunately, Samba 4 is not yet released to the public, but an alpha release is due soon. So for all you early-adopters out there, just a little more patience .

It seems that this writer does not really have that much in-depth knowledge about what is going on in the FOSS world, and how this community works. This is also being reflected in the comments on the article. It looks like this person has fired up one or a couple of popular distributions for a limited amount of time, but didn’t really like what he saw, writing this twisted article as a consequence.

However it is true that Linux, or any Unix for that matter, still has quite the long way to go. While some in the Unix-family surely are more mature than others, especially when you take a look at proprietary Unices, I hardly agree with what was written.

A lot of the article, in multiple of it’s points, is in essence about the fact that things are so de-centralized. Well what do you want? We are talking about Open-Source here. Most of the work is done by volunteer-programmers that devote their free time to all these projects. There is no central leadership and while some of the bigger projects have showed that they do posses quite good management, most of them are just people having fun.

The first point discussed is the different types of package management. True there is not really a standard, although the RPM-format is already widely accepted, as is the DEB one. In fact, these two alone are probably the most used in Linux-land, and there do exist tools to convert one to the other without much hassle.

Second up is the de-centralisation and text-based configuration files. With the first part I totally disagree. Apart from some exotic software here and there, all of the config-files are stored in the /etc folder. The fact that it’s using text-based files actually poses an advantage to me. It’s easier to backup, and you don’t have to spend endless amounts of time browsing through one big configuration database. I know other OS-es do it differently, but if you like that method, then use that OS!

Point three is up. The author is discussing the problems with the kernel Application Binary Interfaces. Big words, and although I’m no expert on this one myself, I don’t really see the problem here. While it’s true that ABI’s are in charge of interfacing between the kernel and applications, these days most applications use higher-level libraries. So unless you are using a lot of proprietary drivers or so, this really is not such a big deal…

Up next is Native File Versioning. Basically, this is functionality that allows you to restore a certain file or folder to a previous version. The author seems to be used to this from his Windows experience, but being a Microsoft connaisseur myself, this really doesn’t work that well anyway. Admitted in some cases it can be handy, but I haven’t used or needed this even once in the many years I’ve been using computers. If you’re smart and you’re going to edit critical files, for god’s sake, make a backup of the file before you start…

On the next two points in the article the writer discusses the Graphical User Interface and X11 integration of applications. I’m going to vent my comment on these two together, as in my opinion they are quite linked together. One of the things I’d like to say about this is that the proposed features by the author really don’t seem to add any value to me. Integrating the GUI more with the kernel only provides semi-lock-in scenarios which should be avoided as much as possible. The GUI’s are already having a lot of standards, more than enough it seems to me. Secondly the article discusses the problematic behaviour that when your X crashes, all applications running under X crash as well. When reading this I was kinda speechless. I mean, isn’t that kind of logic. Is restarting X so difficult? No! Even the author admits that… Actually, the times current X sessions crash isn’t that often anymore anyway, so why even bother on this one? I’m sure over time more and more stability will become available.

Last but not least is the ‘lack of’ commercial backup utilities. Again I totally disagree on this one. All the big players on the backup market already provide full support for almost any Unix/Linux flavor. In fact, most of these things actually work better in Linux, at least in my experience. For end-users the options might be a bit more limited, but if you look around a bit harder, you would find plenty of options, and if you insist on using something ‘Windows-only’, you can always try to run it in Wine, emulating the Windows environment.

Conclusion, this article really dropped the ball on this one. I really am not the type to start writing huge comments on other people’s articles normally, but this one made me feel I should make an exception, and so I did.

This is very good news indeed, as it will enable Linux users to run Silverlight websites natively. Since the development is sponsored by Novell, and they have a partnership with Microsoft, they were even able to throw in the official Microsoft codecs, meaning even more compatibility.

While I’m personally a bit sceptic about this Novell/M$ marriage, in this case it’s clearly proving to be a good step. Who would have thought not so long ago that Linux users would ever get free software with official Microsoft licensed codecs in it? Right, nobody .

I think a lot of Linux people are eargerly waiting for this one. Microsoft themselves promised some time ago a plugin for Silverlight on Linux, but so far I haven’t seen one bit of that promise. And since they are able to provide one for Mac OS X, I find it quite strange that they leave the Linux community out in the cold. Maybe I’m wrong on this one as I haven’t really followed up on it so well, so please, if you know more then me, don’t be shy and leave a comment .

I can’t wait to check this thing out. Probably it won’t be working 100%, but hey it’s still a beta after all, and at least some compatibility is already appreciated. Big thanks to Novell & Microsoft for this one .

This version is currently only available for Linux users, and can be obtained here. This decission was made because 64-bit Linux distributions don’t ship with a 32-bit browser by default. Neither do they usually offer an extended 32-bit emulation layer. The need for a native 64-bit flash player thus is the greatest for this platform.

Windows and Mac users should not worry, a version for their platform is in the make as well, and will be released soon. In the end, the final versions will all be released on the same time anyway.

I think this is a very, very good development. The community has been screaming for this to come out for years now. Many of us already had given up hope. Yes it is true that with using a custom wrapper, emulating or other means you could solve a lot of flash problems, but working native is always better!

On the software side, you can expect the usual goodies like OpenOffice (still version 2.x though), FireFox 3, The Gimp and many others. Another big improvement is better support for wireless networks, a thing that has been pushing Linux back in the past.

Actually, CRN is reporting that this new Ubuntu is outdoing Windows Vista. With faster installation time, better functionality and ease of use, and the improved wireless, this version if bound to be the best alternative for Windows so far. They also did a benchmark of both Operating Systems on the same hardware, and it seems Ubuntu is faster on almost every point.

For existing Ubuntu users, there is now an improved upgrade process. Actually, you don’t have to do much, just change your upgrade path in System >> Administration >> Software Sources to Normal releases. Next you run Update Manager, and the software automatically notifies you that there is a new release available.

The only downside for me is that this upgrade process is terribly slow. On my system it needs to get about 1300 new packages, and it seems the host serving them is having a hard time. This of course might be only a temporary problem. I’m also expecting this upgrade to break some of my customizations I did, but this is normal as I use quite the exotic setup here . For someone working with an out-of-the-box 8.04 install, this shouldn’t be an issue. This makes the upgrade-process very newbie-friendly.

All in all, I’m having high expectations of this new release, and I can’t wait for this damned upgrade to finish . Hopefully not too many hickups will happen, but if they do, stay tuned to this blog, and you’ll surely will read about it!

However this does not mean its development has finished. Developers will still continue to make bug-fixes and add new features, with the difference that the heart of the system, called the structure, stays identical. This means users would no longer have to check if their kernel version, utilities used and drive format match up to each other.

Of course this alone doesn’t make Ext4 ready for production use. As with any new file-system, administrators in the corporate world will wait a little longer to include this and first see how the new system performs on a day-to-day basis. Another drawback is the fact that you still have to maintain one of the older file-systems, as neither the LILO or GRUB boot-loaders can successfully load the kernel off an ext4-partition.

Another important development is that there is already talk of giving Linux a new, next-generation file-system. The system of choice would be btrfs (pronounced butter-fs). Since this system however is still quite immature, and developing a good file-system takes a lot of time, ext4 could be used to bridge the gap.

All in all, I think it’s good to see that the Linux world is working hard to give us the best systems possible. I personally eagerly await ext4, although I think I’ll also wait a little longer to include these in my systems. But maybe if you’re running a non-critical machine and feel adventurous… .

This new version, which is supposed to be an even more fierceful competitor for Adobe’s popular Flash player, looks very promising. Among one of the most eye-catching improvements is the promise that this new version will be shipped with cross-platform and cross-browser support.

Supported platforms are Microsoft Windows (duh ), Mac OS X, but surprisingly, also Linux. For the browser world, you can use Internet Explorer (another big duh of course), but also Firefox and Safari.

I’m glad too see Microsoft has gotten the message from the community and is releasing this functionality also for Mac & Linux users. With version 1 so closely tied to their own Windows platform, they have had a lot of criticism to endure. Of course Mono (2) promised to partly cover these platforms, but it’s nice to see that our Redmond friends took a closer look at some other popular operating systems.

On the browser side, I’m a bit disappointed to not see any Opera support. Probably in the next few weeks we’ll see some workarounds and community patches surfacing for this, but nevertheless, I’m surprised it’s not natively supported. However I’m sure this is only a matter of time.

Whether this newest Silverlight release will be nibbling at the market share of Flash is still to be seen. So far, I haven’t really seen much use of it myself, apart from during the Beijing Olympics, where Microsoft had cleverly set up some partnerships in an attempt to boost their software use. The main drawback at the time was of course the lack of support for other browsers and platforms. Now that this has been solved (however yet to be proven), Silverlight can finally really take off. Probably more partnerships with big content providers are coming, but now at least it has a good chance of breaking through to the mainstream.

I’m sure that we’ll hear and mostly see more about this the coming weeks/months. For the time being, I’m going to take a look how Silverlight performs on my Ubuntu/Firefox setup . To be continued …

Update 15/10: Tried to download it yesterday for Linux, but currently the runtime for this platform is not yet available… Only Windows & Mac are to be found.

Developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl states on his blog that this is due to too many release-critical bugs. Translated to normal english, this just means there’s too many things not working properly just yet.

Now this is not new, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m such a huge Debian addict. Releases of this distro have historically been slow, and though this means you don’t get all the newest goodies right away, it does guarantee you a rock-solid, stable system. However, those who can’t wait for these new toys do not have to worry, as Alexander stays optimistic and invites the whole community to help out.

For the normal users, this means that if you are currently using the Etch release, you should already make the necessary modifications to your system, upgrade to Lenny, and check if everything is working properly. Here’s where my concern comes in.

I mean, it’s all nice, but if you are maintaining a server running Etch, the last thing you want to do is upset your users and start upgrading to something that even the developers think is buggy. OK, I didn’t take a good look yet at what exactly is having issues, but still, this whole thing seems fishy to me at best.

I don’t think a lot of people will be eager to jump at this kind of thing. Maybe if you have a development server running that you can ticker with, yeah … but for us poor my-machine-needs-to-stay-stable admins it’s just not do-able. Maybe if they proposed a way where you could upgrade a single application/service at a time, without jeopardizing your whole system, it would be more successful.

To conclude, this admin here (meaning me ), will watch this from a distance, and I advise all of you to do the same. Of course, the decision remains up to you. If you do decide to take the jump, good luck, and maybe let me know how it went .