Software patents problem.

But the problem is that Mono is dangerous for Free Software. The heart of the matter is, as usual, software patents. Microsoft have patents on the technology inside .NET, and since the Tom Tom lawsuit, Microsoft have shown they are not averse to attacking Free Software using patent infringement claims.

Novell agreement with microsoft.

Miguel’s employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn’t a problem, for them.

And all others?

It is vitally important to the continued success of the community development model that one part of the community does not enter into an agreement which gives some people patent protection while leaving other people out in the cold. That is why I was so opposed to the patent agreements recently entered into by Novell, Xandros and other companies.

This one is reported by Andrew Tridgell, negotiator with Microsoft for Samba.

Update 26-12-2009
Other valid reasons to say no to mono, moonlight, microsoft and the traitor de icaza.

developer Tom “spot” Callaway, Engineering Manager and Red Hat legal expert at Fedora, made it clear that the Fedora project, sponsored largely by Red Hat, will continue to leave the software out. One of the reasons was that the new promise does not protect Linux distributors any more than the old one did.

Ok, we are ready to do some text recognition…
But, under Karmic Koala, there is a problem with tif image as reported by myself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tesseract/+bug/461177
The problem is due to a transparent alpha layer that some tif images have (investigation needed here…*), so before do text recognition is necessary to eliminate it, elsewhere tesseract will generate an empty file…
Just install imagemagick and from a shell do this steps:
convert inputimage.tif inputimage_tmp.pbm
convert inputimage_tmp.pbm inputimage_ok.tif
Original solution founded here.

Now we are finally ready to launch tesseract on our tif image.
Just do
tesseract inputimage_ok.tif outputfile
and tesseract will generate outputfile.txt with recognized text.

ps. The packaged version under karmic is 2.03 and not the last one, 2.04, that, as advised on this page, fixed it. So if you prefer, remove old version and install the new version from source.

* Solved. In Gimp is possible to remove the alpha layer. Just go to
Layer (Livello) -> Transparency (Trasparenza) -> Remove alpha layer (Rimuovi canale alpha)

Many improvements are done to ALSA and now the code is better and cleaned in the kernel driver while the userspace library it’s rather complex, for backward compatibility. Pulseaudio, the sound server, go forward, and manage some new requirements of an actual multi-user, multi-source desktop environment, like, quote Colin:

• Software mixing
• Independent (per-application) volume control
• Dealing with permissions (is the user allowed to access the sound device?)
• Dealing with Bluetooth devices
• Dealing with Network based devices (UPnP, Apple Airtunes, Native PulseAudio etc).
• Handling the moving of streams between outputs.
• Handling sound from remote applications run via X11 over a network.
• Dealing with routing policy (Music goes to USB speakers, Desktop sound events to built in speakers, VoIP to Bluetooth headset)
• Effects to promote HCI (e.g. positional event sounds  – button clicks etc, coming out louder on the left hand speaker when triggered from the left hand side of the desktop)
• Power Consumption and Efficient savings.
• Reduces risk of buffer under-runs.

So, GNU/Linux users stay calm and contribute everyone in your manner to the FLOSS world.
Also the sound stack is an a good state

It is still in development but it is a great intitiative of Teester because it’s a good way to integrate Thunderbird with Gnome.

The plugin is written in Python, and it needs the python-evolution binding. Now i will explain you how to install it. I am using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 64 bit version.

Obviously you need on your system Thunderbird and its calendar extension: Lightning.

Open Synaptic and install these packages and their dependencies:

python2.5-dev, python-gtk2-dev, libecal1.2-dev,
libgdk-pixbuf-dev, libebook1.2-dev

or using a terminal:

sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev python-gtk2-dev libecal1.2-dev \
libgdk-pixbuf-dev libebook1.2-dev

Download the evolution-python binding from Conduit site.

Open a terminal and digit:

tar zxvf evolution-python-0.0.4
cd evolution-python-0.0.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

Well done, now evolution-python bindings are installed. Now download Evolution Mirror add-on and add it to your Thunderbird Add-ons.

Open Evolution, create an account. You have to do this because it creates some basic data such as the Personal calendar.

Now open your Thunderbird and start add Tasks or Events and you’ll see them on the Gnome Clock applet.

As i have already said, the plugin is still in development, for now it does not add events and tasks that has been already inserted before. It also merge all calendars’ data in one unique Evolution calendar. These are some missing but i think and hope that they will be fixed soon.

Anyway is a great work! I hope to have time to help the developer in this add-on, also because it will be very useful with my still-in-development tool called SyncIt. Take a look on my Trac to know something about it even if it is not updated and poorly documented.

I assume you have installed Trac on your local server, or on your Dreamhost account. To enable communication between Trac and Mylyn we have to install and enable the XmlRpcPlugin that you can download from trac-hacks.

After the download, copy your plugin on the system where Trac is installed. Uncompress the archive and go to the 0.10 folder if you have Trac 0.10 or trunk folder otherwise.

Now digit these commands:

chmod 755 -R *
python setup.py bdist_egg

Wait until the Python egg is created and then copy it into the plugins directory of your Trac environment. The egg file is in the dist directory created during the egg building.

Now go into your Admin account of your Trac web interface and go to Plugins page. You’ll see a TracXMLRPC 0.1 field. Clicking on it you’ll see some component. You have to enable these components as shown in the next figure.

Well we’ve almost done. Now we have to install Mylyn and Mylyn extras into Eclipse.

Start Eclipse and click on Help -> Software Updates. Click on the Availabe Software tab. Click on Add Site button and paste these two “repository”:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/extras

Now select to install these features:

Wait until Eclipse asks you to restart to update changes and then you’ll be able to use Mylyn with your Trac environment.

There is also a good screencast: watch, download the plugin, install, love it…

Open Source Innovation, of course!