macfidelity

Today i stumbled upon this really really readable article at www.roughlydrafted.com
Teaser:

How is an untouchable superpower defeated? In many cases, it foolishly engages itself in an unwinnable war and simply consumes itself.

Microsoft, threatened by the encroachment of competition from open source, has long waged a detached propaganda war against free software and in particular Linux, but has recently escalated its conflict into a full blown attack. Here’s what’s happening, and why it will greatly accelerate the company’s undoing.

Check it out.

First impression….sounds like Partition Magic but for free.

The project page can be found here

Quote:

Parted Magic is a Linux LiveCD/USB/PXE with its elemental purpose being to partition hard drives.

Optimized at approximately 40MB, the Parted Magic OS employs core programs of VisParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, while featuring other useful programs (e.g. Partition Image, TestDisk, fdisk, sfdisk, dd, ddrescue, etc.) and an excellent set of documentation to benefit the user. An extensive collection of fileystem tools are also included, as Parted Magic supports the following: ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs.

The latest version is updated with: Linux 2.6.24.2, Parted 1.8.8, ntfsprogs-2.0.0, ntfs-3g-1.2216, and VisParted-2.1.

Parted Magic uses Busybox for basic Unix commands and networking, the Dropbear SSH server and client, and Firefox to surf the web.

The current Xserver is xorg-server-1.3.0.0 with the following drivers: apm, ark, ati, chips, cirrus, cyrix, glint, i128, i740, i810, mga, neomagic, nv, r128, riva128, radeon, rendition, s3, s3virge, savage, siliconmotion, sis, tdfx, tga, trident, tseng, vesa, vmware, and voodoo.

The mini Xserver, Xvesa, is also available.

Parted Magic falls under the terms of the GPL.

Sounds great from my point of view. Gonna test it next time i have to do something like that.

Topic: Who Writes Linux and Who Supports It

Informations about the study here

Quote:

You can start reading the study here

German: Heise.de about the study

Just found the notMac project.

About the project (quote):

Welcome to notMac, a free, open-source utility for using the client-side dotMac services provided by Apple. Since many people already operate their own servers and don’t require dotMac’s server-side featuresâ �� ��such as an @mac.com e-mail address or online access to their contactsâ �� ��the notMac Challenge was started to encourage the development of a method for using the other OS X and iLife integrated servicesâ �� ��like syncing and iDisk accessâ �� ��using one’s own hardware. Thanks to the generous contributions of people from around the world, and a dollar-for-dollar matching fund, the challenge raised $8,622.

Currently the solution requires a server running OS X, but efforts have already begun to create Linux and Windows compatible versions. The installer and source code can be downloaded from SourceForge by clicking the links above. For any questions or comments, please visit the forums. Again, congratulations to Ben Spink for winning the challenge. I’m sure the rest of the Mac community appreciates his hard work as much as I do.

Sounds great. Gonna test this application for sure.

Download here

Forums here

About Mulberry:

Mulberry started off life as a software project that was really meant to help the author learn more about the internet and internet protocols used for email. However, it became much more than that and garnered support from a small (in internet terms) group of users and institutions many of whom relied on the product as their primary email tool.

Whilst it started as only an IMAP client and only on Mac OS, it has grown to cover not only other email protocols, but also calendaring and scheduling and is available on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux systems.

Adherence to standards is a key belief on the part of the developers, and active participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force and the standards process is an important aspect.

Ultimately the failure of the original company (for a whole host of reasons) was really a reflection of the fact that Mulberry had failed to grow a market share that could sustain the company in a market where free clients (of varying quality) are readily available.

Now Mulberry itself is free, though its future is still cloudy in terms of whether development will advance or not…

Quote from the project page:

The full code for Mulberry (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux) is now available as open source under an Apache 2 License. Full details available on the wiki.

The link to the trac-system

So lets wait for the first new releases of that client….

If you ever want to read about linux on Intel-Macs check this page.

Shorty….

Just found the rEFIt project.

Quote from project page:

rEFIt is a boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs. You can use it to boot multiple operating systems easily, including triple-boot setups with Boot Camp. It also provides an easy way to enter and explore the EFI pre-boot environment.

Image:

Maybe you will reach the point that you need some Linux-based applications like: MC or similar.

Basicly there are two ways to handle this situation:

• Fink
• MacPorts

Today i’ll describe some basic things and steps to get MacPorts working under Mac OS X.

Read the rest of this entry »