Open Source | Markus Thielmann

CrunchPad announced to be dead

Submitted by Markus Thielmann on Tue, 2009-12-01

As TechCrunchs Michael Arrington reports, the CrunchPad is dead.

It was aimed to be a low-cost tablet PC, based on open source software. Since their Goal was to offer it for around 200$, it might have been a really successful gadget.

I'm still not convinced that this decision is final. It seems there are some serious issues about intellectual property rights and the distribution of the profits. So putting CrunchPad to death is a lose-lose situation. If you include possible customers, it's actually a lose-lose-lose situation.

Let's hope TechCrunch and Fusion Garage can sort things out.

Canonical released the code behind Launchpad.net today

Submitted by Markus Thielmann on Tue, 2009-07-21

Today, Canonical released Launchpad, their collaboration and code hosting platform for software projects as free and open source software. They choose AGLPv3 as software license, which allows everyone to use the software for private or business matters, as long as they allow others to get the (changed) code as well.

Installation was pretty forward, only a small bug prevented me to install it right away. Thanks to the launchpad developers, the bug was fixed within minutes. Additional to that, the installer didn't agree with my PostgreSQL setup, so I needed to change that as well. Fortunately, there's a really great Howto on that matter as well.

Launchpad local setup

Congratulations to the Launchpad developers, they did great work on that piece of software.

It seems all modules of Launchpad are open sourced. So I'd like to pass a big thank you to Mark Shuttleworth. This is a great contribution of Canonical to the open software community.

This is worth sharing

Submitted by Markus Thielmann on Mon, 2009-07-20

/*
*
* Copyright (c) 2009, Microsoft Corporation.
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License,
* version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope it will be useful, but WITHOUT
* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
* more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
* this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple
* Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
*
* Authors:
* Haiyang Zhang <haiyangz@microsoft.com>
* Hank Janssen <hjanssen@microsoft.com>
*
*/

See LKML for more information.

Axel - Download from multiple sources

Submitted by Markus Thielmann on Sun, 2009-03-01

There are quite a few "Download Managers" available on Ubuntu. Some of them support a technique called "multipart download", which essentially opens multiple connections to one source and thus speed-up downloads.

Since I consider this quite obtrusive (at least if the manager opens more than four connections to one web server), I was searching for a way to download a file from multiple sources ("mirrors") simultaneously.

I found Axel (apt-get), which is essentially a simple shell application, which accepts multiple URL as parameters.

markus@thielmann:~$ axel http://example.com/file.iso http://mirror.example.com/get.iso http://mirror2.example.com/download.iso

Please notice that axel does not check if all files are identical. So it might be a good idea to check md5 sums if available.

I'd love to see a Firefox plugin for axel, which would allow to add more mirrors to certain download.

Analysis of potential of open source software in germany's capital region of Berlin-Brandenburg.

Submitted by Markus Thielmann on Wed, 2009-02-11

Berlin's TSB Technology Foundation sponsored a study researching the potentials of open source software in the capital region of Berlin-Brandenburg.

If you're involved in the Ubuntu project or any other open source project, this might be a great chance to identify possible cooperations (especially if you're commercially involved in open source software) and to meet other members of the open source community. So, feel free to attend the introduction of the deliverables:

Location: Ludwig Erhard Haus Berlin, Mendelssohnsaal, 7. OG, Fasanenstrasse 85, 10623 Berlin
Date: 25.02.2009 at 18:00 hours

You'll need to register your attendence. The event is free of charge, seats are limited. Please notice that all presentations are held in german.