http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9368 Editors' Choice 2006 By LJ Staff on Wed, 2006-11-01 02:00. Linux Journal Excellent competition forced our editors to make some difficult decisions for the 2006 Editors' Choice Awards for software, hardware and services. Outside the open-source products that work on Windows as well as Linux, Windows continues to evolve into a Microsoft-only platform, as Microsoft continues to eliminate its commercial competition. But, competition thrives more than ever on Linux. Pick just about any category of software, and you can find at least two or three excellent candidates, often more. And, the available products are so good, it's difficult to claim that there is a hands-down best, such as the definitive word processor or e-mail client. One's choice often boils down to personal taste. Here's how we approached the task of selecting winners this year. We asked vendors to nominate the products they released this year. We combined their nominations with our own choices, and our editors chose the best of the best for each category. If there's a flaw in our nomination process, it is that it is sometimes impossible for our editors to try out every product or service in the list of nominations. This is especially true of things like hosting and colocation services. In cases like these, personal experience had to trump vendor claims. For example, there may be a better hosting service than the one that earned our award, but we can vouch for our choice from personal experience, which carries more weight. In the end, the process was fun, despite the challenge. We hope some of your favorites captured top honors, or if not, managed to get an honorable mention. So, on with the show. [See the link at the top of this page]
Has anybody come up w/a good stand-alone charting program for Linux yet? I tried SUSE a few yrs ago and loved it. The only reason I went back to XP was because of the charting situation. H
Who would like to join me in a community project to create such a package? If we were to use the excellent Qt framework it would be pretty easy and portable to Windoz, Linux, and Mac.... not to mention multi-lingual. Qt is awesome and easy to work with. Also consider it has a RAD designer aptly called "designer". Qt is known to most people as a cross platform user interface toolkit, but it is much more. Qt supports, appart from graphical user interfaces, also database, files, filesystems, sockets and much more in a platform independent manner. I am planning on doing a trader's oss package that rivals any and all commercial packages. For traders by traders... A complete plug-in framework that would allow for all aspects (that any trader can conceive of). Once again Qt makes it easy. But I'm pretty busy right now, so unless other people can take the reigns, you'll have to wait about 6 months for me to initiate the project. Here's a couple other links that extends the widget set for plotting: Qwt widget set qtiplot Lastly, the entire KDE desktop/window manager is in Qt not to mention thousands of other apps. I love Qt. If people show interest in working on this with me, I'll be able to contribute. But for me to initiate the complete project.. it will have to wait. -kt
Now here's something interesting in the open source world. Sun to open source Java under GPL. IMHO this is a big deal. http://news.lycos.com/dynamic/stori...GY&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2006-11-13-00-26-47
Thanks for the link dcraig; that is good news. It's funny cause I was always under the impression that java was oss. I have to admit that I haven't even played with java programming yet, and I must have confused myself with it's portability. On a more general note, how long till the OSS philosophy becomes main stream do ya think? As a big supporter of OSS, I currently see it as growing vastly and becoming more and more common place. Lookout Microsoft, your business model may possibly be closing in on extinction. -kt
So it looks like the favorite is Ubuntu 6.06. I think that is the current linux distro that is packaged with the linux magazines on the stands now.
Yeah it is the clear favorite. But, I've never tried it cause I'm a diehard Gentoo user . Also, I would probably choose Kubuntu over Ubuntu because it uses KDE rather than Gnome, which is the desktop/window-manager I prefer. You can check out the user rankings of various distributions here: http://distrowatch.com/.
Sun also considering GPL for Solaris: http://open.itworld.com/4914/061113opensolarisgpl/page_1.html Solaris has some very usefull and unique facilties such as dtrace and the Z file system which are well ahead of anything else out there. I assume that if it is GPL'ed they may find their way into Linux. Sun must now easily top the list of commerical contributors to open source. Watch out Microsoft.