And out of left field, it’s Nintendo! Never saw this one coming, did you?

The folks at OSNews have unearthed an interesting, not well-known discovery: Nintendo has released the “Nintendo ES” operating system, and not only that, but under an entirely free and open-source license.

The OS is written in C++, runs EMCAScript (JavaScript), uses Cairo for rendering, and as of recently, can run Squeak, a Smalltalk programming language implementation.

The official website includes screenshots, news, and some specifications, although it is all in Japanese. Google can come in handy.

The following screenshot is Squeak running on N-ES, virtualized with QEMU:

This project from Nintendo R&D is in very early development, but it could have a great amount of potential. No specifics are available as to what it can be used for or why it even exists, but we can only speculate. A Wii development kit? Unlikely, but possible.

“We propose an extensible component operating system architecture in which an operating system kernel uses reflection to process C++ pure virtual function based system calls and upcalls to provide a unified programming environment for application, server, and kernel development. We found that we could even develop file subsystems and a TCP/IP protocol stack on an existing operating system based on this architecture.”

While Sun’s Java platform is now almost completely open source, most distributions haven’t been updated to ship with the technology (and there is a small amount of code that still isn’t open source). Without Java, you could be missing out on running some applications and (less frequently now) Java applets on websites.

It is a little bit of a pain to install however, so in this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to install it from Sun’s website using the self-extracting installer.

So first of all, let’s head on over to the site and go to the Linux Java downloads page. Let’s jump there quickly however, so click on the following link - http://www.java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp?locale=en&host=www.java.com:80.

On that page, we want the self-extracting file (and for wide compatibility, I’m not doing the RPM version in this tutorial, so choose the one below that). Let that file download. Now we’ll need to head over to the terminal for a bit (I’ll assume that file you downloaded is on your desktop).

Read the rest of Installing Sun Java on Linux

Fedora, like many distributions, has a requirement that all the software in its repositories conform to a what is free software and open source.

Fedora as it currently stands has guidelines which only accept Free or open source software. The differences in licenses between what FSF considers Free software the OSI approved list of open source licenses are very limited currently to the reciprocal license (which is not a license under which we ship any Fedora software, and the OSI is reconsidering it anyway), few other licenses and we would gain better credibility, community support by changing our packaging guidelines to only allow Free software as defined by the FSF. We would gain by explicitly declaring what we already follow in our strong commitment to Free software.

Sometimes, you might want to install some software that doesn’t quite meet these requirements, however, such as a proprietary driver or some software that has a different licence type.

On Fedora 7, there are several repositories for additional software you can enable for this purpose. Probably the most popular is Livna. Once you enable the Livna repository, installing the software you might want should be a simple yum install away.

So how do you get the repository up and running?

The installation process involves downloading a single RPM package from the Livna and installing it. It is sort of a ‘metapackage’, in the sense that installing it will grab all the stuff you need and configure your yum installation to use Livna’s software repositories.

Download the metapackage from http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm and once the download is complete, simply double-click the file.

After confirming your root password, it should install. Now you are ready to go to your package manager and install all that additional software!