Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Strong Linux smartphone sales in China helped Motorola achieve the highest overall year-on-year growth among the top five vendors in the PDA/Smartphone market, according to Gartner. In contrast, Motorola's Symbian- and Microsoft-based smartphones are "not making significant progress," Gartner reports.

Chapter 20 from Marcel Gagné's new book Moving to Ubuntu Linux reprinted with permission of Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Enterprise security specialist Internet Security Systems (ISS) - which is soon to become an IBM subsidiary - claims to have become the first enterprise security company to provide server security protection for the latest Linux and Solaris operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0 AS/ES and Solaris 10 SPARC.

Asa Dotzler has conducted an interview with Mozilla developer Boris Zbarsky. Boris contributed to the Mozilla project for a number of years as a volunteer and now works part-time for the Mozilla Corporation. Questions were suggested by readers of Asa's weblog.

Open source software is playing a growing role in telephony, and getting the attention of major equipment suppliers, but there is still an element of “buyer beware” in the use of open-source telephony technologies. Those were the key messages from a panel on the subject at the inaugural Voice 2.0 conference here Monday.

The built in webserver in Visual Studio 2005, formerly known as Casini, uses a dynamic or static port on the localhost machine (e.g. http://localhost:2049/default.aspx). It is dynamic by default, but you can make it static if you choose.

We like openSUSE 10.1. Really, we do. And, it's not just us -- openSUSE has been holding onto second place, after Ubuntu, for months now on DistroWatch, and it's even been crawling close to first place in recent days. There's just been this one little, well not so little really, problem: the revised YaST package manger, which is used for adding new programs and updating old ones, has stunk. There have been fixes, but they've all left something to be desired. Perhaps the biggest single problem was simply this: when you have a broken package manager, how do you use it to fix itself? It was doable. It was also painful. Now, the openSUSE project has finally come up with the most practical fix of all: SUSE Linux 10.1 "remastered."

In a letter to the deputy director general of the European Commission's Enterprise and industry section, which made its way into the hands of the INQUIRER, Hugo Lueders, of the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) seeks to rubbish a report into the economic impact of open source software (dubbed FLOSS in the EU, so as not to upset the French – Free/Libre Open Source Software).

Colorado-based OpenLogic said today that it is now offering its customers indemnification coverage for intellectual property infringement on 160 open source projects offered by the firm. OpenLogic said the coverage was targeted at giving enterprises peace of mind when using open source products.

An East German company will soon begin selling an IP-PBX setup based on a Mac Mini running Linux. 4S Newcom's iBlue package comes with an iPod Shuffle that acts as a boot device for the Mac Mini, plus five Linux-based VoIP phones.

Open source software can help manage large software projects of globally distributed, individual contributors with virtually no management overhead. As open source blends more and more with the commercial software industry, this property of the open source phenomenon, which I will refer to as "open source globalization," may have an even higher impact on engineering jobs than IT offshoring. But this time, the news is not so bad for those who embrace the change.

Under urging from Intel Corp., TransMedia's Glide online applications suite--an emerging competitor to Microsoft Office--will gain a Linux desktop client in January of next year plus a Linux version of its back-end infrastructure during the March 2007 timeframe. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

With the release of the 2.6.19-rc1-mm1 kernel, the ext4 filesystem was merged into Andrew Morton's -mm tree for further testing. In the announcement Andrew notes that the new filesystem is compatible with ext3 until you add a file that has extents. He also notes, "when comparing performance with other filesystems, remember that ext3/4 by default offers higher data integrity guarantees than most. So when comparing with a metadata-only journalling filesystem, use `mount -o data=writeback'.(Although this doesn't seem to make much difference with ext3)" The goal is to stabilize the new filesystem within the next six to nine months, and ultimately to replace the ext3 filesystem.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application. Download packages for Kubuntu, SuSE or you can try before you install with the KOffice 1.6 live CD.

In a research note, Jefferies analyst Katherine Egbert says that she has heard Oracle will probably be entering the Linux market “soon,” with a “software stack” featuring Ubuntu Linux. “We have heard that Ubuntu is currently working to certify its recently introduced server OS to all [of] Oracle’s major products, including databases and middleware. The relationship between Oracle and Ubuntu seems to have come together rather quickly, and is perhaps the fallout from an attempt by Red Hat and Oracle to work more closely together. Red Hat management offered yesterday that they would continue to work closely with Oracle should such an event occur, while at the same time continuing to develop complementary technologies.”

cURL is a handy command-line network tool whose name stands for "client for URLs," but think of it as a "copy for URLs" -- it can copy to or from a given URL in any of nine different protocols.

IBM's Brad McCredie, who works for the Systems and Technology Group as the chief architect of the future Power6 processor, gave his presentation at the forum last week, and divulged a lot of the inner workings of the device. There's a lot of stuff in this chip, which is what you would expect from a device with around 750 million transistors.

System tray items can now be reordered by the user. Support for action sounds in okular. Work begins on Dynamic Brush architecture and canvas improvements in Krita, with layer handling improvements in Karbon. Krita switches library dependencies from ImageMagick to GraphicsMagick. Memory usage optimisations in the KHTML web rendering engine and Amarok.

Over the next two or three entries I'm going to provide summaries of activity represented on some of the mail-lists most relevant to the development and use of audio software for Linux (and other platforms). I'm subscribed to a variety of such lists, and it occurred to me that a summary of their traffic would be a good indicator of the breadth and depth of our corner of the larger Linux world. I'll proceed through my lists in loose alphabetical order, starting with news from theArdour camp.

Puppy Linux has been updated to version 2.11: "Puppy version 2.11 is out. Puppy 2.10 was the first Puppy to use LZMA compression for the 'pup_210.sfs' Squashfs file (the file that has all of the applications). We found however that it doubled the start-up time for each application, not very noticeable on a modern fast CPU, however very much a problem on older hardware. Thus, for 2.11 we have gone back to the standard GZIP compression. Version 2.11 is basically an improved 2.10. Apart from reverting to GZIP compression, this release has various bug fixes. There is also an 'xorgdrvrs' ISO that includes the extra X.Org basic video drivers."