Showing headlines posted by the_doctor

Microsoft has come along way since ex-CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux ' a cancer', softening its stance on open source to the extent that Windows 10 will soon run a selection of Linux software.

"There will never be another Red Hat" has become a common refrain—one that I've personally raised. In an era when consumers prefer to pay for services instead of software, Red Hat is an anachronism.

A startup wants a mobile menu for their new app. It’s going to cost them time and money to build one from scratch, so they search on Google to find one that is ready-made, a template if you will.

The "IANA Transition" took a big step forward this month and we are one step closer to the US government handing control over the DNS and IP numbering to a vaguely-defined group accountable, effectively, to nobody.

Brett Gaylor is a Director at the Mozilla Foundation, where he helps helm the current encryption education campaign. He also oversees Mozilla’s Open Web Fellows program, which places open source technologists and activists at leading nonprofits like Amnesty International and ACLU.

Connect a keyboard and mouse, and it becomes a full-featured Linux desktop.

The development team behind the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) project, an open-source desktop environment that keeps the spirit of the old-shool KDE3.5 desktop alive, have announced the Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.3 release.

When it comes to the software I use on Linux, I'm very purpose driven in my application choices. In almost every situation, I'll use the best software for the task at hand. And as a result, sometimes this means using proprietary software on my Linux PCs.

In a world of PCs dominated by Windows and Macs, Dell's line of "Project Sputnik" laptops with Ubuntu Linux have secured a cult following.

For small businesses and consumers without enterprise deployment tools, a clean install of the aging Windows 7 can take a full day. And the problem's getting worse.

Selecting the best Linux distro is a matter of personal choice, based on your daily work flow. Two Linux experts list their personal picks for best distro and discuss each distros merits and challenges.

Publicly, Canonical Software's announcement that Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem sounds like a potential violation of the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

Hardware vendor TP-Link says it will make changes to its routers so it would prevent US users from loading custom open source firmware on their devices, all in order to comply with current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is set to remove support for AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver, known as fglrx, when the operating system update releases next month. The new hybrid AMDGPU driver should be a great replacement—but it isn’t completely ready yet and isn’t compatible with older graphics hardware. The fglrx driver will be removed when you upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if you’re using it.

By itself, Android is a fairly secure platform. But anything (and I do mean anything) connected to a network is no longer one hundred percent secure. This means the onus is on the end user to work with that device intelligently. Otherwise, you run the risk of handing over the keys to numerous kingdoms.

Before the KDE 4.1 release in 2008, Aaron Seigo announced the end of desktop icons. He was being provocative, because what he was really announcing was the end of being restricted to a single icon set. Instead, KDE Plasma began supporting multiple desktops, and with them several ways to swap sets of icons in and out. These changes have received little publicity, but they are ideal for quickly customizing a desktop for a specialized task.

The first reason is, because if you don't...I'm telling mom! Now that we have that bit of business out of the way, let's seriously talk about Ubuntu Unity...the much-maligned desktop interface introduced by Canonical in the Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook edition.

I'm a big openSUSE user. No ifs, ands or buts about it. I love it so much that I even sit on the openSUSE board. But that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the other, truly remarkable, Linux distributions. And one of my absolute favorites is elementary OS. What this group of people has accomplished over the last few years is nothing short of phenomenal.

Linux users are chastising Microsoft for not paying enough attention to its Skype software on their platform of choice. They're ticked off that Skype had gone without an update on Linux for over a year and a half, and that the the long overdue upgrade that was rolled out this past Monday broke the client.

I haven't written about using my Bluetooth devices on Linux in quite some time. That is good, because it means that they are all just working so there is not a lot to write about. But there have been some interesting and useful developments in Bluetooth support for various Linux distributions recently, so I think it will be useful to run through a survey of Bluetooth devices and Linux distributions.