Showing all newswire headlines

At the Qt Developer Days in Munich, Germany, Sebastian Nyström (VP Application and Service Frameworks) and Lars Knoll (Qt's R&D Director), outlined the future development of Qt, the open source GUI framework. The feature most requested by customers is more performance and this is now a primary focus of development. With the in development Qt Scene Graph, the plan is to accelerate Qt by reducing the complexity of the graphics rendering pipeline from three stages to one, making full use of GPU acceleration where it is available. Another project, Lighthouse, offers similar hardware acceleration for developers who are creating embedded devices.

In previous posts, I have highlighted some of the outstanding new native Linux games that are coming out soon or have been out but may not be well known. For many Linux gamers, however, the pool of native Linux games is still too small. As most already know, it is possible to play some Windows games in Linux using Wine. Additionally, there are two prominent commercial spin-offs of Wine that are both designed specifically for gaming: Cedega and CrossOver Games. At one time, there was little difference between the three, other than the graphical configuration interfaces. But over time, each has developed its own feature set and, in some cases, support for Windows functionality that the others do not possess.

"YouTube has slowly but surely been expanding the availability of WebM in their HTML 5 open video beta, but uploaders have so far had no control over whether their videos would be available in a free format. Videos deemed popular enough by Google would be made available in WebM, but other than that, only videos which happened to be HD (720p or greater) would definitely be viewable in WebM."

This tutorial shows how to prepare an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND or MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

Acer announced a dual-boot Windows 7/Android netbook, featuring Intel's dual-core Atom D550 or single-core Atom N450 processors. The Acer Aspire One Happy offers a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, up to 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive (HDD), plus 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB ports, and eight hours of battery life, says the company.

Despite respectable download numbers from AppWorld and other markets, BlackBerry applications have been a second class citizen for some time. Hiding beyond the ubiquitous email, calendar, and contacts, the application environment sits — often unknown and unseen.

The study also doesn't shed much light on potential hybrid deployments where Linux is deployed alongside Windows and Unix. "We didn't ask that question exactly," McPherson said. "I bet you are correct that many would be hybrid, and that would be good to ask next time."

Before we get into it though, the topic of focus, the ASUS RT-N16, is a Gigabit and Wireless-N compatible router that uses a Linux kernel based firmware (essentially, the operating system) by default. The default firmware (or, operating system) on the router can be replaced with a different operating system (OS) such as TomatoUSB.

In the Free Software ecosystem, nearly everybody has heard about KDE. People associate us with a great desktop environment and some interesting applications. On other desktops there may be installations of KDE software, but those people may not know a single KDE application. This is why Torsten Rahn and Bastian Holst went to INTERGEO this year to present Marble.

From my perspective, IBM's move to the OpenJDK is long overdue. When I asked IBM yesterday why it took them so long, I was told it was just a question of having a dialogue with Oracle, whereas there wasn't one with Sun. To me, that's the primary reason why Oracle will continue to be successful with Java. Oracle is a sales driven company. Make no mistake about it, Oracle 'sold' IBM on the idea of joining the OpenJDK. Oracle closed the deal that Sun could not. http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/10/red-hat-hails-i...

Last month we carried out our fourth annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we sought feedback from the Linux community about the most common graphics drivers and hardware in use, what display/GPU-related features desktop users are most interested in, and collect other metrics to aide developers. Here are the results from this year's survey.

Skolelinux is often refered to as Debian Edu or the educational subset of the GNU/Linux distribution Debian. It is a Debian Pure Blend, a subset of Debianthat has been tailored to be used out-of-the-box in schools.

Alcatel-Lucent is taking aim at the enterprise with a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching platform that is the cornerstone of its new Application Fluent Networks strategy. The OmniSwitch 10K platform can scale up to 256 10GbE ports, delivering up to 5.12 TBS of total switching capacity. The new switching platform includes technologies from Alcatel-Lucent's experience with service providers. The OmniSwitch 10K is also the first enterprise platform from Alcatel-Lucent to leverage its new Linux-based AOS 7 network operating system.

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0), BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions as feasible under current laws. I believe that better communities for software development are enabled by these liberal licensing situations. Rather than creating a single power with significantly more rights, as seen in the “open core” movement, liberal open source development encourages real, dedicated and sustainable contributions, made by companies with business models other than selling support and ‘enterprise features’.

How will GNOME 3 compare to KDE 4? The picture is still emerging, since GNOME 3's official release is still months away. However, with GNOME Shell available as a preview in the latest GNOME releases, a general outline is starting to be visible. Of course, some elements cannot be compared yet. It would be unfair, for instance, to compare panels in any detail, because in the previews GNOME Shell's panel has neither applets nor configurations. Nor, for that matter, can much be said yet about the upcoming KDE 4.6, which should be the latest version when GNOME 3.0 is released.

Docky is a simple light weight dock application for Linux. It's newbie friendly with a simple interface and easy to learn configurations. There are a number of default themes which more or less look like the same. Here are a few Docky themes that quite stand apart.

In an earlier article, we studied the fundamental aspects of shell scripting and covered topics such as redirection, variables, arithmetic expansions and control constructs. In this part, we will focus on more advanced concepts that are useful for system administrators and software developers…

There is now a legal publication with the goal of explaining FOSS issues to lawyers. It's the first peer-reviewed law review entirely devoted just to the legal issues of FOSS. It's called The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, or IFOSSLR, and it's "a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues," as they describe it. If this is an area of law that interests you, X marks the spot.

In this article by Jonathan Bennett, author of the book OpenStreetMap, we'll look at the tools and techniques used by the OpenStreetMap community to gather data using GPS, and upload it to the website.

Here's some fun news: "Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014." I moved to a smart phone within the last year. In the past I hadn't really needed one. When I went somewhere I typically had my laptop with me, so I usually hid behind that. However, as my role became more and more driven by general email and Internet access rather than specific proprietary programs I realized that I wanted to have more access and functionality without lugging the computer around all the time. If you know me at all, you know I'm a Linux nut, so I naturally gravitated toward an Android phone. I love it. The openness suits me and I get to use my curiosity and ability to tinker to my advantage.