Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Dell’s 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw.

The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there. When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD. Apple has also contributed a large amount of code back to the open source community, most notably WebKit, which is used as the browsing engine in nearly every mobile platform. Considering the recent popularity of Apple’s systems, and since there was a big Apple event happening today, their involvement in open source is worth a look.

Microsoft just received confirmation of a patent that hands the company the intellectual property of shutting an operating system down. I can’t quite recall how often Microsoft ha stalked about a faster way to shut down its operating system. It is part of the pitch of virtually every new operating system and it has remained an annoyance that it can take quite some time until the software in fact closes running applications and the operating system itself.

[Linux does this already no? - Scott]

Those of you not familiar with Linux won't be familiar with the way it lets you install new software. After 12 years with Linux, neither am I. And I think this highlights a serious problem with the way that open-source software has developed and how it can grow. The problem is choice – one of the most touted and noble reasons for using Linux in the first place. For general use, there's too much of it. It's often overwhelming, needlessly complicated and an easy excuse for change. Choice goes hand-in-hand with redundancy and duplicated effort.

Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

Simple partition resizing operations, such as those described in Part 1 of this series, usually conclude successfully. Sometimes, though, you need to do something different or troubleshoot problems. This article covers some of these situations. The first topic is LVM configuration and how it interacts with partition resizing. The second topic is troubleshooting techniques. Although a complete description of all the problems that can occur when resizing partitions might fill a book, a few basic principles can help you work through many common problems. Finally, this article describes some alternatives to partition resizing, should the problems you encounter prove insurmountable.

Strange bedfellows VMware and Novell have officially released SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, a version of Novell's open source OS that piggybacks on every copy of VMware's vSphere hypervisor. In June, VMware and Novell told the world they had agreed to an OEM deal that would see VMware distribute SUSE Linux with vSphere, and the combined product is now available to all. If you purchase a vSphere license and subscription, you also receive a subscription for patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server at no additional cost.

Ubuntu's use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo.

Red Hat is in talks to buy a JBoss cloud provisioning startup called Makara, according to a source familiar with the matter. Makara – a Red Hat JBoss partner – produces a portal enabling IT teams to set up, provision, and administer public Amazon and private Xen and VMware clouds. The two-year old company is believed to have met with virtualization giant VMware, who turned down the prospect of a deal.

For the past three years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask tens of thousands of users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.

Recent news and product releases could be cause for concern over the future of the open source Oracle/Sun Grid Engine. Things change. Indeed, high tech is often a sea of change. For some open source software is a lifeboat in the storms of change. While everything else can be bought, sold, or demolished, your investment in open software is still yours. No where is this more important than in HPC where change is a way of life. Prior to open source, the ability to use hardware often depended on support contracts from vendors. If these companies sank, so did the support and keeping with the ocean metaphor, your prized HPC system has now become an expensive boat anchor.

Allen's lawsuits look like classic patent trolling. There are just four patents involved, all incredibly broad. This means that on the face of it, probably every company involved with Internet activities “infringes” on them. What is described, as the accompanying drawing makes clear, is essentially most Web pages, with information drawn from various sources being brought together. The trouble is, the filing date for this idea is 5 December 1996 and I - along with several million other early Internet explorers - was routinely using this stuff from 1994.

Is there some kind of secret brotherhood of lesser-known Microsoft and Apple founders? Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder better known as Woz, is voicing some surprisingly strong support for Paul Allen and the Microsoft co-founder's patent litigation against Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants. Asked about the lawsuit during a video interview with Bloomberg News, Wozniak says he's "not at all against the idea of patent trolls," and he believes Allen's suit represents the fact that inventors have rights under the U.S. patent system.

Earlier this month there was the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 as the last likely release of this OpenSolaris + Ubuntu Hardy mix to be based upon the original OpenSolaris Nevada code-base with Oracle killing the project so now they have the Illumos OpenSolaris fork to utilize. Today there's another OpenSolaris community OS release, this time in the form of SchilliX, which is the OpenSolaris derivative created by two German developers.

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Rather than having both parties tied to their computers and logged into their Gmail accounts, one user can now call anyone in the US and Canada with telephone service. Google states that rates will remain free for the rest of the year and very low for international calls.

Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, a new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. Those releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface.

Wind River has launched a new community site for Wind River Linux customers, engineers, and embedded Linux community experts. The Wind River Developer Community for Linux is designed as a collaborative site where Wind River Linux users can ask and answer questions using a point rewards system, the company says.

In past articles our Android sample application GUIs have consisted of a simple button or two and the corresponding click-handler code. What if some of those buttons are only supposed to be available under specific device conditions? Examples include providing a button only when a connection to a remote Bluetooth peripheral has been established or some other specific device condition.

If you haven't used Linux before, are new to Ubuntu, or would like a quick update on the latest in open source advancements for the desktop, then The Official Ubuntu Book is a great place to start. Authored by a group of some of the most experienced open source administrators and developers, this 400-page user guide details everything you need to know about how to make the most of your Ubuntu, Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE), and Xubuntu (Ubuntu with Xfce) computer.