Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Today it is hard to think of a phone without a camera. In fact we are just as likely to take a picture with our phone as we are to make a call. And once we take a photo, we are quite likely to send it as a message to someone else, but that is a topic for another day! In this column we are going to write a simple Android application which demonstrates taking a photo and displaying it to the screen of your phone.

TROY, Mich., April 27 - DisklessWorkstations.com, a leading supplier of thin client hardware and solutions for open source thin client environments announces Bundled LTSP Support. Bundled support is included as part of LTSP Thin Client purchases for use with the Ubuntu operating system (versions 9.10 and later). Bundled support incidents are awarded based upon the quantity of thin client devices purchased and are provided at no additional cost.

Netbook desktops in free and open source software (FOSS) are in a state of rapid development. Should a netbook be treated as more as a mobile device than as a laptop? Should developers assume that netbooks are used for light computing such as social networking, rather than for productivity? These are just two of the questions whose answers affect the design of any netbook desktop.

Six Japanese technology firms have announced they are developing a new application platform for mobile phones that will be compatible with Linux, Symbian, and possibly Android. Developed by NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp, the unnamed, multimedia-focused mobile platform is scheduled for arrival in phones in early 2012, say the partners.

As reported by Computerworld (from the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010), Google plans to assign two developers to work on integrating enhancements developed for the Android Linux kernel into the official Linux development tree maintained by Linus Torvalds.

It's widely known, at least within geekdom, that the number of available IP addresses is on a collision course with the number zero. The depletion of the IPv4 address space, and the necessity of migrating to the next-generation IPv6, has been discussed ad infinitum in geek circles since RFC 2460 was published in December 1998. That discussion has not always been about the best way to resolve the issue, however. The imminence of IPv4 exhaustion has consistently been denied, and its emergent nature downplayed. Indeed, APNIC Director General Paul Wilson's 2003 statement on the subject — describing depletion predictions as "misinformation" and "rumor", while stating that existing IPv4 would suffice for another twenty years — brings to mind the infamously mis-attributed quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Linux server adoption among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is reportedly 25 percent higher in the Asia-Pacific region than it is in the United States, and growing faster than the worldwide average, says a new study by Springboard Research and Spiceworks.

Marvell is shipping a new member of its Linux-ready Armada line of system-on-chips touted for delivering up to 1GHz performance while consuming less than a single Watt. A slower but more power-efficient version of the Armada 300, the Armada 310 offers 256KB L2 cache, plus PCI-express, gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0 connectivity, says the company.

On Unix platform, tar command is the primary archiving utility. Understanding various tar command options will help you master the archive file manipulation. In this article, let us review various tar examples including how to create tar archives (with gzip and bzip compression), extract a single file or directory, view tar archive contents, validate the integrity of tar archives, finding out the difference between tar archive and file system, estimate the size of the tar archives before creating it etc.,

While there's likely already a number of you tired of hearing about Valve's efforts to bring the Steam client and Source Engine to the Linux desktop and are just waiting for an official announcement, there's a few more Linux details to shed this afternoon for those interested in this event that has the possibility of sparking a Linux game revolution. Valve rolled out their "Steam 2010 Client" to Windows gamers today, which brings a new user-interface and other improvements (here's the details for those interested), and is also what their forthcoming Mac OS X client is based upon. Hidden within this major Steam client update are more references to Linux.

Canonical - the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Linux - is taking to the clouds. But will cloud builders take to the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud variant? It sure looks like it, if the early results with UEC are any indication. Companies like the utility computing ideas embodied in Amazon's EC2 compute cloud and S3 storage service. But any company that has been managing its own data processing for decades is not going to trust its key applications and workloads on EC2, no matter how cheap and easy it is, no matter how secure Amazon says it is.

Canonical has announced that it will offer its own certification programme for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and that graduates will be entitled to claim an 'Ubuntu Certified Professional' certification. Previously Canonical had worked with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) to offer the Ubuntu Certified Professional exam which combined the general Linux LPI 101 and 102 modules with the Ubuntu 199 module to provide an Ubuntu tailored qualification.

The clipboard is one of the oldest and most important features of desktop computing. With it, you can temporarily store pictures, images, and even file information in the system’s memory, and then copy or move that information to a new destination. KDE has an advanced clipboard system, largely due to a small program called Klipper, which can store more than one piece of data. KDE also has the ability to copy and move files with copying and pasting, and automatic creation of files using clipboard data.

I just finished writing that new book about Fedora 13 last night, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. It's nice to have a project like that put to bed. Of course, when writing any beginner's Linux book, invariably the topic of DVD playback comes up, and I always wrestle with what to tell new Linux users about the convoluted legal mess that watching a DVD on a Linux machine has become. For those who are unfamiliar, DVDs are encrypted with a content scrambling system (CSS) that is designed to prevent unauthorized machines from playing DVDs. What it's really for, of course, is to prevent unauthorized machines from copying the content of a DVD, so illicit copies of Did You Hear About the Morgans? won't be distributed freely across the Internet.

Google's Android, the increasingly important embedded Linux, had one major problem: it had been moving slowly away from the Linux mainstream. Now, after the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Conference, Android and Linux are coming back together. Not only is Google going to be hiring two new Android developers to work more closely with the Linux kernel development team, they're also working on re-merging its driver code with Linux. Indeed, the first series of driver patches that will bring Android and Linux back into alignment have already arrived.

Freescale Semiconductor announced that it has signed strategic agreements with Enea, Green Hills Software, and Mentor Graphics to support Freescale's QorIQ, PowerQUICC, and StarCore processors. The agreement with Mentor Graphics calls for the company to work with Freescale on developing a common Linux build and distribution methodology for PowerQUICC and QorIQ system-on-chips (SoCs).

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship.

It was simply a matter of time before Linux became my primary operating system. My most recent malware incident was the final straw that sent me into the safe haven of Ubuntu. Suffice it to say that last week was a pretty crappy one for me. My FaceBook account was somehow compromised, causing untold amounts of my friends to receive a spammed invite to some sort of diet seminar scam event and then having to endure the embarrassment that accompanied it.

LXer Feature: 26-Apr-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Oracle charging for Sun's ODF plug-in, Stallman reconsiders his existence, Steve Jobs tells people who want porn to buy an Android, a farewell to Songbird and much more. Enjoy!

Free software began as a political movement: its central aim was – and remains – the propagation of freedom. Later, it became a development methodology too, largely at the hands of Linus, whose geographical isolation in Finland forced him to develop ways of using the Internet to coordinate a new kind of massive, but decentralised, global collaboration. Later still, free software also became a way of making serious money – something that Stallman has repeatedly said he is quite happy with, contrary to much FUD claiming otherwise.