Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In December 2009, the Software Freedom Conservancy filed lawsuits against 14 consumer electronics vendors alleging that they were not in compliance with the GPL license. Of those 14 vendors, 13 have now either settled amicably or are in productive discussions toward a settlement.

For those trying to find a new Linux game that offers good graphics while not being a first person shooter with little to no plot -- as is the case for a majority of the commercial and open-source games available for Linux -- the Amnesia: The Dark Descent game is expected to be released next month. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a graphic adventure horror game that will have a Linux-native client and has been in development by Frictional Games, the same studio that developed the Penumbra series.

According to survey results released by Accenture, two thirds (69%) of organisations anticipate increased investment in open source, with over a third (28%) saying they expect to migrate mission critical applications to open source within the next twelve months. The survey of three hundred large public and private sector organisations in the US, UK and Ireland, found that half of them said they were fully committed to open source and almost a third said they were still experimenting with open source.

Linux is known for a lot of great things, but you rarely see it listed as a platform of choice for multimedia production. Some of that poor reputation for multimedia has long been deserved, but in recent years the quality of Linux’s audio and video applications has been steadily increasing. One of the best loved of these is Hydrogen, a high quality drum machine application. As is often the case with extremely versatile software, Hydrogen can sometimes seem overly complex to a newcomer. Today we’ll attempt to cover many of the most confusing aspects of Hydrogen so you can easily create your own phat beatz in a matter of minutes.

[Being a drummer myself I'm going to have to check this out.. - Scott]

The WordPress community witnessed the end of a high-profile war of words last week when the distributor of a popular commercial theme for the blogging platform agreed to license some of his work under the GPL. Prior to last week, Chris Pearson had argued fiercely that WordPress themes are not derivative works of WordPress itself — as the project has long claimed — and thus he was free to sell his Thesis theme under his own restrictive licensing terms.

While Linux runs great on most any hardware, it runs even better on a machine with ample memory and a recent CPU. Upgrade options abound for even the most hardware hacking averse. In this monthly roundup we'll take a look at options to get your Linux system running even better without breaking your budget.

Take Thunderbird, mix liberally with calendaring, instant messaging, and release it on Linux and Windows. What do you get? Spicebird, a collaboration client that remixes Thunderbird to bring the creaking mail client up to date for today's users. Spicebird has been in the works for some time, but the 0.8 release is finally ready for a wider audience. To see if it's ready for everyday use, I downloaded Spicebird 0.8 a week ago and started testing.

Software patents are dangerous and costly to business and the community. Please sign this letter to support abolishing patents on software.

Some things seem so obvious I feel silly even saying them. And this is one of them: any IT staffer who only knows one operating system is not worth hiring. We see the silly Microsoft vs. Linux vs. Apple stories every day, with Ten Reasons Why This One is Better, and 7 Reasons Why That One Sucks, and Five Ways to Make Headlines With Lists. The ones that crack me up are the "10 Scary Hurdles to Migrating to Linux." Ever notice how every single time they mention "You'll need Linux skills!" Oh dear, no! Linux skills? Well there's a dealbreaker! Because it is completely unreasonable to expect your current batch of delicate Windows admins to have any Linux skills. Sigh.

The 2.6.33 Linux kernel has introduced a useful new service called the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD). This service mirrors an entire block device to another networked host during run time, permitting the development of high-availability clusters for block data. Explore the ideas behind the DRBD and its implementation in the Linux kernel.

One of the problems commonly talked about in our forums and elsewhere is the poor responsiveness of the Linux desktop when dealing with significant disk activity on systems where there is insufficient RAM or the disks are slow. The GUI basically drops to its knees when there is too much disk activity, which is far from being ideal. For many the problem has just been present for a year or two, but those experiencing these horrible responsiveness problems where it may take many seconds for a menu to appear when clicking on it or a half-minute to do a VT switch, there soon may be a fix.

If you spend any time at all on the command line, you almost certainly use less (more's backward-scrollable cousin) on a very regular basis. Like me (until recently), however, you may never have taken the time to learn many of the long list of useful commands and shortcuts with which less is provided. Here are a few commands that will help you get more value out of less.

The 2.6.35 distribution of the Linux kernel has been released, incorporating support for future Intel graphics chips, power management for AMD Radeon chips and Google-donated network performance improvements for multiple processor systems, among 22 areas of significant change.

An article on open source security has sparked off a furious backlash in the normally polite and businesslike world of a British Computer Society journal. Commentards have reacted furiously to a piece by Steve Smith, managing director of IT security consultancy Pentura, in the July Edition of ITNow. A lengthy first response by Luke Leighton takes the article apart paragraph by paragraph and contains a dozen expunged swearwords. The opening line of the 4,000 word rebuttal, for example, reads "the BCS is supposed to be a reputable organisation, yet this article - every paragraph - is complete [DELETED]."

Ubuntu is a distribution that people have strong feelings about, both pro and con. Last week, those feelings erupted again after former Red Hat employee and Fedora community architect Greg DeKoenigsberg ranted about Ubuntu's contributions to the GNOME desktop in his blog.

The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which underlies Linux distros including Ubuntu, Xandros, and Chrome OS.

As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released the new Linux 2.6.35 kernel, providing users of the open source operating system with new networking capabilities and performance enhancements, along with filesystem improvements.

The co-creator of DTrace has seemingly erased all memory of Larry Ellison’s Oracle from his mind, after quitting Sun Microsystems for an engineering veep role at Joyent last week. Bryan Cantrill is the latest in a long list of Sun men to quit the firm, following its takeover by Oracle earlier this year. His exit came just a week after Greg Lavender, the lead developer in charge of the Solaris operating system at Oracle, left the company. Worse still, the OpenSolaris Governing Board, which is supposed to steer the open source version of Solaris, is mulling disbanding because Oracle has had zero contact with the board for the past six months.

Traditionally at Phoronix we have stayed away from publishing benchmarks of Gentoo and similar source-based distributions for the lack of them having a standard or "stock" configuration for which one can easily replicate our tested software stack due to all of the different variables that come into play so the value of these benchmarks are much less compared to those distributions providing pre-compiled binaries for a standardized set of packages. However, satisfying a number of requests, we are publishing such benchmarks today. Rather than using Gentoo itself for benchmarking, we are using Calculate Linux Desktop, which is Gentoo-based while providing a very nice "out of the box" experience, i686 and x86_64 binaries, and overall is a polished and user-friendly Gentoo experience.