Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE. Today we are happy to announce the winning designs. Read on for details of how to download the labels to use. read more

Building on what we already know about Android development, we take a look at adding App Widget functionality for your phone's "desktop."

A few weeks ago, Google announced that Chrome OS will be ready for release this fall. Like many Google products, Chrome OS is designed to be a game changer. There are no desktop applications, as we typically think of them. Instead, the entire user experience happens within the browser. Naturally, some people think this is ridiculous while others see it as the natural evolution of technology. The success or failure of Chrome OS might even be a major factor in determining whether or not that evolution happens. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s how to build the Chrome OS image.

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.

The ARM processor family is a complicated one, with many different variations, leading to large numbers of separate sub-architectures in the Linux kernel. A quick glance at the ARM directory in a recent kernel tree shows nearly 70 different sub-architectures, each corresponding to a different CPU or system-on-chip (SoC). That complexity has made it harder to develop new products for new or existing ARM devices. A new organization that was formed by six silicon vendors, Linaro, seeks to simplify that landscape, and allow easier—faster—development of ARM-Linux-based products.

The Linux Foundation today announced the addition of new sessions and keynotes for LinuxCon 2010. The announcement finalizes the list of speakers and professional session planned for the conference, which will take place in Boston August 10-12. In the newly added sessions, Red Hat's Matthew Garret will discuss what he's learned from recent Android/Kernel community talks. MySQL author Monty Widenius will discuss why he forked with MariaDB. Canonical's Matt Asay will comment on the success of the Linux desktop. Hank Janssen of Microsoft will explain the physics behind the Hyper-V drivers built for Linux.

The last two years have seen the KDE desktop not only rewritten from scratch, but adding innovation after innovation. Sooner or later, the moment had to come when its breakneck pace of development slowed -- and, judging from the second beta, that moment is the upcoming 4.5 release. Not that KDE 4.5 is short of changes. However, most of them are either concerned with stability and appearance, or minor enhancements. By contrast, new applications or directions are few. You might call the 4.5 release a consolidation and refinement of the improvements made in previous releases in the KDE 4 series.

Unless you are one of the few who have upgraded to Froyo, or you have rooted your Android phone, chances are, you are still not able to tether using your Android phone. Those who are seeking a solution, PdaNet is the easiest way available to provide tethering to your Mac or PC. PdaNet allows you to, without rooting your phone (and thus keeping your warranty intact), share your phone’s data connection with your computer, enabling you to go online on it through your phone and its data plan. Obviously, this requires a data on your wireless plan for your phone, but if you’ve got an Android phone, in all likelihood you’ve also got data, so let’s move forward!

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we'll review several of these. Let's get started!

Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows. Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client's machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.

Were you imagining that "Paul Murphy" was going to apologize for his attacks on Groklaw or for being so wrong in his support of SCO? Or that he'd keep his promise to stop blogging if SCO lost? Or that he'd finally admit SCO has no case Au contraire. He continues to insult, and he predicts SCO, or a new owner of Novell, will surely succeed yet in fulfilling SCO's plot, in what he believes, if I've understood him, will be a legal Hail Mary pass to go down in history. The new FUD is his article, Suicide by Victory: More on SCO, in which he predicts gloom and doom for Linux because Novell won at the jury trial in Utah. I know. He's so funny. It makes no sense. But I'll answer him seriously anyway.

One of the common complaints about Linux is that there are too many different editions (or “distributions”) to choose from, and only a hardcore nerd can tell them apart. Well, it's true, but you can safely ignore 99 per cent of them. Welcome to The Register's guaranteed impartiality-free guide. Tomorrow, we'll tell you how to get them, burn them and set them up to dual-boot with Windows and on Wednesday there will be a guide to tweaking your new setup and getting it ready for use.

A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell's interest in experimenting with new platforms.

LXer Feature: 21-June-2010

In this week's Roundup we have a battle between KDE3 and KDE4,Linux versus the world: The unwinnable war?, Dell removes "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® " statement from website and today marks my three year anniversary as E-i-C for LXer. You know, I think my grammar has gotten a little better.

My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II -- in Europe, in Ron's case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.

Your prime directive as a system administrator is to keep those systems whipped into shape and running without interfering with user’s daily operations. Sometimes the systems put you in a difficult position when their disks overflow with files. The simple solution is to remove files. But, what if you can’t do that? You have to add disk to your ailing system. But, how and where do you add that space? And, how do you keep this from happening again?

Earlier this week AMD released the Catalyst 10.6 driver that on the Linux side of the table had finally made use by default of their new 2D acceleration architecture, offered official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, and formalized their OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support. Since the release of the Catalyst 10.6 Linux driver, we have been running a new set of tests on their new ATI 2D acceleration architecture, but the results are not what you may expect when compared to the open-source ATI Linux driver.

Over the past decade, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has been supporting the Apache community’s development of some of the most ubiquitous products in Open Source, benefiting billions of users worldwide. Its collaborative, consensus-based development process, affectionately dubbed "The Apache Way", is one of its secrets to creating dozens of high quality, industry-leading software products that all began with a single project.

Apple's iPad was hardly the first tablet to appear on the scene, but it is unquestionably responsible for the recent spike in tablet development. Now it looks as if Ubuntu — the Linux distro everybody loves to hate, but uses anyway — will be entering the field as well.

When you work with large amounts of photos, it can get tiresome to have to manually manage the file and directory structures. To help resolve this, many people use photo managers such as Picasa, DigiKam, and iPhoto. There are several options for Linux, so we’ve decided to check out each of the major photo management options for Linux to see exactly what each one offers. Today we’ll be comparing Picasa, F-Spot, Shotwell, DigiKam, and Geeqie.