Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development.

Amazon announced a third generation of its Linux-based Kindle e-reader, featuring a lighter and smaller body, a screen claimed to have 50 percent better contrast, and a battery life of up to one month. Still available with 3G, the device is also offered in a Wi-Fi-only version that includes a WebKit-based browser, the company says.

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE's recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok 1.4. The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?

SimplyMEPIS is a simply wonderful distribution. It was the first to offer a complete out of the box experience all tied up in a pretty package. It would be fair to say that it was probably the inspiration for many of the easy-to-use distributions available today.

It's a sad truth that advancements in technology often make jobs obsolete, usually sooner than most people are ready. The more savvy workers learn to keep up with the times, and adapt their skills to make the best use of their experience, without becoming redundant themselves. The role of Systems Administrator may soon be one of these changing jobs, simultaneously much less, and much more, than what it is today.

I applaud the Indian effort, just as I applauded the effort by OLPC to create an ever-lower priced entry into what people hope is a more inexpensive way and effective way to deliver information to the masses of people unable to afford a 400 USD laptop or 300 USD net-book. In some countries the cost of these devices is almost doubled through import duties levied by the government, so every dollar in cost savings is effectively two dollars saved by the end customer. And for people who make a very low wage (or who are unemployed), this amount effectively doubles or quadruples again. Having the “pad” manufactured in India will reduce those duties to zero, and the pride of having developed something in their home land will encourage younger Indians to contribute to computer engineering.

Even though most Android users are still waiting for Android 2.2, details about the next version Android 3.0, or Gingerbread are starting to emerge. Android 3.0 release date is looking like Q4 of this year, possibly around October. And Gingerbread may already be in some testers' hands - Phandroid has shown an unverified photo of a test build of Android 3.0 running in the wild.

NCR announced two compact POS (point of sale) devices that run SUSE Linux for Point of Service, as well as a number of Windows operating systems. The RealPOS 40 and RealPOS 60 use Intel Atom and Celeron processors, respectively, offer enhanced energy efficiency, and provide both four powered serial ports and up to eight powered USB ports, the company says.

The Linux Mint development team have issued the KDE Edition of version 9 of their Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, code named "Isadora". Linux Mint aims to be user friendly and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, and various plug-ins and media codecs.

Basket Note Pads is a multipurpose note-taking application for KDE. Business people can use it to keep track of important tasks and notes. Writers can use it to organize their thoughts. Students can use it for note taking. And generally anyone can use it as a virtual paste bin or clip drawer. Basket was one of the last KDE 3 programs to be ported to KDE 4. While the development appeared to have stalled for some time, it has picked up again, and the developers have released a beta version for KDE 4.

Let's catch up quickly in the Psystar/Apple situation, so we don't miss any of the action. When I read the new DMCA exemptions EFF won, I immediately started to think about Psystar, so I wanted to see what's new. Maybe you did too. So here's the latest I could find. The appeal is going forward. Presumably the next step in the appeal will be oral argument, although I can't swear to it, since Psystar filed its brief under seal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals back in May, so we can't read it, and that's when they would have made the request or not. I can't believe the entire document needed to be sealed, but that is what happened. Perhaps they'd prefer we not get a chance to analyze it?

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment. The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users.

Corporate backing and a large supportive community – almost all Linux distributions can boast of at least one half of that. Fedora, since its inception in late 2003 as Red Hat's community distribution, has nurtured around itself a devoted community. It has achieved this after providing, release after release, an innovative and complete distribution that demands attention and respect.

If there was any justice in this world, there would be two cars parked in my driveway. One would be a 1977 Ferrari 308 GTS. The other would be a midnight blue BMW M3 convertible with all the amenities. I'd want the leather seats and power everything. When I'm in the BMW, I don't want to have to roll the windows down; I want to push a button and have a leprechaun come out and roll them down for me. I want to point the car in the general direction of where I want to go and have it drive me there. That's right, sometimes a guy just wants to be pampered.

ALSA has been the default Linux sound system for many years, and it is a perfectly capable audio subsystem even in this modern era of fancy new things. Carla Schroder shows us how to to control Linux audio with ALSA.

The U.S. military and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are putting their heads together to help the military adopt more open source software. The military wants in on the cost savings, speed and flexibility which OSS offers to users, as opposed to being stuck waiting on proprietary software vendors to modified their tools when changes are needed. If the open source model can be secured enough for the military, surely it can be secured enough for the enterprise.

It's summer. And frankly, that means no one's all that excited about working. Oh goodness no. In honor of the season of laziness, we've put together a list of some of the most fun open source downloads you can find. No, none of those office productivity tools here just lots of games, hobbyists tools and other time wasters. Is it quitting time yet?

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released on June 4 and a new master workspace was branched off for the upcoming 3.3 on June 5. The code in this branch will be stabilized and later become the product release that will find its way onto your desktops. With the feature and UI freeze of June 24, only fixes will go into this new OOO330 release code branch. New features will be merged into the DEV300 development code line as 3.3 is readied for release.