Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Although my intent is not to start the next GNOME/KDE-level war, it seems there must be a happy medium between total desktop insecurity and total desktop unusability. Linux offers so many ways to secure data that it's important to realize it's okay for folks to have different needs and desires.

PulseAudio was supposed to cure desktop audio in Linux. It promised useful features like device routing and individual volume controls. It may well do these things; in my experience it has been frustrating, opaque, and unreliable. Some have claimed that Ubuntu's implementation is flawed; I haven't looked at other distros yet, so I don't know.

In 2005, the Debian project voted to declassify messages on the debian-private mailing list after a period of three years. That is easier said than done, apparently. The General Resolution (GR) calls for volunteers to do the work of declassification, and few Debian Developers seem eager to do the work required to make it happen.

Google will crack open more of Android's development process but keep new versions of its mobile OS closed for competitive reasons. The giant will change Android's Native code Development Kit (NDK) so that contributed code joins the publicly available Android source tree rather than going into Google's private tree.

In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today. The reason for the desktop's success is obvious. A desktop requires much less knowledge than a command line, and is suited to maybe 80% of the most common tasks that an average user needs. If the desktop needs much larger applications, that hardly seems a problem on a modern computer.

Have you ever wanted to look inside a tar.gz file but without expanding it? Have you ever wanted to just dump files in a .tar.gz file without having to organize it and periodically tar and gzip this data? This article presents another REALLY useful user-space file system, archivemount. It allows you to mount archives such as .tar.gz files as a file system and interact with it using normal file/directory tools.

Banshee, the open-source media player that's built with Mono and Gtk#, is working towards their 1.8 milestone but today they have put out a new development snapshot. What's special about this new development release, Banshee 1.7.3, is that it adds support for Amazon's MP3 store and brings other enhancements too.

Many people still cling to the notion that Linux is for 30-year-old male geeks. While that may be true, there are plenty of other people of all ages, ethnicities, and genders who enjoy Linux and other free and open source software. For the most part, the operating systems a child uses are determined by the child’s parents and school. As the parent and Linux user yourself, you may prefer your child to use Linux at home.

Acer is switching its consumer-oriented EP101TC tablet (pictured) from Windows CE to Android, claims NetbookNews. Meanwhile, HP has trademarked the word "Palmpad," which is likely to be the name for its upcoming WebOS-based tablet, says The Inquirer.

Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other. This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog the each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the value of simplicity in systems administration. The more simple a setup is, the more likely it will be stable and easy to fix and maintain. If a setup is so complicated that it takes serious brainpower just to comprehend, chances are that there is going to be something wrong somewhere. Obviously, systems administrators have been dealing with complexity for a long time, and the basic sysadmin toolbox reflects the lean towards keeping it simple.

We love Linux, and want to make it easier for others to do so, too. This first edition of the Lifehacker Pack for Linux includes our favorite apps that get things done and make your desktop great. Linux isn't quite like Windows or Mac, as there are many, many distributions, usually running on one of two desktop systems (GNOME or KDE). We've chosen to write this list up from the perspective of a standard, GNOME-based Ubuntu user. Ubuntu is what the Lifehacker editors use, it's what most of our Linux-leaning readers use, and it's generally popular and frequently updated. Many of these apps can be downloaded and installed on other Linux systems, of course—check the Download link, or search out its name in your own system's package installer.

Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla's Director of Developer Relations and Open Source Evangelist, has announced that he has taken a new role at the company, the non-profit organisation behind the popular open source Firefox web browser. In a post on his personal blog, Blizzard, the former Software Team Lead for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, says that, over the last few months, he's "been focused on one aspect of that job more than others – helping to drive the web-facing side of our platform."

The PC-BSD development team have announced the release of version 8.1, the "Hubble Edition", of their open source operating system. According to the developers, the first point update to the 8.0 branch of PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD 8.1 and includes a number of enhancements and improvements over the previous release.

Traditional mobile phone carriers love to play games with syncing phones to PCs. But it's a new game now with Android---There are many ways to sync your Droid phone with your Linux PC, all easy and using standard Linux applications. Paul Ferrill shows us how.

Spotify is a streaming music service that previously was only available to Windows and Mac users. Spotify offered a way for music lovers to enjoy their favorite tunes on their computers and gadgets legally. But Linux users were left out in the cold... until July 12.

In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.

One of the most compelling reasons for using free or open source software is that it provides an opportunity for the user of the product to add whatever features he wants or needs. But the ability to add features is constrained by a project's size and complexity, and the nature of available documentation. So, while GIMP is one of the most well-known and successful open source software projects, its huge code base can be intimidating.

When your camera is 500 feet up hanging from a balloon, how do you tell it when to shoot photos? Or you want to shoot some time-lapse photos of clouds, the changing light on a mountain, a slow-moving highway repair crew...Akkana Peck shows us how to remote-control all kinds of Canon camera functions using CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit.

We've covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin's "Browse the Web without a Trace", January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I'm justified in featuring it this month.