Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.

NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source. NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.

Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved - for desktop systems. The situation in the fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next big problem to be solved.

Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.

The Linux and open source community provides countless user and server applications. They also provide solutions to help support these and other applications, even to support non-technical departments. You'll find many help desk or customer service trouble ticketing systems in the FOSS (free and open source software) world. Right now we'll review 5 different solutions.

When it comes to trouble-shooting an application printing things to the screen, or to a file, is not as full-featured as attaching a debugger to a running device, but there is a time and place for printing a simple message to the screen.

Microsoft has cracked open .NET a little further and surrendered some control over its development platform to the open-source community. Latest code for company's take on Python and Ruby – fine-tuned for .NET, IronPython, and IronRuby – has been quietly released under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) license.

Earlier this month an Intel employee began asking about making optimizations to Mesa's shader compiler (on the Mesa-dev list). This Intel employee was not one of their usual Open-Source Technology Center developers commonly working on their Linux graphics stack as part of Keith Packard's team, but instead it was an uncommon name: Benjamin Segovia. Ben is from Intel's Advanced Graphics Lab team where previously he worked on ray-tracing techniques, but as of late seems to be at least dedicating some of his Intel effort towards optimizing Mesa.

Do you have problems keeping time synchronized on your network? Do your systems tend to drift? You can resolve the time drift problem by using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to keep all your system’s time in sync with each other. What’s that? You’ve tried using NTP to find that some of your systems still set themselves apart from the pack. You can go one step further and create your own NTP server for your network.

he London Stock Exchange, which is currently in the process of moving its trading platforms to Linux, has lost its chief technology officer, Robin Paine. Anyone trying to contact Paine via email receives the following message, “Robin Paine no longer works for the London Stock Exchange”.

Not long ago, the overwhelming issue on the Linux desktop was catching up with Windows and OS X. Partly, the concern was usability, but it also included the need for a rich ecosystem of utilities. But some time in the last few years, that goal was reached, so quietly that exactly when is impossible to say. Some might still quibble over a feature or two, but the competitiveness of the free desktop is strong enough that equaling rivals no longer seems a major concern.

Can we talk about licenses for a bit? It's something I've wanted to talk to you about for a long time, and it's a good time for it, because Mozilla is redrafting its license and would like your input. Here's where you can find the Mozilla Public License, the current version, along with a FAQ that explains it and an annotated version, and here's where you can get the draft of the revised version, and here is a red-lined version. Nothing in the draft revision is yet set in stone. You'll notice that they are working on it like Legos, issue by issue, and this draft isn't addressing all the issues they hope to address.

Linux.conf.au announced a Call for Papers for its 12th annual open source Linux conference for developers, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on Jan 24-29. Linux.conf.au 2011 (lca2011) starts off with two days of mini-conferences, and is followed by three days of main sessions and an "Open Day" of events and presentations that is open to the general public.

How is a Linux distribution put together? For Novell's openSUSE, it starts with its newly improved Build Service 2.0. Building a Linux distribution is a complex task that involves both project and package management skills. For Novell's openSUSE community Linux distribution, the key tool it uses is the openSUSE Build Service, which was recently improved with a 2.0 release in June.

The OpenSUSE Project announced the final 11.3 release of OpenSUSE, featuring Linux 2.6.34, the Btrfs file-system, improved netbook support, and desktops including KDE 4.4.4, GNOME 2.30.1, XFCE, and LXDE. Meanwhile, eWEEK Labs reviews Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, praising its virtualization features, despite some "snags."

Microsoft might be "all in" on tablets (here and here), but it's Linux that will dominate this new category of device, according to latest research. ABI Research reckons Linux-powered non-smartphone mobile devices will comprise 62 per cent of operating systems by 2015.

Yesterday we found it interesting that Intel is not even able to ship their own Linux driver for their own hardware with their MeeGo operating system. The driver in question is their new EMGD driver for the Menlow and Tunnel Creek platforms that have a graphics core that's designed by Imagination Technologies rather than their own in-house intellectual property. The EMGD driver from Intel currently requires signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement with them to gain access to this driver, but it's not the only driver available that targets the Intel GMA 500 / GMA 600 graphics core that's derived from the Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 535.

At a recent local LUG I regularly attend, Braddock Gaskill gave a wonderful presentation on an open source 8-bit computer he had created. This was his first public debut of the device and every person in attendance was enthralled. Later, we met over coffee since I wanted to let him know (and ask if it was ok) that I thought his device would make for a great piece for Linux Journal. Braddock agreed and we started to chat about both the Humane Reader & Humane PC.

VPN connections let you remotely access file or connect remote offices together via secure tunnels over the Internet. They can even come in handy to secure connections on public Internet ports or Wi-Fi hotspots, hiding Internet traffic from local eavesdroppers. If you aren't going to have more than two-dozen VPN users, you might consider setting up your own VPN server using the DD-WRT router firmware. If you have a compatible wireless router, you can load the firmware on it. This gives you an OpenVPN server and client, and many more cool features. You can then set it up for remote access connections or site-to-site connections to connect offices together.

The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the "official" repository. There are many maintainers looking after various subsystems, but every patch they merge must eventually be accepted by Linus Torvalds if it is to get into the mainline. Linus's unique role affects the process in a number of ways; for example, as this article is being written, Linus has just returned from a vacation which resulted in nothing going into the mainline for a couple of weeks. There are more serious concerns associated with the single-committer model, though, with scalability being near the top of the list.