Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Oracle has announced an updated version of its embedded open-source database for Google's Android, during a three-way wrestling match for the affections of Eclipse developers. On Tuesday, the database giant used the annual EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California to unveil Berkeley DB 11g Release 2, which introduces support for Android. Oracle is a member of Eclipse, and Berkley DB 11g Release 2 is due on March 31.

Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain because of postings about ICINGA, a fork of Nagios. At the centre of the dispute is Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios and CEO of Nagios Enterprises. The H talked to him about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward.

Linux vendor Red Hat will report its fiscal 2010 numbers today. Virtualization, cloud services, middleware, a big win on the Tokyo Stock Exchange-- is Red Hat's future as rosy as it appears?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and founder Richard M. Stallman.

Web-based applications are fantastic, except for that whole "running in the browser" thing. Looking to free your browser-based apps from your Web browsing? Take a look at Mozilla Prism.

KDE document reader Okular doesn't just read multiple document formats; it also allows you to add annotations to files as you read them. Note that to get this functionality, you need version 0.8, which is in Ubuntu Karmic, or Debian Squeeze (see my howto if you want to install this on a Lenny box). To bring up the reviews toolbar, go to Tools->Review. You'll see various highlighters, drawing, and note options down the left-hand side of the document window. Be warned that the inline text annotation option will hide anything underneath its box. Right-click an annotation for a context menu that allows you to delete it or add a pop-up note. You can view all annotations by clicking on the 'Reviews' tab on the far left of the Okular window.

I hate having to change. I do not know a lot of people that really enjoy it, but there are just certain aspects to change that bug me. And when it comes to changing technologies, it is even more of a headache, both in the short term and in the long term.

Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled "Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver," so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.

The Ubuntu project released its first beta of Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx"), offering two new themes, social-networking tools, cloud-related enhancements, faster boot-times, and an updated Firefox browser with Yahoo search as default. Meanwhile, an oddball icon placement in one theme has Ubuntu users up in arms.

Did Windows crash beyond repair? If so, you probably want to get your files off of the drive before you erase everything and reinstall Windows. This tutorial will help you do exactly that. We're going to use Ubuntu's LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution that's a free and open source alternative to Windows. The LiveCD mode lets you boot into and use the operating system (OS) without installing anything on the computer. You should be able to view your files and copy them to another drive, backup to discs, or transfer via a network. Now let's get started!

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2010

Sorry for the late posting of the LXWR. This past week we had several different Ubuntu related items including Mark Shuttleworth stating "This is not a democracy", a list of Linux applications you might not know of and our Hans Kwint shows us that there are real alternatives to the iPad. Enjoy!

Novell has spurned an unsolicited $1bn cash takeover bid from Elliot Associates. It said on Saturday that it had considered the company's offer to acquire Novell for $5.75 per share in cash, but concluded such a deal was "inadequate" and "undervalued" Novell's "franchise and growth prospects".

The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release brings back Kexi, the data management application similar to MS Access. The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, for example improved support for Microsoft file formats with the addition of import filters for MS OOXML, and bug fixes.

Ubuntu, love it or hate it, is quite possibly the most popular Linux distribution around. With an emphasis on community and making the operating system accessible to as many people as possible, it’s easy to see why it’s number one. In fact, I’ve been a strong supporter of Ubuntu since its beginning, beta testing just about every release and I submitted a ton of bug reports to help make it as awesome as it could be. Though my relationship with Ubuntu has often been strained due to Canonical not always putting the interests of the users in direct focus, I’ve always stood behind it. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and I must part ways, as well as any community involvement I once had with it. What strained this relationship? Read on for a first hand account.

In this, our final instalment, we will look at the screen terminal multiplexing program. What the heck is a "terminal multiplexing program?" I'm glad you asked. Now that we have installed a bunch of interactive applications on our workstations and SSH to allow remote access, we have a slight problem. Is it reasonable for an interactive program (like mutt) monopolize our terminal session? Isn't Linux multi-tasking? On the graphical desktop, we can have many applications running at once and, by moving the mouse, we can switch from application to application. Of course, on the console, we can switch virtual terminals to provide multiple sessions and if we are using SSH, remotely accessing our workstation from a graphical desktop, we can open multiple terminal windows.

Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme—a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu's visual identity.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, including representatives from The Commerce Guys, which helps companies and organizations deliver useful Drupal-based e-commerce sites and solutions. In advance of the conference, we caught up with Ryan Szrama, a developer with The Commerce Guys, and the original developer of Ubercart, an open source e-commerce package. Here are some of his thoughts on where Drupal-based commerce is headed.

A week ago we reported on open-source GPU offloading, which allowed multiple GPUs from different vendors that were backed by open-source graphics drivers to offload the 3D rendering work to a secondary GPU and then to pass the rendered result back to the primary GPU driving the display. This open-source work referred to as PRIME was based on NVIDIA's Optimus Technology. This work was done by David Airlie just as a proof of concept and he doesn't intend to get the work completed and shipped in the upstream packages, but is hoping to hand off this task to someone else.

According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You've seen my video of Marvell's 4.3? Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10?).

On February 9th 2010 the KDE community released the a new major version of the KDE Software Compilation to the world. As this provided an excellent excuse for throwing a good party, the last 7 weeks have seen hundreds of KDE enthusiasts gather at over thirty release parties around the world. Most parties featured demos and talks about the new release and the majority included beer, other drinks, food (including KDE cake!), some had karaoke and all of them were about meeting cool people and having some fun.