Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It is no secret that Linux is not a popular gaming platform. Despite that stigma, however, the open nature of Linux makes it easy, even for relatively inexperienced developers, to produce quality games. Therefore, while the number of high-rated Linux game titles may be small in comparison to Windows or gaming consoles, there are a number of quality free and commercial games out there. Most of the Linux sites that list games tend to highlight the same bunch; however, there are a few hidden gems that you may have missed but are still worth playing. In no particular order, here are four you might want to try.

Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that its Open Accessibility Workgroup is releasing IAccessible2 for Windows under the BSD license. It is also announcing the availability of AccProbe, a new desktop application testing tool that is available under the BSD license. AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation's Open Accessibility Workgroup.

LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones -- the Optimus One and Optumus Chic -- and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based "HTC Vision" emerged as the device's manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.

In a post on his blog, developer Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD-Jon, says that, "Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows." Among other things, Johansen, the co-founder and CTO at doubleTwist, is well known for his involvement in reverse engineering the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement and for doubleTwist, an iTunes-like application for managing and synchronising content on various devices including Android mobile phones, BlackBerry devices and Palm smartphones.

Google is updating the stable version of its Chrome Web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, addressing a handful of security vulnerabilities -- including four that could put users at risk simply by viewing a maliciously constructed image file. Those vulnerabilities addressed in Chrome 5.0.375.99 are rated as "high" severity, and include a high-memory corruption flaw that could be triggered by an invalid PNG image file. Google awarded security researcher Aki Helin $1,000 for the discovery of the vulnerability, which he reported June 7.

Have you ever felt that you are being watched in whatever you do online? Websites seem to know who you are and can greet you with your name when you visit them. Google always seems to know what you are searching, even before you started the search. Getting scared? Perhaps it’s time to turn your privacy filter on. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes.

In a move to bring screen-orientation awareness to mobile Web applications, Google has added accelerometer APIs to the WebKit HTML renderer. The APIs are based on the DeviceOrientation Event Specification, a W3C Web standard draft that describes DOM events for monitoring orientation changes and accelerometer activity.

Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.

Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.

Getting a bit tired of the font selection your distribution ships with? Want a bit more variety for presentations or publications? Tons of fonts are available under open licenses, but only if you know where to look. You'll find plenty of "free" fonts online, but not all of them are licensed under free or open source licenses. You have to be a bit careful when choosing free fonts if the licenses matter. Some are free to download but not distribute or modify, others are distributed without any licensing information at all. Those make me a bit nervous, as it's hard to tell whether someone is distributing a font legitimately or not. Other fonts have custom licenses that wouldn't qualify as OSI-compliant but might be good enough for personal or business use.

Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old. Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use. After all, Linux is more than a mere efficient platform. It can also provide a great deal of entertainment as well.

Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan "icculus" Gordon.

Firefox is a great open source web browser for Linux and other OSes, but have you checked out Opera? The Opera web browser runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You'll also find its available on many mobile phones and devices. Yes, its closed source, but its still free. Plus its packed with some great features. Right now we're going to look at six of them, not really in any particular order.

LG Electronics announced Monday that it plans to release an Android-based tablet computer by the fourth quarter of the year. The South Korea-based company said in a press release it would use Google's open source operating system but provided no pricing or technical details. The tablet is part of an upcoming line of about 10 smart devices and smartphones the company plans to release by the end of the year, the company said.

I know it sounds crazy. Fedora is more a test-bed for the enterprise-grade RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Fedora is cutting edge software that evokes images of users fixing more issues than enjoying user-friendly software. Fedora is for those who already know; Ubuntu is for those that do not. Right? Wrong. Those assumptions are wrong on numerous accounts... especially since the release of Fedora 13.

LXer Feature: 05-July-2010

Some of the big stories this past week included Cisco creating their own tablet, SCALE moves to a larger venue, Bruce Byfield asks is KDE 3 Zombified or Resurrected?, Run Chrome the easy way and Carla Schroder sets off a nuclear weapon in the LXer forums. Ever drink a bottle of Rum all to yourself? I hope all our U.S. readers had as much fun July 4th as I apparently did. Enjoy!

Many of us like to run more than one operating system on a single machine. It's a great way of experimenting with how the other half live, testing new distributions and even playing a few Windows-based games. But dual and triple booting has always been considered something of a dark art. This is because it involves the double jeopardy of messing around with your disk partition tables and playing with a pre-installed operating system. If things go wrong, it can be a disaster. Or at least, that's the popular perception.

One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we'll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.