Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

A Berlin-based software company is preparing an Intel Atom N450-based e-reader that runs Linux with Android extensions. Billed as the "tablet PC for publishing houses," Neofonie GmbH's "WePad" tablet sports an 11.6-inch touchscreen, 16GB of flash storage, a SD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and a webcam, says Neofonie.

The second week in the Salt Lake City jury trial between the SCO Group and Novell about the copyright to Unix has uncovered further surprising details of this never-ending story. First, SCO's former CEO Darl McBride, who was called as a witness, confirmed that SCO didn't need the debated copyrights for the development of its family of operating systems, and that the copyrights were only required for the licensing business of the vendor's SCOSource division. Then the previously unaware jury members were informed that a judge had already delivered a ruling in this matter, but that his decision had been overturned. The trial will go into its third week while, at the same time, Novell's Brainshare conference will be held in Salt Lake City.

Wikipedia has become famous, or perhaps infamous, for its intolerance of new content. That is to say, there's a dedicated group within Wikipedia's community that prides itself on pruning content from Wikipedia rather than being inclusionist on new content. The deletionists are getting renewed attention after proposing that the dwm entry be deleted because it's a a "non-notable window manager." While dwm may less notable than other desktop environments and window managers, most users would probably find it more useful than not to have an entry describing dwm in Wikipedia.

There are again some rumors about LiMux' dead here in Munich. I don't want to comment on the origin of them, but to the responsible company: This doesn't work out. LiMux is more alive than ever and the story goes on very well....LiMux has achieved one very important goal. The open standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now Munich's primary used internal document exchange standard, beside of PDF for non-editable documents. Congratulations to all, who made this great success happen! Our standard office workplace consists now of OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and many other sometimes needed apps like e.g. GIMP.

Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu 10.04 that Friday entered the beta stage, looks to be taking the popular distro to an entirely new - and very consumer-oriented - level. Between Canonical's web-based syncing service Ubuntu One - unveiled last year - the coming U1 music store, and the new Me Menu, Lucid Lynx is looking less like the stoic Linux desktops of yesteryear and more like like, well, what everyday consumers want in an operating system.

Shuttle announced a compact, all-in-one PC featuring a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a dual-core Intel Atom D510 available with SUSE Linux. The X50V2 includes a 1366 x 768 display, webcam, 4-in-1 card reader, a 2.5-inch hard drive bay, and up to 4GB of RAM, says the company. The X50V2 resembles Shuttle's recently announced XS35 desktop in that it is available in a "barebone" configuration without memory, a hard disk drive (HDD), or operating system. It will also be available preconfigured with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD, loaded with either SUSE Linux or Windows 7 Home Premium, the company says.

Virtualization has come to be the hot pick for consolidating and cutting hardware costs. All those machines within machines raise questions about the safety of what's inside, though, and according to a recent study, some are seriously lacking in good answers. The analysts at Gartner have been pondering virtualization lately, with particular emphasis on how migration affects security. According to their research, that effect is considerable: They estimate that some sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the original boxes.

Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density, always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive, worth-reading summary stating that "4 KiB logical sector support is broken in both the kernel and partitioners." As the subsequent discussion revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that we're not quite that badly prepared.

Florian Schießl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned. On his blog, the IT expert admits that "We were naïve," and confesses to a "miscalculation". Following approval of the project in 2003, LiMux was conceived as the sole Linux client, which "fits into every different environment inside the IT units." This may have been "theoretically possible", but, according to Schießl, would have meant failing to unify the existing patchwork of IT applications and essentially continuing to muddle through.

The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web.

Over the last couple of years a number of different open source business strategies have evolved. According to the 451 Group, it's an evolution that includes the broader adoption and usage of open source overall by both open source and proprietary software vendors.

Part 1 of this series introduced arpeggiators in general and profiled the QMidiArp application. This week we conclude our survey with a look at two more arpeggiators for Linux musicians: Hypercyclic and Arpage.

Snapping a quick screenshot is a capability you get out of the box with most current Linux distributions. Hit the Print Screen function key, and you should see a dialog box pop up with a capture of your entire screen. For GNOME users this typically launches gnome-screenshot while Kde will bring up Ksnapshot. Both tools are similar in functionality and get the basic job accomplished.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently appointed Jeff Jaffe as their new Chief Executive Officer. Jeff had most recently worked as Chief Technology Officer at Novell. W3C is an international community that sets standards for the web. Its work has had significant positive impact, and has helped free the web from proprietary standards. W3C is also famous as the home of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is now out for developers to try out and test -- well kinda/sorta. You see the IE9 Test Drive Platform Preview isn't really a browser is it? IE9 as it is currently available lacks tabs. It lacks a back button and it lacks an address bar. In my view, it's a crippled browser that does not represent the modern web browsing usage model at all. The idea for Microsoft is to show off new features without the confusion of a full fledged browser -- though why tabs, address bar and tabs would do that is beyond my comprehension.

Of course when I say leopard, with regards to anything computer, you think Mac OS X. Not this time. This time we’re talking about a different flavor of Linux – Pardus.Pardus is developed in Turkey and named after the Anatolian leopard. It’s goal is to be a complete distribution that new users can use with little introduction to Linux. It takes advantage of KDE 4 and offers a very user-centric experience. Pardus has a few features that most will have never heard of or seen before. In this article I will introduce you to some of these features as I introduce you to Pardus Linux.

Love it or hate it, Ubuntu has changed the way Linux is perceived by many. What was once a mysterious hacker OS is now on the desktop of many technophobic grandmothers, and part of that success in recent years is due to Ubuntu. Next month, we’ll have the newest long-term release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. A lot has changed since Warty Warthog, the first release, so we here at MakeTechEasier thought it was time to take a look at how Ubuntu has evolved over time with screenshots, software information, and the origins of some of the important features that we all now take for granted.

A startup that includes former members of Openmoko has begun shipping a hackable Linux-based "copyleft" clamshell for $99. Qi Hardware's Ben NanoNote incorporates Ingenic's MIPS-compatible 336MHz XBurst Jz4720 processor, 32MB SDRAM, and 2GB NAND flash, and offers a 3-inch, 320 x 240 display.

ach year, the Linux Foundation is responsible for putting on some of the biggest names of the conference season. LinuxCon, the Kernel and End-User Summits, the Linux Plumbers Conference — they all have the Foundation behind them. The next up on the schedule is the Collaboration Summit, and as of last week, attendees can now check the details on the Summit's who, what, where, and when.