Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It was patch day for the test environment, the group of servers dedicated to testing locally developed code before it is pushed into QA, and then into production. Patches for RedHat Enterprise Linux are applied using "yum update" in our setup, keeping it simple. Things were going well, no conflicts, no problems with our applications after the patches were applied. Then, one of the server's yum processes died with an error--a very familiar error. Yum was trying to install a patch that depended on a certain library being at a certain level. Our library in question was higher than the level required. That library had been updated prior to patch day, so rolling it back would break whatever package installed it. I was immediately flashed back ten years...dependency hell.

The OpenOffice.org Project developers have announced that future Linux and Unix versions of their open source office suite will use the popular GStreamer multimedia framework for audio and video content playback. The developers initially created a multimedia solution for OpenOffice using Sun's 'Java Media Framework' (JMF) for a backend. However, OpenOffice Graphics Project Lead Kai Ahrens notes that, "Time has shown that JMF seems to be a bit outdated today and that support for appropriate decoders is still not as good as expected."

The London Stock Exchange has delayed a move to the Linux-based Millenium Exchange trading platform by two months, in order to give clients and IT suppliers more time for development and testing. The Turquoise dark pool venue will go live on 4 October, instead of an original planned launch in August or September. The LSE UK cash equity market will move off the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect platform to Millennium Exchange on 1 November, instead of the September original plans.

I talk a lot about software in this blog but most of the discussion is at the personal level: I tried this, I experimented with that. I hardly ever talk about what I use for doing my IBM business and more rarely still do I talk about IBM’s internal policies about software use. This entry is different, and gives you a bit of a view inside the company. Like many individuals and members of organizations, IBMers use their browsers a lot for conducting business. Our desktop and laptop software environments have some common applications but also software specific to do our various jobs. And these jobs are varied, as there are about 400,000 IBM employees around the world.

The Ubuntu development team have announced that the next Ubuntu Developer Week will take place from the 12th to the 16th of July. Several online workshops will take place during the week, run by a variety of Ubuntu contributors and community members.

Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" will be a high-end format supporting 1280 × 760 resolution and requiring a 1GHz processor, essentially splitting the operating system into two platforms, says UnwiredView. Meanwhile, HTC and Sprint are readying an Android smartphone with a 2GHz processor and 1080p video recording, says OzcarGuide, while TmoNews says HTC is prepping an Android phone for T-Mobile with dual 800MHz processors.

In order to accommodate its steady growth over the past few years, the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will move to its new home, the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, starting with SCALE 9X in 2011. The new venue – larger than SCALE’s former home for the last four years at the Westin Los Angeles Airport – will allow SCALE to expand its offerings at SCALE 9X, slated for Feb. 18-20, 2011.

This month we take a look at a number of small form factor PCs that either come with Linux or would make a perfect fit for your favorite Linux distro. Each of the computers mentioned takes up very little space, but all deliver plenty of computing performance to handle everything from basic web browsing to watching videos. They make nice little firewalls, basic file/web/print servers, and quiet, low-power media servers. All of these units typically consume a fraction of the power of a conventional desktop and less than many traditional laptops.

Rockbox has been chugging along for years offering an open source firmware replacement for MP3 players. But how relevant is a firmware replacement for a type of device that's slowly going extinct? With the release of Rockbox 3.6 on June 3, now is a good time to check in on the state of Rockbox and the future of the project. Rockbox is considered stable for a range of more than 20 MP3 players from Apple, Archos, Cowon, iRiver, Olympus, SanDisk, Toshiba, and several others. The project also offers unstable ports for a number of other players, and ports are in progress (but largely non-functional) for another dozen or so.

Amazon released its Kindle app for Android, while announcing a multimedia version for the iPhone and dropping the price of the Kindle, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Android 2.2 rolled out to Nexus One users, but Sprint suspended its own rollout to the Evo 4G, says eWEEK, and Samsung announced plans for a Froyo update to its Galaxy S.

It was over six weeks ago that rumors, later confirmed as true, circulated stating that Mandriva's financial situation was so dire that it was considering buy-out offers to try to avoid having to close its doors. This news struck many Mandriva users and developers hard and all held their breath waiting for further news and the release of Mandriva Spring 2010.1. Although the final release of 2010.1 is still absent, news that Mandriva S.A. might be saved was met with sighs of relief and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Several weeks ago, I ended a comparison of the KDE 4 and 3 desktops by saying "Unless a project takes over KDE 3 development, sooner or later it may become unusable with the latest generation of computers." What I had missed -- free software being a large place where events move at near-light speeds -- was that a project had already taken over KDE 3 development. It's called Trinity KDE, and is organized by Timothy Pearson, who has been releasing Kubuntu releases that use KDE 3.5 for some time. According to Facebook rumor, he has been planning to revive KDE 3 for some time.

Last Autumn I volunteered to review Windows 7. But in the following weeks, I found Linux to be preferable in many ways. This is pretty significant progress, and outside the 'community' has gone largely unnoticed, too - I haven't seen all that many Ubuntu stories in the Wall Street Journal. But what comes next is going to be pretty challenging for everyone involved – and that's what I'll look at here. But first a bit of history, starting with a confession.

On of the great aspects of Qt is that it is cross platform. Not only across desktops, but also across devices. The Qt make tool, qmake, can be configured to cross compile for different architectures using different compilers and different settings. How to do all this is reasonably straight forward, but you need to know how to get started. When you've downloaded and extracted Qt you find yourself facing a configure script with loads of options. Trying to get control of them all can feel overwhelming the first time, so it is good to know what is about to happen.

In previous articles I have hinted that at Phoronix we are working to take advantage of the Btrfs file-system within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic to provide an interesting feature that will further expand our automated testing capabilities, but how does this file-system come into play? Well, here is what's being worked on and it should be of terrific value to many people. One of the features of Btrfs not found in other Linux file-systems (like EXT4) is support for copy-on-write snapshots / sub-volumes. With this Btrfs snapshotting support is the ability to mount different snapshots in a very easy manner and since they are copy-on-write, the disk storage requirements are not extreme

Cisco announced an enterprise-focused tablet based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom, using Intel's upcoming x86 Android port. Due in the first quarter of 2011, the Cius offers a seven-inch touchscreen, 32GB of flash, 3G and 802.11 a/b/g/n communications, a 720p-capable front-facing videocam, a five-megapixel still camera, plus an optional HD audio docking station equipped with a telephone handset.

Cross-platform efforts to provide interoperability with Windows on Linux systems may cease to be of importance in future as the acceptance of alternative OSes widens, say industry watchers. Linux users have relied on various methods to access Windows programs, one of which is the Wine project. The open source effort offers users a way of running some Windows programs by providing a substitute layer that encompasses APIs (application programming interfaces) and DLLs (dynamic-link libraries) for the Windows kernel.

It's common knowledge that Linux has a fair number of file systems. Some of these are unappreciated and can be very useful outside their "comfort zone". OCFS2 is a clustered file system initially contributed by Oracle and can be a great back-end file system for general, shared storage needs.

Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader. Frields joined Red Hat in February 2008, replacing Max Spevack, another Red Hat employee who ran the open source Linux development product from February 2006 until Frields took over. Smith will take over the FPL position (which is a full-time job with a Red Hat paycheck) to steer the development of Fedora 14, something that Frields already got the ball rolling on.

Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.