Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If making money from open source was hard, extracting it from clouds might prove to be even more difficult. Particularly when your main rival on the x64 server is none other than Microsoft. Red Hat got its start as Linux magazine publisher that tucked a Linux CD in the back, and then evolved into the largest commercial Linux distributor in the world. The company added middleware from JBoss and created other middleware, such as its Enterprise MRG messaging, grid and realtime Linux variant, and virtualization software for desktops and servers. And now it has to position itself as an alternative to Microsoft as the platform upon which customers can build x64-based clouds.

As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of educational software and I've written quite about about various programs in the past. But, as a programmer, I'm also a big fan of any program that makes computer programming more approachable by younger children. So, when I heard about Scratch, I was pretty enthusiastic.

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you're comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate. However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there's nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.

For many enterprises, the server OS presents a quagmire: They don't want to pay too much for the server OS on which they rely, but at the same time, they don't want their server OS makers going out of business. The big question is whether there's enough money in open source software to build strong and stable enterprise OS makers. If you run your business using Microsoft's Windows server OSes, then you really don't have to worry. The Redmond giant is rolling in cash thanks in no small part to the high prices it charges for its desktop and server OSes and the client access licenses it requires to connect one to the other.

First came Android, the mobile OS. Then came the first Android phone, the G1. Then came the Nexus One, the first true gPhone — Google top to bottom. And it just kept going from there. Today, not yet three years into development, Android is available on dozens of devices, from phones to e-readers to netbooks and more. It's taken the #2 spot in the mobile OS world — well ahead of the "unkillable" iPhone — and reportedly is slated to take on Apple's other hot toy of the moment. Given the explosive growth and variety of devices sporting the OS, it comes as little surprise when a manufacturer announces they have a new Android offering in the works. Unless, that is, if the manufacturer is a networking giant and the announcement comes out of nowhere.

As we reported last week, Red hat has just reported another robust financial quarter--one of many achieved in a row. Earnings came in at 15 cents a share, or $24.1 million, compared to 12 cents a share expected by analysts, on total revenue of $209.1 million. Once again, Red Hat not only maintained its key subscribers but grew subscriptions and renewals.

Intel is working on a fully native x86 version of Android 2.2 and plans to ship its version of the Google-backed mobile operating system to developers in the next two months. Given how slowly Android 2.2, codenamed "Froyo," has come to market, that would make x86 one of the first platforms to get the Linux-based OS. Android had originally been written for ARM-based processors, which are in use in the vast majority of smartphones -- including all of the major HTC Android phones and Google's Nexus One, the only phone now running Android 2.2.

Virtualisation doesn't have to be scary. It isn't the sole domain of the enterprise, or cloud computing, or server farms. It's just as useful, and just as manageable, as the average desktop, and there now seem to be almost as many ways to virtualise Linux as their are distributions themselves. You could pay money, for example, and buy a workstation product from either VMware or Parallels, both of which have excellent performance, support and some advanced features. Or you could try their open source equivalents, the wonderful VirtualBox and Qemu.

As I mentioned in an earlier Linux Journal article, I decided to cut the apron strings with my television provider over a year ago. Bye bye, DISH Satelite TV! Man, you should have heard them whimper. "But sir, is there anything we can do to keep your business?".

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As open source becomes more widely accepted, an obvious growth path for them is to be bought by a bigger, traditional software company. The concern then becomes: how does the underlying open source code fare in those circumstances?

Your editor had the pleasure of giving a keynote talk at the 2010 LinuxTag, immediately prior to Mark Shuttleworth's keynote - a position described by more than one person as being Mark's warmup act. That role must have been successfully carried out; Mark's talk was, indeed, well received from the start. Topics ranged from the familiar (cadence) to issues like quality, with a look at upcoming Ubuntu design features as well.

Commandlinefu.com collects your useful command-line one liners and shares them with the rest of the world. I check it out every so often (if you're really dedicated, there are Twitter and RSS feeds),

What’s the one thing that you see criminals, spies and other mysterious individuals doing just prior to embarking on a caper? If you said, “synchronize their watches” you guessed correctly. And, why do they do it? Because timing is everything. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) does the same thing for your systems and for the same reasons; it keeps them synchronized.

LXer Feature: 27-June-2010

In the LXWR this week we have a Mac devotee moving to Linux, you want Linux to run what?, Marcel Gagne talks about when Linux was fun, Phoronix does a five-way Linux distro comparison and Steven Rosenberg says goodbye to Ubuntu..sort of. Enjoy!

The iPhone 4 may be on sale now, but the Android community is doing a good job of keeping quite a lot of the spotlight on itself - mainly thanks to Verizon Wireless' aggressive promotion of its flagship phones, Droid Incredible from HTC and the new Droid X from Motorola. Such efforts are beginning to show results in terms of Android's market share and developer commitments, and could even create some enterprise momentum soon, say analysts.

In this post, I’ll talk about the REMOVE_ASSET and INSTALL_ASSET mechanisms that can be invoked by Google via Android’s GTalkService to not only remotely remove applications from an Android device but also remotely install new applications.

I touched briefly upon OS independence when I wrote a little bit about the Q10 minimalistic word processor a few weeks ago and PyRoom, another minimalistic word processor, last week. Or, if I didn’t, then I certainly should have done. The point that I’m trying to make is that as both of those applications save their data as straight unmodified text files; those file are obviously readable on pretty much any system out there, from computers to word processors, tablet devices to mobile phones – hell, I think that even my Microwave displays text files. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly?