Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Until a few years ago, hardly a day went by without an article being featured on Linux Today about how “the year of Linux” had arrived. Every Linux user with a blog was willing to bet, year after year, that this was finally going to be “the year of Linux.” This was going to be the year when the public got wise, quit paying the Microsoft tax and moved over to the obviously superior Linux. And year after year, it didn’t happen.

Mozilla says it has "no official position" on NPAPI Pepper, the revamped browser plug-in API developed by Google for use with Native Client, a plug-in that runs native code inside its Chrome browser. Google is also using Pepper to integrate Adobe's Flash player and a PDF reader with Chrome, and in announcing its plan to bundle Flash with Chrome, the company seemed to indicate that Mozilla was backing the API. "We are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API," Google said in a blog post.

Wine, the project that lets Linux users run Windows apps within Linux, has released a major update that fixes a number of bugs and includes 64-bit support. Wine 2.1 includes a new set of icons, a number of fixes for video rendering – improving Windows gaming – and better font anti-aliasing and handling of desktop link files. Wine has always been a controversial app in the Linux community with purists claiming Wine is exactly what Linux doesn't need – a Windows crutch that just undermines claims that Linux can do anything Windows can do. Rather than relying on Wine, the argument goes, Linux users should concentrate on improving the Linux apps that cover the same territory.

Intel has confirmed that it will create a native version of Android 2.2 that will run on devices sporting the Atom chipsets. Intel's Renee James told APCmag.com that an X86 version of Android 2.2 – codenamed FroYo – would be available for developers this summer. "Our expectation is that (native x86 Android) will be based on the Froyo release and will be available this summer to developers," said James.

LinuxTag 2010 is the host of a Debian miniconf; that, in turn, was where relatively new Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli delivered a relatively high-energy "state of Debian" talk. According to Stefano, Debian is doing great, but can do better yet; he has some ideas for how to make the project better.

For several years now, Sprint has been in next-to-last place among U.S. wireless network providers. But that might eventually change if Sprint continues to offer smartphones like the HTC EVO 4G ($200 with a new contract), a well-reviewed Android 2.1 handset boasting several firsts and currently a Sprint exclusive in the U.S.

A little over a month ago we released the Linux port of Osmos, promising statistics on our sales and downloads. We wanted to find out - from a financial perspective, for our studio - “is it worth porting games to Linux?” The short, simple answer… is “yes.” Did we get rich off it? No. But the time we invested was repaid, with room for margin of error, and possibly with a little extra at the end. Allow me to break it down..

Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It's approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.

The VideoLAN project is shipping version 1.1 of its open source VLC media player, adding hardware acceleration, WebM support, and faster HD decoding, but deleting Shoutcast support. Meanwhile, several industry reports suggest possible reasons for Adobe's temporary suspension of its beta 64-bit Linux version of Flash.

In this part of the series we complete our tour of the Grace algorithmic composition environment. The Targets: Grace can format its output for the following targets and file types : * Audio - Realtime and file (WAV, AIFF, etc) * MIDI - Realtime and file (MID) * OSC - Realtime * Csound - Realtime and score file * FOMUS - File (LilyPond and others). We've already considered Grace as a generator for MIDI files and realtime performance. Now let's see how it works with Csound.

LinOn Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn't need multiple layers of security software.

The NoSQL database that powers Facebook's popular FarmVille and Café World games is being released as a public open-source project. Zynga (the games' creator), NoSQL start-up NorthScale, and Korean games portal NHN have announced the membase open-source project at Membase.org, under an Apache 2.0 license. All three have contributed code.

Over the night on Phoronix an article was published entitled Is LGP Going The Way Of Loki Software? Linux Game Publishing has been around since 2001 when Loki Software had collapsed, but in recent months LGP has been eerily quiet, has stopped responding to inquiries from customers and other Linux gamers, and their only announced game ports are titles they began working on back in 2002 and 2003. This had led many to worry and wonder whether LGP is dead.

Canon's digital cameras, like all digital cameras, are really little computers. Certain features are enabled or disabled to justify different price points. It's all done in software, so the wizards of CHDK have created firmware to add new features (such as RAW support), and to do it safely without bricking your camera. Akkana Peck tells how in part one of this series.

Having file systems in the kernel has its pros and cons. Being able to write file systems in user-space also has some pros and cons, but FUSE (File System in Userspace) allows you to create some pretty amazing results. This article takes a very brief look at user-space file systems and FUSE.

Red Hat is not as precisely coupled to the economy as many other IT players. Throughout the Great Recession, Red Hat got its brim a little wet, but it never blew off Wall Street's head and got trampled in the mud like so many other companies. And as the economy recovers, the commercial Linux operating system and JBoss middleware distributor is growing at more or less the same rate – like nothing ever happened.

Last weekend a team of KDE volunteers (wo)manned a booth at LinuxTag. As hopefully many of you have already read about (and maybe already joined) on Wednesday the new Supporting Membership program was launched. There is some more content upcoming, but for now we'd like to give you all a quick taste of what those four days were like. On Tuesday afternoon, Eckhart Woerner and Frederik Gladhorn arrived at the KDE e.V. office in Berlin, not only to say hello and have quick look at the office but also to equip the boothbox. Then everybody took off to the fairground venue in order to set up the booth.

A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE. Today we are happy to announce the winning designs. Read on for details of how to download the labels to use. read more

Building on what we already know about Android development, we take a look at adding App Widget functionality for your phone's "desktop."

A few weeks ago, Google announced that Chrome OS will be ready for release this fall. Like many Google products, Chrome OS is designed to be a game changer. There are no desktop applications, as we typically think of them. Instead, the entire user experience happens within the browser. Naturally, some people think this is ridiculous while others see it as the natural evolution of technology. The success or failure of Chrome OS might even be a major factor in determining whether or not that evolution happens. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s how to build the Chrome OS image.