Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.

LXer Feature: 08-Mar-2010

In the area of window managers Linux users are completely and totally spoiled rotten. We constantly debate the merits of one desktop environment/window manager over another. We argue over what programs are better than others, what versions of those programs we like over another and getting in world class pissing contests all the while crying about what we wish they would do better or differently. I wish Windows users had this problem, but they don't. Why? Because they have no choice.

The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month. The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest I think. - Scott]

We reported a month ago that Unigine Heaven on Linux is still trash with the ATI driver so Unigine Corp is continuing to hold off on releasing the Unigine Heaven tech demo with the OpenGL renderer that supports hardware tessellation until there is a good Catalyst release. Unigine Heaven was released for Windows 7 back in October on this operating system's launch day using a DirectX 11.0 renderer, but buggy Linux drivers have held back the public Linux-OpenGL build. We have been fortunate to run Unigine Heaven on Linux internally and it's a beautiful tech demo / benchmark to say the least even without a bug-free tessellation experience.

Welcome to another interview with a KDE contributor. Last time we interviewed Marco Martin from KDE Plasma team, this time we talked with Tobias König from KDEPIM about Akonadi and the TV series Lost ;) The original interview in Italian is available in Giovanni Venturi's KDE blog.

MySQL Cluster is used to provide high-availability, high-redundancy for the distributed computing environment. You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I’m using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition. I’m using 3 servers (1 Management and 2 data) to setup cluster in CentOS 5.4 Linux box. The steps mentioned here can be used for quickly deploying a cluster and worked out for me but no guarantee that this will work for you, So its always advisable to go through official MySQL guide as well for production environment. In case you are also riding on cloud computing wave, I’ve already blogged way to setup MySQL cluster in Amazon EC2 environment.

Without an operating system – Mac OS X, say, or Windows XP – a computer is just a dumb box of chips, and even the most exciting application will have no environment in which to run. And, it's easy to forget that you have a choice of which OS you run. In fact, as a Mac user, you're uniquely positioned because an Intel Mac is the only computer in the world that can legally run all three major operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Indeed, you can, if you like, load all three on the same computer and pick which one you want to load when you switch your Mac on.

LXer Feature: 07-Mar-2010

In the LXWR this week we have Munich showing off its migration to Linux at CeBIT, Ubuntu opens up a music store, a nice review of OpenShot, Jeff Hoogland 'mints' his girlfriends laptop, the three giants of Linux and a LXer feature about contributing upstream..enjoy!

Google's purchase of DocVerse March 5 validates the market for applications that bridge the gap between the Google Apps cloud computing suite and Microsoft's Office on-premise applications. Google will stitch this technology into Google Apps, appealing to customers who want to use Google Apps as their main collaboration suite, but still use the documents they created offline in Office without losing any of the data. The move comes as OffiSync is building its own suite of software that creates ties between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers.

One of the things that's been wandering around my mind lately (one of thousands) is the thought of the wild woods. In other words, places in the world that are away from civilization, away from the normal creature comforts of daily life, such as areas in Northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, sections of Africa, and others like that. Places where you have enough power to run a machine, but no internet connection, or if you do, it's sparing at best. Places like this sometimes have computers, and a reasonable amount of use for one, but they're way outside the normal network connected sphere of influence you see in the regular world. That then begs the question, how do we get Linux into areas like that?

There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.

Canonical is updating Ubuntu's look and feel with a new style that departs from the popular Linux distribution's traditional brown theming. The new theme, which was announced yesterday as part of an initiative to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity, will be used in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx. The design documents that Canonical published Wednesday left a lot of questions unanswered. Fortunately, the new themes were rolled out to Ubuntu 10.04 alpha testers today in the latest set of package updates. We used the Ubuntu alpha to conduct some hands-on testing so that we could see how the new theme looks with a number of popular applications.

For the tinkerers and testers, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfect year. Almost every desktop and application we can think of is going to have a major release, and while release dates and roadmaps always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, many of these projects have built technology and enhancements you can play with now. We've selected the few we think are worth keeping an eye on and that can be installed easily, but Linux is littered with applications that are evolving all the time, so we've also tried to guess what the next big things might be.

For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix (UNR), but I’ve never given it a shot up until now. Being a KDE guy, I usually lean toward applications based on the Qt toolkit and I’ve never really liked GNOME much. For some reason though, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been lingering in my mind for a potential review, and now I’ve finally been able to give it a shot. I’ve actually been using UNR for a couple of months now. When I first started playing with it, I didn’t even own a Netbook, so instead I tried it out on a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. About a month later, I was gifted a Dell Mini 10 netbook, which afforded me the opportunity to try UNR in it’s intended environment.

The Free Software Foundation is gearing up for a big event March 19th through 21st to be held in Cambridge, Mass. at Harvard's University Science Center. LibrePlanet 2010 is a three day event with workshops on using free software for everything from Web development to video editing and graphics. This year's LibrePlanet is going to feature a new "Women's Caucus," a day-long track on Sunday to boost participation by women in free software projects. There's no shortage of events focused on free and open source software. You can't swing a penguin without hitting a conference these days, so we interviewed FSF membership coordinator Deborah Nicholson to find out what makes LibrePlanet different from some of the other events going on this Spring.

The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and "configurators."

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org. This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers. Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Bruce Byfield is already grumpy from the Olympics invasion of his hometown, and now KDE and GNOME are causing vexation. They both have many wonderful abilities, but some things leave users scratching their heads and wondering "why."

The BBC has tried to draw a line under its decision to bar open source implementations of RTMP (real-time messaging protocol) streaming in the iPlayer, after The Register revealed the Corporation's quiet switcheroo last week. BBC online managing editor Ian Hunter claimed in a blog post today that the term "open source" had been "conflated" by users who had grumbled about third party RTMP plugins being locked out of the catch-up service.