Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Moonlight, the de facto open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight platform for Linux that leverages Mono, is nearing its 3.0 release. Moonlight 2.0 was just released a half-year ago, but Moonlight 3.0 Preview 7 was just released and it's offering up more features.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

Some rumours have emerged that IBM is considering an OS/2 comeback and I'm filled with the same mixed feelings that always emerge whenever the subject is raised. Would I want OS/2 back on my desktop now? Not really. Have these rumours got me a bit excited? Absolutely. In fact, I'm willing to take a guess about what the new OS/2 might be.

Making an image copy of your system disk is a great way to create a backup. With the cost of portable USB drives at all time lows, you could keep a couple around for rotation purposes. If your main drive does crash, you could be back up and running in a matter of minutes. Now all that's left is making the actual image copy. There are lots of ways to accomplish this task, and we'll spell a few of them out to help you along.

Have you always wanted to set up your own music station to stream your latest music collection to your friends or colleagues? Have you been thinking lately of setting up an always-on music streaming server so that you can just open up your web browser and listen to your favorite tracks? A music server is great in a dormitory, laboratory or office where the file server can double up as the music server! I will show you how using Zeya.

The enterprise software vendor consolidation trend has now reached the open source corner of the market, with Consona's announcement that it is acquiring Compiere, Inc.,

First quarter global notebook PC revenues grew to $31.1 billion, representing a 31 percent year-to-year increase, says DisplaySearch. Leading the way were mini-note PCs (netbooks), and slates (tablets), which together grew 56.4 percent year-over-year, but tablets may soon start cutting into netbook sales, says the study.

If something doesn't work, try something else. That's a lesson that the FSF needs to embrace, if it wants to succeed with a mainstream audience. Being the Party of Gno, and trying to tell users to just avoid Windows, Cloud Computing, iPads, and proprietary software isn't cutting it. It's time to come up with credible alternatives or be satisfied with remaining irrelevant to the majority of users.

Flock — the so-called social web browser — has dumped its traditional Firefox core in favor of Chromium, the open source incarnation of Google's Chrome browser. CEO Shawn Hardin calls Flock 3 — released today as a public beta — the first major browser other than Chrome to use a Chromium base, and in making the switch, the Silicon Valley outfit is dumping nearly six years of history. The Flock dev team began building browsers from a Mozilla base in late 2004, which predates the arrival of Firefox 1.0. Before going to work on their eponymous social browser, the team helped develop Netscape 8.x, the first AOL Netscape browser based on Firefox.

Linux Mint is another distribution that seems designed for new users, although many seasoned users find it as handy as anyone. Linux Mint takes Ubuntu and makes it usable by adding drivers and codecs and adjusting the default application stack for more mainstream appeal. In addition, they customize the appearance for a more universal demographic. Mint isn't just a revamped Ubuntu. Its developers actually write tools and utilities to increase user-friendliness. Best of all, it's one of the few distros that can truly be considered "install and go." All these factors are surely why Mint has soared into the top 3 of Distrowatch's Page Hit Rankings.

Neelie Kroes is no lightweight when it comes to open v. closed software. She spent six years as Europe's head trust-buster, and in that time, collected billions from proprietary software makers who sought to corner the market with their closed-source wares. When she spoke, big software — and everybody else — listened. In February, Ms. Kroes moved on from chasing down monopolists, becoming the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda — the EU's lead regulator of all things information technology. If her recent comments are any indication, she intends to continue her staunch opposition to proprietary software in her new position.

Open source electronics firm Liquidware has released a kit for attaching a 4.4-inch Liquidware BeagleTouch OLED touchscreen to a BeagleBoard to construct a Linux-based, tablet device. The Beagle Embedded Starter Kit also incorporates a BeagleJuice battery module and a 4GB SD card.

There was a talk last week at LinuxTag in Berlin by Egbert Eich about kernel mode-setting and the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) graphics stack on Linux. Egbert is, of course, a long-time X developer and openSUSE developer at Novell who was one of the masterminds behind the RadeonHD graphics driver and has worked on various pieces of X over the years. In Egbert's brief KMS talk he briefly covered the history of the Linux graphics stack, the user and kernel-space APIs for DRM mode-setting, and related topics. For those that missed out on his talk, below are his slides.

According to Henry Chesbrough1, Open Innovation consists of using external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, to advance a company's technology. Software architects and developers are usually not short of ideas, but which of those ideas are the really good ones? How do you select the winning options and avoid wasting energy and money on the useless ones?

Java father James Gosling has endorsed plans to juice managed runtimes on Linux from a company that was once at loggerheads with Sun Microsystems over his beloved language. Gosling has said he's "excited" by the Managed Runtime Initiative, which involves code contributions from Java appliance specialist Azul Systems, saying the effort will create the new functionality needed for managed runtimes to "continue their growth and evolution."

Eucalyptus Systems — the open source outfit that mimics Amazon's so-called compute cloud inside private data centers — has released a major upgrade to its commercial product, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0 includes support for Windows virtual machines, letting you hoist Windows Server 2003, 2008, and Windows 7 images atop a Eucalyptus cloud — not just Linux images — and it includes new billing, accounting, and user management tools. New CEO Marten Mickos — the former CEO of MySQL AB — also promises "improved scalability."

Rooting your Android device is much like jailbreaking an iPhone. Once rooted, you can make your phone run faster, tether it to your computer, tweak hidden settings to your liking, and more. Here's how to do it on your Motorola Droid. Rooting essentially means giving yourself root permissions on your phone. It's the equivalent of running programs as administrators in Windows, or running a command with "sudo" in Linux. There are a number of great reasons to root your Android phone, highest among them being speed (through custom ROMs and through overclocking), tethering, and installing apps and widgets from other builds.

The release of FFmpeg 0.5 last March was significant as it was the first official release in quite a while for this popular and widely used free software media program. Fifteen months later, FFmpeg 0.6 has been released with plenty of changes including support for Google's VP8 codec / WebM and improvements for HTML5/H.264 video playback.

It looks like Dell will join Acer and HP in offering netbooks based on Google's Chrome OS sometime this fall. Dell isn't among the official Chrome OS partners named by Google, but as noticed by Download Squad, the code repository for Chromium OS — the open source incarnation of Chrome OS — includes some rather conspicuous bits that point to Dell as an early manufacturer.

If you've ever tried to change system-wide bash settings, you know there are three major ways of invoking bash, all of which behave differently when reading in settings files. 1. Interactive login shell (e.g., when logging in from the console or via ssh) 2. Interactive non-login shell (e.g., when you run bash at a terminal prompt) 3. Non-interactive shell (e.g., to run a shell script).