Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When I said recently that we still need the Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a flood of comment. There's no doubt that we need OSI - but we need a better OSI. The one we have now is just too small to be effective and too mired in past successes; a renaissance is needed. You can help.

Another shoe has dropped for the SCO Group -- this makes about a dozen -- but when will this outfit go away? First the SCO Group sues IBM for billions in a case related to alleged intellectual property infringement, and then it starts threatening Linux and Linux users. Then, after Novell says that the SCO Group does not have the rights to Unix that it needs to sue and threaten, it sues Novell. Since then it has been mostly downhill for the SCO Group.

Are you like me and have multiple Ubuntu machines under one roof? Are you tired of downloading the same update multiple times? Sick of what seems to be duplicate work? Let me introduce you to my little friend... squid-deb-proxy.

Microsoft and Oracle are losing out to Linux and MySQL while cloud computing's not exactly taking off, according to the latest survey of Eclipse users. The number of those building software using a PC running Linux has grown by thirteen percentage points in three years to almost a third, while those using a machine running Windows has dropped by 16 points to 58 per cent since 2007.

Threading is no small topic in programming circles. Some folks love them. Some hate them. Whether they are good or evil is a debate for the pious among us — I use them when they fit and you might want to do the same. In this article we’re going to have a look at a basic building block of Android applications — performing an operation in a secondary thread while keeping the primary GUI thread accessible and the user up to date at all times.

You're probably familiar with using makefiles to build executables from source code. But did you know that GNU make can automate many tasks? Juliet Kemp teaches us how.

Let me be blunt: If you're not using Linux on the desktop in call center and other fixed-purpose computing environments, you're doing your company a disservice. It never fails to amaze me when I see environments with hundreds of Windows XP systems running TN3270 sessions to an AS/400, with a headset-equipped person staring at the green screen and talking to a customer. Even if there were a need for Web browsing and email for those users, why would you pay for Windows on that system in this day and age?

When you install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition in October, don’t look for Firefox on the desktop — it won’t be there. Chromium, Chrome’s open source cousin, is going to be taking its place. After years of desktop dominance on Linux, is Firefox losing its foothold or is this an anomaly?

One year ago we reviewed the ZaReason Ion Breeze computer that was built around NVIDIA's ION platform with an Intel Atom CPU, but today we are looking at our first ZaReason notebook and it boasts some very high-end hardware. The Verix 1656 is one of ZaReason's highest-end notebooks and its powered by a quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU (with Hyper Threading to make for eight logical cores in this mobile computer), a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M GPU, and a 15.4-inch 1680x1050 display. The ZaReason Verix 1656 also has a very nice brushed-aluminum exterior.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is bullish on PCs exposing millions of consumers to Linux – despite the industry succumbing to Jobsian tablet fever. Shuttleworth reckons that Ubuntu is approaching a tipping point among the ordinary PC-buying public, with the distro shipping on a record (for Ubuntu) five million machines this year.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) recently elected a new executive which will sit for two years until the Idlelo 5 conference in 2012. Tectonic spoke to the newly elected officials about the successes of the past, new challenges and hopes for the future.

Most users interact with OpenOffice.org on the desktop. But what if you need to do a selective restore on the files that store custom gradients or colors? Troubleshoot why an extension won't install? Share resources with other users? For these kinds of tasks, you need to know a bit about where OpenOffice.org stores its files, and what you can do with them.

LXer Feature: 14-June-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Jono Bacon's Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy, can virtual PCs save desktop Linux? Is Android fragmentation something to fear? The four different types of Linux users and our own Hans Kwint says "Tear down this stair!". Enjoy!

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah finally granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's last frantic attempts to keep any of its claims going. Or, to quote Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw and top expert on SCO's endless anti-Linux lawsuits: "The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine."

Dell reckons Ubuntu offers more protection than Windows online as it convinces consumer PC shoppers they shouldn't be scared of Linux. In a statement flagged here by TheVarGuy.com, Dell picked on security as one of ten reasons why people should buy PCs running Canonical's Linux rather than Microsoft's operating system.

Maverick Meerkat will drop the Mono-based F-Spot image organiser in favour of Shotwell, reducing the number of Mono-based apps in a default Ubuntu install to just one. Change is afoot. Ubuntu developers have already said that Chromium will be the default browser in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 10.10 release and now news is in that Shotwell will be the default image organiser in Maverick Meerkat.

Two and a half years after the KDE 4 series of releases began, many users are still using KDE 3. A preference for the familiar seems to motivate some; while others seem influenced by the rumors that began with the botched 4.0 release. Still others want a feature that the KDE 4 series has yet to implement -- or, sometimes, a feature they have been unable to find because of reorganization.

Swatch isn’t a cleverly designed watch from the 1980s but you’ll think it’s just as handy (and cleverly designed) as one. Like Logwatch, swatch is a perl script that watches your logs but swatch watches them for regular expressions that you configure. Swatch will notify you via mail or the console screen (stdout) when it matches the configured log file entries with your watchfor directives.

Ubuntu-based tablets could hit the market as early as the first quarter of 2011, says a Canonical exec. "The devices world is a really exciting space right now and we're really bullish on it," Canonical VP of alliances and OEM services told Network World.

Last week when releasing the Linux 2.6.35-rc2 kernel, Linus was upset with the number of late merges and other commits that were receiving pull requests in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel development cycle when the work should instead be now about bug and regression fixes. As such, Linus was going to be much more stringent about what he would allow within the Linux 2.6.35-rc3 kernel and he has indeed followed his tighter rules.