Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

SCO is still drowning in its own fail sauce but hasn't completely suffocated yet. The company's Chapter 11 Trustee has proposed selling off SCO's mobile technology business for some quick cash. The prospective buyer is said to be none other than Darl McBride, the company's much-despised former CEO, according to a report by Groklaw.

A former Sun Microsystems' executive has re-assured worried OpenSolaris users the open-source operating system has a future under new owner Oracle. Dan Roberts, Oracle director of product management, has said the database giant will continue to invest in OpenSolaris and will deliver the operating system's next incarnation: OpenSolaris 2010.03.

Sprint and Verizon Wireless have released Palm's upgraded 1.4 version of the Linux-based WebOS for Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones. Ofering much-anticipated video capture and editing functionality plus improved messaging features, WebOS 1.4 arrives shortly after Palm announced lowered investment guidance due to disappointing smartphone sales.

Several Linux distributors have released updated sudo packages to fix two vulnerabilities that allow users with limited access rights to escalate their privileges. The sudo (super user do) command is intended to allow users to execute certain commands at another user's privilege level - usually root. The contents of the /etc/sudoers file determines whether or not a user is authorised to execute a command at a higher privilege level (by preceding the command with sudo) without further authentication. This allows administrators to give other users the rights required to handle certain management tasks without giving them overall root access.

The KDE Project has announced the availability of packages for Microsoft Windows, bringing the KDE 4.4 applications to Windows. New in this release, the packages have been broken out from the main KDE modules so it should be easier for users to simply install a single package if they choose. Not everything is available for Windows yet, for instance Amarok is not available for Windows at this time, but most KDE apps should be good to go on Windows with this release.

As with all operating systems, the way a Linux game behaves on a computer is largely dependent on the design of the game, the graphics hardware and drivers the user has, and the settings one chooses. Native Linux games are typically better at supporting the computer’s default resolution without much tweaking, but the way it handles fullscreen display on a a dual-monitor system depends on the game engine employed. After about an hour of trying to configure all of your games, you might very well find yourself drowning in sea of techno-babble and configuration files. But have no fear, MakeTechEasier has come to your rescue yet again.

For many users, the combination of Slackware Linux and the Xfce desktop is the perfect blend of stability and speed, whatever the age of their hardware. But if Slackware itself is too much hard work, why not try one of its derivatives with a friendlier approach to the desktop and with out-of-the-box support for popular hardware and multimedia codecs? Bernard Hoffmann, an experienced Slackware user, has taken three Slackware-based Xfce distributions (Zenwalk Linux, Salix OS and GoblinX) for a test drive to see which one would be a best fit for a blazing fast and powerful home desktop. In the news section, Oracle confirms the continued development of OpenSolaris, Fedora delays the upcoming alpha release of version 13, Mandriva switches to nouveau with the latest kernel update in "Cooker", and Linux Mint prepares for an imminent release of its LXDE edition. Also in this issue, a link to a good summary of bleeding-edge repositories for Kubuntu and a brief talk about zombie processes. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the February 2010 DistroWatch.com donation is the Squid project.

Things are hotting up in the USA – following an offer from majority shareholder Ralph Yarro to lend SCO Group more than 2 million dollars for its pending court cases, the administrator Edward Cahn has presented an alternative financing option to the bankruptcy court. None other than Darl McBride, the former SCO chief executive who was sacked by Yarro, wants to purchase and develop the company's mobile arm. As reported on Groklaw, the proposed conditions of sale are extraordinarily generous, with a purchase price of $35,000 being mooted. Licensing fees would be due only when the company's turnover exceeds 1 million dollars annually – they are not expected to exceed 30,000.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning to overhaul the desktop panel and integrate social networking features in Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx. One of the key components of this effort is the Me Menu, which shipped in the Lucid alpha 3 last week. The Me Menu, which Canonical unveiled in December, provides a unified interface for managing your presence on instant messaging and social networking services. A text box that is embedded in the menu allows users to publish status messages to all of their accounts. The menu also provides easy access to the standard account and identity configuration tools.

The consolidated IT of the city of Munich is reporting at CeBIT 2010 on converting their workstations to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration to the free office package was finalized for Munich. All 15,000 office PCs of the city council will work on OpenOffice, under Linux or Windows.

Installing and Running Linux on Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3): It is possible to install and run Linux on the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game console (not-including the PS3 Slim model). In fact, there are plenty of distros that are compatible with the PS3 such as Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Yellow Dog, and Gentoo. The Linux kernel supports PlayStation 3 since version 2.6.21, that means no patches or hacks are required to install and run a full-featured distro.

I admit it: I'm slightly jealous of Microsoft server administrators. You see, in the Linux world, we have the power to create crazily robust and creative systems, but we're often reinventing the wheel.

The story first hit in last week on the Slovakian tech site DSL.sk. Since I am not linguistically equipped to follow the Slovakian tech scene, I didn’t hear about the story until it was brought up in English on TechCrunch. The gist of these reports is this: DSL.sk did a test of the “ballot” screen at http://www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser. It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser. However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of the browsers was far from random.

Following Saturday morning's major earthquake in Chile, aid efforts worldwide are already springing into action. The open source Open Street Map (OSM) project plans to lend its support by calling for volunteers to update its maps of Chile on the basis of the latest satellite images. This will assist orientation and coordination of aid teams in Chile.

Government competition agencies are increasingly focused on Google’s growing power in search and online advertising. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have all determined that Google is dominant in certain markets, including search advertising. In late 2008 the DOJ was prepared to go to court to block Google’s attempt to partner with its largest search rival, Yahoo!. Last year the DOJ told a federal court that Google’s book search plan is anticompetitive in several respects. (One big problem is that Google would help itself to essentially exclusive rights to tens of millions of books—effectively locking out everyone else.) Last week the DOJ reiterated that view in court, even after Google had an opportunity to address the DOJ’s concerns. This week came news that the European Commission is investigating various aspects of Google’s conduct, including claims of retaliation, exclusivity and manipulation of search results to disadvantage rivals. The European Commission is likely to treat these cases quite seriously, given that Google’s share of search and search advertising is north of 95% in many European countries.

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2010

In this week's LXWR we have a Ubuntu fanboy who comes clean, A Windows metrics source lies about his identity, is Linux Distro-hopping a Thing of the Past?, SCALE 8x: Review Of My Road Trip To L.A. and a whole lot more.

A chunky Visual Studio 2010 releases soon, packing more features and representing perhaps more hours of development than any other single-vendor's development tool. How could you resist? And yet many do resist such highly automated and powerful productivity tools and continue to favor Emacs or other text editors and command lines for their development. Ruby, the fastest growing language ecosystem, has evolved primarily without IDE tool support. What explains this love/hate relationship with the IDE among developers and the companies that make them. Will we ever all get on the same page?

Novell executives said this week that it's seven-year-old Linux business has finally broken even -- making good on promises made a year ago. But it hasn't been an easy trek to begin making money off of Linux, and one factor may way against Novell's Linux business going forward: The waning revenue from its landmark 2006 agreement with Microsoft to begin reselling Linux support subscriptions. This week, Novell reported its first-quarter fiscal 2010 earnings for the quarter ending on Jan. 31. Net revenues came in at $202 million, a decline from the $215 million reported for the first quarter of 2009. On the net income side, things are a bit brighter. Novell reported GAAP net income of $20 million, or $0.06 per share, an increase over the $11 million or $0.03 per share it reported for the first quarter of 2009.

First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.

Android's been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you're a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.