Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

From the "Maemo, to Moblin to LiPS' files: There have been multiple efforts from multiple vendor groups over the last 5 years to develop a successful mobile Linux operating system. Now we've got another one with MeeGo that my colleague Andy Patrizio reported on yesterday. The pairing of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin was a bit surprising to me initially, but in many ways it does make sense. To be blunt, Nokia's Maemo Linux platform was going nowhere fast.

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community over the project's potential future with database giant Oracle. OpenSolaris developers have complained they've been "completely ignored" by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project's future going unanswered.

The Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) was recently held in Newport Beach, California. FOSS 2010 was an invitation-only workshop aimed at identifying the key research projects and challenges for free and open source software. FOSS is funded by the Computing Research Association and the National Science Foundation, and hosted by the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine.

The Twitter microblogging service has created a Twitter loves open source page, listing the projects it has released or contributed to. The page lists programs written in Ruby, Scala, Java and C/C++ and some tools.

I worry that modern Americans have lost both manual skills and the curiosity to explore how things work. I probably worry too much, but look how computers have progressed: from a text command prompt, to all kinds of rich GUis, to smartphones and PDAs, culminating in the iPad. The iPad doesn't even use a keyboard, all you do is grunt and point.

A few media technology companies have joined the LiMo Foundation, Adobe Systems among the newest ones. The fact that the LiMo platform supports Flash should motivate developers and content providers to create corresponding LiMo applications, said Adobe in what the LiMo Foundation considered worth a special press release.

I love WordPress. I love its user-friendliness and how easy you can get it installed and running within 5 mins. I love its extensibility and the plugin system that enable us to increase its functionality without any coding needed. However, despite all the love, WordPress is not perfect. There are plenty of times where you will wonder why a simple and basic feature is not included in the WordPress core and you have to go hunting for plugins/hacks/solutions just to solve a simple problem. Take this as my letter to WordPress (and Matt Mullenweg) and I seriously hope they can add the following features to the core in the future.

One of the features that was talked about and proposed a few months back was a music store for Ubuntu where one could easily purchase music and somewhat fits in with Canonical's plans for the Ubuntu Software Store (or the "Ubuntu Software Center" as it's now called). Plans were laid out for an Ubuntu One Music Store and the first packages to support this in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are now available.

If the concept of cloud storage and applications is appealing, but not the idea of handing control of your data over to someone else, then why not set up your own little cloud? Dmitri Popov shows us how with Tonido.

The open source PHP dynamic language is one of the most widely deployed languages on Web servers today. But what operating systems are PHP developers using to develop and deploy their applications? It's a question that has been asked before and now it's being answered with a new study from Zend, one of the lead commercial backers behind PHP. The study surveyed 2,000 PHP developers in December and found that 85 percent reported that Linux was their primary operating system as a production environment for PHP.

Although Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu, Google has no intention right now of targeting the mass market. Instead, Chrome OS will be certified to run on specific hardware, which at the very least will need either an x86 or ARM CPU and a solid-state drive (SSD) for storage. Most SSDs are faster than hard drives, which enables Google to squeeze the boot time as low as possible. SSDs are also much more expensive, but that's mitigated by the fact that Chrome OS is designed to operate in as little storage space as possible – we think you might be able to buy a Chrome OS netbook with just 1GB of storage.

Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo's internet search and search advertising businesses have been cleared by both European and US regulators. The European Commission ruled that the deal "would not significantly impede effective competition". Under the deal, Yahoo's website will use Microsoft's Bing search engine, and the two firms will share the revenues. Microsoft is seeking to increase its share of the search engine industry, which is dominated by Google. It and Yahoo first announced the planned tie-up in July of lasts year.

While I was at linux.conf.au 2010 last month, I finally met Ted Ts'o, one of the most senior figures in the Linux world, and, like many of them, now working for Google. Indeed, few people go further back in the world of Linux than Ts'o: he made his first contribution to version 0.10 of the kernel, which came out in December 1991, and he also set up the first site in the US that carried the Linux kernel and related software.

Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support. Android drivers have now been escorted from the staging area, while Ramzswap (formerly Compcache) framework for compressing RAM has been added.

Work on porting KJots to Akonadi started a long time ago (around summer 2008!), and that effort is reaching a milestone this week. The ported version of KJots has been merged into trunk for the next release of the KDE Software Compilation where work will continue on it to refine features and fix bugs.

If you've been using the recently released Boxee Beta media center but found it to be a bit on unusable side of buggy (at least one Lifehacker writer felt that way), good news: Boxee just released an update to Boxee Beta, and while the update doesn't have any new features, it's overflowing with bug fixes (over 500 resolved issues in total).

With the rise of KDE 4.4 comes a new crop of desktop widgets (or Plasmoids). Earlier renditions of KDE 4.x saw the Plasmoids less than useful. The latest workings, however, have become quite useful, productive even. In this article I will introduce you to five of those Plasmoids that can help your productivity in one way or another. I will also show you how the Plasmoids are now installed.

At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Linux Magazine Online pulled Android commentator Jan Wildeboer and kernel staging tree maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman away from the daily events to talk with them on camera.

Let's correct some facts and assumptions in Dr. Gary Pisano's Expert Report on behalf of SCO in the SCO v. Novell trial, shall we? Why? First, it's fun. Geek fun, granted, but that is who we are. Second, I see what I view as mistakes, and I surely don't want people to be confused or for errors to go down in history unanswered. If the testimony is excluded, which is the relief that Novell is asking the court for, it won't be answered in the trial. So, for historians, and for our own enjoyment, here is Groklaw's answer to the expert report of Dr. Gary Pisano, part 1.

The Wikimedia Foundation has received another major donation. Today Google announced that it is donating two million dollars to the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet," explained Google co-founder Sergey Brin, "This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales emphasised the long friendship between Google and Wikimedia, "Both organisations are committed to bringing high quality information to hundreds of millions of individuals every day, and to making the Internet better for everyone."