Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

During a conference call HP chief executive Mark Hurd told the Wall Street Journal that HP plans to extend Palm's webOS not only to smartphones and tablets but to other devices, including web-enabled printers. "We expect to leverage webOS in a variety of form factors, including slate computer and Web-connected printers," Hurd said.

From today, users will be able to download and install free software to play and encode the new WebM format. WebM is based on the Matroska container format - replacing Ogg - and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.

Adobe has rolled out an HTML5 development kit and announced that Flash will use Google's freshly open sourced VP8 video codec. The company wants you to know that despite its tussle with Steve Jobs, it very much believes in web standards. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch unveiled the new HTML5 Pack - an extension to Adobe's existing HTML editing kit, Dreamweaver CS5 - at Google's annual developer conference this morning in San Francisco. The extension arrives just three weeks after release of Dreamweaver CS5.

The nice folks at ZaReason, the independent Linux OEM computer vendor, sent me their Teo tough netbook to review. Is the Teo really tough? It is usable like a real computer? Or just a toy with a funny name?

Commercial Linux distributor Novell is hoping that the delivery of the first service pack update for its SUSE Linux 11 operating system for servers and desktops will give the software a bump. And not just because SP1 has support for lots of new hardware. According to Kerry Kim, senior product marketing manager at Novell in charge of its Linux lineup, no matter how good a new version of an operating system is, there are IT shops that simply will not install the code until it gets its first dot release. (Which is why the R2 update for Windows Server 2008 last fall was similarly important for Microsoft.)

Often when we are preparing for cross-distribution comparisons or benchmarks of different operating systems (like our recent Mac OS X 10.6 vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks) we are often asked to include Arch Linux in the mix. This is usually on the basis of including a rolling-release distribution to provide a performance look at a constantly evolving distribution with many of the most recent open-source packages rather than a traditional distribution with packages that may be months older. Many of those requesting Arch be included in our testing mix also claim that Arch performs significantly faster than Ubuntu and our usual test candidates. The main reason we do not deliver many benchmarks of Arch, Gentoo, or other distributions that use a rolling release approach is that they are not very reproducible with their results since their packages are frequently changing and there are more end-user customizations going on compared to most other distributions.

The organizers of the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) have announced new speakers for the second annual event, to be held June 11-13 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Some 30 speakers have been announced for the Ubuntu-heavy show, including Jon "Maddog" Hall, Wietse Zweitze Venema, and Keith Bergelt. The Southeast LinuxFest is billed as a community event for anyone who wants to learn more about Linux and free and open source (FOSS) software. Attendees of all skill levels are invited, say the SELF 2010 organizers.

Just shy of 2000 different licenses cover the 230,000+ projects in the Black Duck Knowledgebase. It's important to note that the top 10 licenses cover 93% of all projects and the top 20 almost 97%. Well over 60% are GPL. So, the vast bulk of projects are under a small number of well-known licenses, and that's a good thing. But the other 3% of projects and 1980-odd licenses (and there are some odd ones!) clearly constitute a "long tail." Join me, won't you, for a journey to the outer reaches of that tail.

General Motors (GM) announced that version 2.0 of the Android version of its OnStar Mobile app for the Chevrolet Volt will feature Google Maps integration. The voice-enabled feature, which shows a Volt's location on Google Maps, may only be the first step in Android integration with OnStar, say reports.

After using Outlook/Exchange since 1997 and RIM/BlackBerry devices since 2004, I recently spearheaded a move to migrate TPC Healthcare (the boutique healthcare technology firm that I founded) to Google Apps and to Google's Android devices. For a long time I considered myself to be a big Microsoft/RIM guy, but over the last couple of years something really shifted for me, not the least of which was spinning off my business into its own entity.

Bittorrent is the clear leader when it comes to efficiently distributing large files online. Just about any media site or Linux distribution offers files as torrents, and there are several options when it comes to the client you use to download those files. So many, in fact, that it can quickly become overwhelming when you attempt to find the “best” one. As with most software, “best” can mean different things for different people. Today we’ll round up X of the top clients for Linux and compare features to help you decide the right one for you.

Acer has moved to deny that it will show off the first laptop to use Google's Chrome OS at Computex in June. It had been suggested that the laptop giant was poised to use the Computex show to put a Chrome OS device on show, but the company has insisted that this is not the case. "Despite recent rumours in the press regarding the launch of Chrome OS based netbooks at Computex, Acer confirms that it has no short-term plans for such a product," said a hastily written statement from the company

While it's pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you'd like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you'll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product. Or you may need to educate yourself about underlying technology before you find the open source applications usable.

OpenOffice.org's tools for creating diagrams are easy to ignore. For one thing, their controls are extremely small. For another, they are pitifully under-documented in the online help, which plods through the options without explaining what they are or why you want to use them. Then, just to really confuse you, the full set of tools is available only in Draw and Impress, although Write and Calc users might also want them. Yet despite these handicaps, OpenOffice.org's diagram tools work well enough that many users should find no need for more sophisticated tools such as Dia.

The ethtool utility provides ethernet card information and management to die for. Do you think you have a network bottleneck that’s somehow related to your NIC’s speed or other settings? If so, ethtool might be the utility that will save the day and many painful conversations. Ethtool is a privileged user only (root), powerful system tool that allows you to query and change settings for your system’s ethernet cards. Using it, you can change almost every aspect of a supported card; from the basic to the esoteric.

On Sunday a new version of the Linux kernel rocked up, with two new filesystems loaded into the distro. Laidback Linux founder Linus Torvalds characteristically understated the relevance of the latest 2.6.34 release in a post about the final release candidate. “Nothing very interesting here, which is just how I like it. Various random fixes all over, nothing really stands out. Pretty much all of it is one- or few-liners, I think the biggest patch in the last week was fixing some semantics for the new SR-IOV VF netlink interface. And even that wasn't a _big_ patch by any means,” he languidly noted

The Puppy Linux developers have announced the availability of version 5.0 of their independent Linux distribution, code named "Lupu". Puppy Linux is a popular small release that is around 100 MB in size, focuses on ease of use and can run entirely from RAM. Puppy Linux 5.0 is the first release to be based on Ubuntu and includes several changes over the previous 4.3.x branch.

In the embedded space, there's been a lot of talk about whether Android is fragmented, and if that fragmentation will ultimately hurt Android, because developers won't know what version to code for and users won't know which one to use.

Reports of the popular Linux distro ditching Firefox get clarified. Amidst reports that Ubuntu would ditch longtime default browser Firefox for Google's Chrome browser were put to rest with a resounding "sort of." A recent blog post by Ubuntu Community team member Jorge Castro explained that while Canonical has considered a Firefox alternative, it isn't Google Chrome, but rather Chromium, the open source version of the Chrome browser.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 2.6.34, which is notable for adding two filesystems: Ceph for distributed and cloud-based applications, and LogFS, which is optimized for flash-memory based devices. Other new features include a faster KVM virtualization driver based on Vhost.net technology, says LinuxPlanet.com.