Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC, the high quality audio and video player for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Its speed, portability, and built-in support for most common codecs make VLC an extremely popular choice for playing video. While that’s all well and good, VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more. Today we’ll look at some of VLC’s most interesting and little-known features that help make this an indispensable application for nearly all desktop platforms.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski claimed power to regulate companies that provide Internet access, opening a fight with cable and telephone companies and sparking opposition from Republicans. Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., cable operators that sell Web connections, fell more than 5 percent in New York trading. Genachowski’s proposal lays a foundation for net neutrality rules to bar Internet service providers from interfering with users’ traffic. The plan provides “only the modest authority” needed after a U.S. court stripped its power over the Web, Genachowski, a Democrat, said today in a statement.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Opera has switched its Dragonfly open source debug tool to an Apache 2.0 license to include a promise that users are protected from patents owned by Opera or any other contributor to the project. Dragonfly - similar to Mozilla's Firebug tool - completed its open sourcing in February, when it was moved from Opera servers to BitBucket. It was originally under the BSD license.

To remove Mono from your shiny new desktop installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx enter the following command (after taking the usual precautions like backups of your data etc)..

Ten years ago a simple twin panel file manager was released. It had a few small glitches like showing rrr instead of rwx for permissions, had some compatibility issues with Debian and Solaris, did not save keyboard settings, but it was, in spite of many bugs, sort of usable for everyday work. Ten years ago Krusader started on the path to becoming a top file manager for a large range of operating systems and users.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced keynote speakers for LinuxCon, scheduled for August 10-12 in Boston. LinuxCon will feature keynote speakers including Virgin America's Ravi Simhambhatla, GNOME's Stormy Peters (pictured), the SFLC's Eben Moglen, and Forrester Research's Jeffrey S. Hammond, and will host a Linux Kernel Roundtable.

In a post on his blog, Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.0 of Quirky. Kauler says that, while the Quirky Linux distribution is in the same family as Puppy Linux, it's a "distinct distro in its own right."

When is open source not really open source? When it's an Android phone. OK, before everyone jumps all over me and screams, "Android is built on Linux!" and "It's more open than the iPhone!" let me say this: Yes, it is built on an open-source platform and it is, indeed, more open than the iPhone. But in the cutthroat world of mobile telephony, Google may have met its match with old-school behavior from telephone service providers and handset makers who aren't so keen on the "open" part of open-source. The Open Handset Alliance isn't so open, nor is it too much of an alliance among Android device makers. It is about handsets, though, so there's that.

A new open source project dubbed Guacamole allows users to access a desktop remotely through a Web browser, potentially streamlining the requirements for client support and administration. Guacamole is a HTML5 and JavaScript (Ajax) VNC viewer, which makes use of a VNC-to-XML proxy server written in Java. According to its developers, Guacamole is almost as responsive as native VNC and should work in any browser supporting the HTML5 canvas tag.

The Linux Foundation announced the first round of keynote speakers and several mini-summits for its upcoming conference, LinuxCon. The event, scheduled for August 10-12, 2010 in Boston, MA, draws FOSS users and developers from around the country to learn, discuss, and collaborate on all things Linux.

The first thing you'll notice with Google's new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it's faster, much faster, than the last version. You don't need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it and you'll see that it blows other browsers away.

[I just upgraded Chrome on all my computers and I actually can see a speed difference, I'm impressed. - Scott]

KDE today released the 3rd monthly update to the 4.4 series, bringing a slew of bugfixes and translation updates to our users. Konsole has seen some love, so has Okular. Check out the changelog to get to know more about it. This release, as all our x.y.z releases (where z > 0) does not contain new features but concentrates on stabilizing the existing codebase. As such, the upgrade should be safe and painless, so we recommend updating to everyone running previous KDE SC versions.

Five years ago today, on May 1st, 2005 OASIS approved Open Document Format 1.0 as an OASIS Standard. I'd like to take a few brief minutes to reflect on this milestone, but only a few. We're busy at work in OASIS making final edits to ODF 1.2. We're in our final weeks of that revision and it is "all hands on deck" to help address the remaining issues so we can send it out for final public review. But I hope I can be excused for a short diversion to mark this anniversary.

Apple has streamlined the process of dual booting Windows on your Mac, but when it comes to Linux, Boot Camp isn't so friendly. Here's how to triple-boot your Mac with OS X, Windows 7, and the shiny new Ubuntu 10.04. If you're a Mac user, you may have already used Apple's Boot Camp to get Windows on your system for those must-have programs. With a fast new Ubuntu out, however, you might want to give it a try—but installing Linux isn't exactly easy on Macs, since they don't recognize it by default.

Tech companies are playing hardball on smart phones, yet Linux could gain the upper hand with Intel and Nokia going on the defensive with MeeGo. To get you on Facebook while on the bus, play a tune, and - oh, yeah - make a call, Microsoft and Apple are finding new ways to reign in the competition on phones: they're using patent threats.

DVD tools are more important on Linux than on most operating systems. While Windows or OSX users rarely burn CDs or DVDs except for an occasional backup, for many Linux users, burning a Live CD to investigate a distribution is a common task. Similarly, although the users of other operating systems may extract audio or visuals from a CD, all the really large local content libraries I have seen tend to be on Linux. What is an occasional convenience to others are standard tools in the free and open source lifestyle.

The Linux Mint team has released a development RC version of Linux Mint 9 ("Isadora"), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool that restores previous software selections, and various menu improvements, says the team. The Isadora RC (release candidate) follows up on Linux Mint 8 ("Helena"), which released a RC1 GNOME version in November, and a final KDE release in early February. Based on Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala"), Linux Mint 8 added improvements such as new OEM installation features, an option to ignore updates, and "menu places" that can be configured by users.

Sometimes you just have to get excited about what you can buy, hold in your hand, and use in your home machines. Let's look at some cool storage technology that the average desktop user can tackle.

Linux continues to invade the scalable computing space and, in particular, the scalable storage space. A recent addition to Linux's impressive selection of file systems is Ceph, a distributed file system that incorporates replication and fault tolerance while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Explore the architecture of Ceph and learn how it provides fault tolerance and simplifies the management of massive amounts of data.

I like the brand spanking new Ubuntu 10.04 a lot. But while I like its GNOME 2.30 interface, I also like other interfaces such as KDE. It would be nice if Ubuntu could also play MP3s, common video formats and Flash from the get-go. You could install all these and other extras from the Ubuntu repositories, but there's also a wide-variety of Ubuntu spin-offs that come ready to give you the functionality you want right out of the box.