Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" associative arrays that were added in version 4.0 of bash. On the other hand, if you've ever used any modern Office Suite and seen code-bloat at it's finest and just think the bash folks are exaggerating a bit, then read on.

On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code. The 2.7 release marks a major milestone for LLVM, as it's the first time that its C language compiler, Clang, has sufficient C++ support to self-host, meaning that it can compile a functional version of itself.

As a file manager, Gnome Commander has the look and feel of early workhorses like Norton Commander and Midnight Commander. Among its many talents, Gnome Commander is a life-saver when it comes to synchronizing files. Something I wish were available in more apps I use is the ability to do advanced renaming of files, and GC does this with support for various types of meta-data.

I'm no friend to Windows. I know the operating system too well to trust it. But, I did think that even though Windows is defective by design, you could keep it relatively safe by installing patches quickly and using anti-virus software religiously. I was wrong. First, it turns out that one of Microsoft's latest Windows patches just flat out didn't work. Whoops! This isn't the first time that this has happened. But, what really caught my attention this go-around was that at just about the same time the news broke that a flawed McAfee Antivirus update knocked out millions of Windows XP computers. Talk about sloppy quality assurance! How the heck can a Windows anti-virus company release an update that locks XP computers into an endless reboot cycle?

Microsoft and HTC have signed a patent agreement protecting the handset maker from Microsoft patent lawsuits over its industry-leading Android smartphones. HTC will pay royalties to Microsoft, which for the first time is enforcing its alleged Linux-related patents on an Android-based product -- yet the agreement may help HTC defend against Apple's Android-related lawsuit.

SCO has filed its "renewed" motion for judgment "as a matter of law", with its supporting memorandum. They ask the judge to rule over the heads of the jury and decide that the jury "simply got it wrong" when it ruled that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 from Novell. In the alternative, they'd like a new trial. See, this is the problem with loaning money to SCO. They don't ever want this dance to end. The rest of the world gets it. SCO lost, by judge (Dale Kimball) and now by jury. They'd like this to be over. And us, the musicians, so to speak, at the dance? We're tired and we want SCO to stop already so we can pack up and go home and get some sleep. And no, this isn't normal, stretching a case that was hopeless from day one into what looks to become a more than decade-long event. And can you imagine the international outcry if the judge were to grant a request like this?

HTC has agreed to pay Microsoft a royalty when it sells a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system. But why does Microsoft make money from Google's software? Android is based on open source software - and Microsoft has long raised fears that aspects of Linux may infringe on its patents.

Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely? The ODF plugin was developed to allow Microsoft Office users to exchange documents with OpenOffice.org users. It works for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing docs and Sun gave it away for years. So why has Oracle so suddenly decided to charge for it? Whatever Oracle's strategy, the company isn't talking.

Few people in the open source community have touched as many projects as Leslie Hawthorn, the now-former open source program manager for Google. As one of less than ten employees in Google's open source programs office, Hawthorn was at the center of the Google Summer of Code — a project that has worked with hundreds of projects and thousands of college students since its inception in 2005. When Hawthorn announced at the end of March that she was leaving Google, we decided to catch up with her and find out what she's learned from her time at Google and what she has planned next.

Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner, and it's shaping up to be one of the most eagerly awaited (and controversial) releases in the distro's history. What new goodies are included? How does it tap into the ever-expanding world of social networking? And most importantly, can you move those window control buttons back to the right of the titlebar, as nature intended? Read on for the gory details...

Starting in December 2009, hard disk manufacturers began introducing disks that use 4096-byte sectors rather than the more common 512-byte sectors. Although this change is masked by firmware that breaks the 4096-byte physical sectors into 512-byte logical sectors for the benefit of the operating system, the use of larger physical sectors has implications for disk layout and system performance. This article examines these implications, including benchmark tests illustrating the likely real-world effects on some common Linux® file systems. As disks with 4096-byte sectors become more common throughout 2010 and beyond, strategies for coping with these new disks will become increasingly important.

Making custom Linux distributions can be an arduous task. Luckily, there are companies out there that are looking to make the process more friendly. Previously, I reviewed the Reconstructor Web UI, a web-based Debian/Ubuntu customization utility, and today, I'd like to present you with a SUSE-based alternative called SUSE Studio. Although SUSE Studio does have some offline components (such as SUSE Studio Onsite and the rest of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit), this review will focus on the online components which are freely available at susestudio.com. For those that are following along at home, I'll assume that you already have an account with SUSE Studio.

Today it is hard to think of a phone without a camera. In fact we are just as likely to take a picture with our phone as we are to make a call. And once we take a photo, we are quite likely to send it as a message to someone else, but that is a topic for another day! In this column we are going to write a simple Android application which demonstrates taking a photo and displaying it to the screen of your phone.

TROY, Mich., April 27 - DisklessWorkstations.com, a leading supplier of thin client hardware and solutions for open source thin client environments announces Bundled LTSP Support. Bundled support is included as part of LTSP Thin Client purchases for use with the Ubuntu operating system (versions 9.10 and later). Bundled support incidents are awarded based upon the quantity of thin client devices purchased and are provided at no additional cost.

Netbook desktops in free and open source software (FOSS) are in a state of rapid development. Should a netbook be treated as more as a mobile device than as a laptop? Should developers assume that netbooks are used for light computing such as social networking, rather than for productivity? These are just two of the questions whose answers affect the design of any netbook desktop.

Six Japanese technology firms have announced they are developing a new application platform for mobile phones that will be compatible with Linux, Symbian, and possibly Android. Developed by NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp, the unnamed, multimedia-focused mobile platform is scheduled for arrival in phones in early 2012, say the partners.

As reported by Computerworld (from the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010), Google plans to assign two developers to work on integrating enhancements developed for the Android Linux kernel into the official Linux development tree maintained by Linus Torvalds.

It's widely known, at least within geekdom, that the number of available IP addresses is on a collision course with the number zero. The depletion of the IPv4 address space, and the necessity of migrating to the next-generation IPv6, has been discussed ad infinitum in geek circles since RFC 2460 was published in December 1998. That discussion has not always been about the best way to resolve the issue, however. The imminence of IPv4 exhaustion has consistently been denied, and its emergent nature downplayed. Indeed, APNIC Director General Paul Wilson's 2003 statement on the subject — describing depletion predictions as "misinformation" and "rumor", while stating that existing IPv4 would suffice for another twenty years — brings to mind the infamously mis-attributed quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Linux server adoption among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is reportedly 25 percent higher in the Asia-Pacific region than it is in the United States, and growing faster than the worldwide average, says a new study by Springboard Research and Spiceworks.

Marvell is shipping a new member of its Linux-ready Armada line of system-on-chips touted for delivering up to 1GHz performance while consuming less than a single Watt. A slower but more power-efficient version of the Armada 300, the Armada 310 offers 256KB L2 cache, plus PCI-express, gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0 connectivity, says the company.