Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh's energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the "business of open source" miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd.

There are many ways to do the same tasks in Linux, which is a lovely thing because it means we can tailor our workflows to suit our own personal needs. Here are five of Carla Schroder's favorite speed and efficiency tips.

Google released Chrome version 5 developer builds for Windows and Mac on Friday. "The devchannel has been updated to 5.0.307.1 for Windows and Mac," said the firm. On the Windows side of the fence, the default downloads directory on Vista and Windows 7 can now be used. Google has added a content settings window to the latest rough-round-the-edges iteration of its browser. The tool gives surfers more control over changing and policing their plug-ins, cookies, pop-ups, images and JavaScript. The search engine giant’s latest developer build, intended to be tested by hardcore coders, also comes with several bug fixes.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2010

Gábor Horváth has been developing the raw photo converter RawTherapee single-handedly, on Linux and Windows, since 2006. The application has been freeware the entire time, with Horváth accepting Paypal donations through the project's web site. Consequently, although there are significant changes in the 3.0 alpha release announced on January 4th, it was arguably bigger news that the project was switching to the GPLv3.

Well, it was bad enough when X@FOSDEM became a one day event (where for the past several years it has been a highly-populated two-day conference) at the upcoming Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) taking place in Brussels next weekend, but now it's not even a one day event. X@FOSDEM has just been sliced down to now just be a half-day conference... Well, five hours.

Being a SysAdmin (as most of you who read this blog regularly know), I love to look at logs to solve problems. If there is an issue, the first thing I always do is look at the logs to see what went wrong. Even when I am writing programs, I build debugging in from the beginning to make sure I know what’s going on at all times (especially when something goes wrong).

New work on the Sandia National Laboratories Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible. Sandia researchers, working hand in hand with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, socialized 4,096 of Red Storm's total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system — a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.

Hardware failures, power failures, and most of all, storage media failures. Ever notice how fragile digital storage media are? Are we ever going to get digital storage media that can match plain old paper, and other analog media, for reliability and longevity?

Once again the Defective by Design have sprung into action to denounce another product from Apple, and once again nobody really cares. Defective by Design is a marketing campaign sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. While the FSF does plenty of good work, DBD is increasingly out of touch with the majority of users. Contrast the tone of the Defective by Design campaign with Stan Schroeder over at Mashable, who nails Apple's goals with the iPad:

According to a letter seen by heise online, the German Federal Office of Justice last week launched summary proceedings against The SCO Group GmbH for "breaching regulations pertaining to the publication of its accounts." The proceedings were suspended after the imposed fine was paid. No information on the size of the fine is available. According to the agency's website, the fine can range from 2,500 euros to a maximum of 25,000 euros.

Recently, I was showing a Motorola Milestone phone to a non-technical friend. When I mentioned that the phone was running Android, he said to me "Oh, thats the Google Linux for phones isn't it... does it run OpenOffice?". I had to disappoint him at that point, but it lead to a question I had to ask: When the user interface is different and the API for developers is different, is an operating system still Linux, or is it something else?

There are many dialog programs out there, Zenity, Kdialog, xdialog, etc. I love programs like these. They make it so easy to spice up a shell script with a little GUI action. Today I'm going to go look at a dialog program called gxmessage.

No matter what you're pleasure, chances are there is an online community serving it. The open source community has many such places — Linux.com, for example — that cater to specific elements of the community. Red Hat believes there is room for a larger community for the larger community, however, and have seen to the task themselves with Monday's launch of opensource.com.

Hearing that the next Ubuntu release will use Yahoo! as the default search engine in Firefox leaves me with a twinge of uneasiness. My misgiving -- and it's a small one -- is not so much with the decision as with why it was made. In itself, the decision is trivial enough. If you dislike Yahoo!, you can easily change the default by going to the search engine field in the upper right corner and clicking on the icon and choosing Manage Search Engines from the drop-down menu.

KDE users love the look of all those pretty applications. The key is the toolkit KDE uses: Qt. You can learn to create beautiful applications yourself using Python-Qt. Akkana Peck shows the way.

Some hard drive cloning programs support a wide variety of filesystems. Some can create image files and store only the sectors that are actually in use. Some can clone over a network, and a few can multicast a drive or image file to multiple targets simultaneously. Clonezilla can do all of the above, with the added benefit of being free. It’s a live CD with partitioning software and simple cloning interface packed with useful features. In this guide, we’ll be using Clonezilla to run a disk-to-disk copy and checking out a few of the more interesting options.

Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress' TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with "all-points" multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, "Cyanogen" has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google's Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone's spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.

Some 95 percent of Malaysia's government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept--and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

Looking to help the KDE community and living in Southern California? Then this is a great opportunity for you! The Southern California Linux Expo will be in town February 20-21, 2010, at the Westin Hotel near LAX. All you need to help out is to be willing and able to be there and be a user of KDE's applications, such as the Plasma Workspaces, Amarok and Koffice.