Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Appcelerator - the Silicon Valley outfit whose open source Titanium platform lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools - has announced that the platform will soon generate native runtimes for "the new Apple tablet." On Wednesday, Steve Jobs and company will unveil "a major new product," and according to countless reports, this is the long-rumored Apple tablet. Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie declined to provide specific information about Titanium's embrace of the as-yet-unannounced tablet - or about the tablet itself. But he did say that Appcelerator would release additional details on Thursday and that Titanium's Apple tablet APIs will arrive "very soon."

Linux users users have several good personal finance managers, like KMyMoney, which has matured into a feature-full, easy-to-use application. Eric Geier covers automatic updating, check printing, plugins, and other useful features.

The Linux Foundation announced a free webinar series on topics ranging from Linux administration to performance tuning. The Linux Training Webinar Series will launch with a webinar on Linux contributions on Mar. 1 by Jon Corbet, while future sessions feature leading Linux kernel maintainers and developers.

Red Hat is looking to fill gaps in its increasingly burgeoning portfolio of software goodies by declaring it may soon get into the BI game. The company’s JBoss CTO Mark Little told journalists at a press event in London this morning that plans were afoot to develop software for that market. He would not be pushed, however, on whether Red Hat’s move into the Business Intelligence area would involve homegrown technology or come from a possible acquisition over the next year. “We have plans to do something in the BI space,” he said.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat started out as a catalog business peddling Linux and Unix software and started tucking a homegrown Linux created by Marc Ewing in the back of the catalogs. It didn't take long to realize that the Linux was worth more than the catalog business, and thus the poster child for the commercialized open source movement was born.

Google has released a new Windows version of its Chrome browser with what it says are two of the most requested enhancements: extensions and bookmark sync, and a significant performance boost.

Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.

Remember XGI Technology? The company that was spun out of SiS and Trident back in 2003 and for a while had some interesting low-end GPU hopes along with a few graphics cards that actually made it out to the market. There really hasn't been much talk about XGI in years and ATI had bought up one of their alliance companies in 2006 that further diminished this company. Their Linux drivers were not the best back in 2005 and things really never changed for the company that had hoped to compete with ATI and NVIDIA on some level.

The Linux world has everything, if you know where to find it, including an in-between option to the command-line interface, and a full-blown X Window System environment. Juliet Kemp talks about ncurses, the excellent graphical environment for the console.

Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). Both have built on the massive potential that was unlocked by the Asus Eee PC but led nowhere, as its operating system failed to inspire a new generation of Linux users. There's a new breed of netbook distro that's aiming to change this perception and take the fight for the perfect mobile platform back to the manufacturers.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups. Enter Albany Senior High School, an Auckland, New Zealand-based unorthodox enclave of education. The school, which opened its doors in 2009, takes a different approach to learning, utilizing open principles that include open spaces, open interaction, open opportunities — and open source.

Red Hat has launched opensource.com as a community site for open source. The Drupal powered site has been created by Red Hat but Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's President and CEO, says "This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat. Instead this will be a site for open source, about the future". He added that "this site is one of the ways in which Red Hat gives something back to the open source community"

KDE’s default web browser is Konqueror, and many users love it for its speed, integration with KDE, and its host of features. Nevertheless, some sites do not perform as well as they do in Mozilla Firefox, and some users prefer the large number of available Firefox add-ons. Furthermore, users who move from Windows to Linux might prefer Firefox for its familiarity. Regardless of their reasons, there are plenty of KDE users who want or need Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox uses GTK themes for its visual appearance, which ruins the visual continuity that KDE users have come to expect. But fear not, there is a way to make Firefox look and partially feel like a real KDE app. Using four Firefox add-ons and one GTK theme, you can give Firefox an extreme makeover.

Emery Fletcher muses on how a rank Linux beginner can figure out how to install the latest Firefox release, even when professional tech journalists can't.

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2010

January 31st will be my last day with Novell. I've given it a great deal of thought, and decided that it's time to move on. With the openSUSE Conference wrapped up, 11.2 launched, the major projects I've been working on are completed and I feel like this is a good parting point. It wasn't an easy decision, but I had some time to refocus over the holidays and I know that it is time to move on. One of the most important responsibilities any employee has -- especially a community manager -- is to know when to move on, and not remain in a role just for the sake of having a job.

Android will trail only Symbian in mobile phone market share by 2013, according to IDC. Android phones such as the pictured Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which is now heading for NTT DoCoMo, will grow 150.4 percent to 68.0 million units by 2013, but other Linux-based phones will struggle, says IDC.

Those familiar with Linux will be able to tweak settings, add and remove apps and customise the menu, toolbars and other desktop elements. Incredibly, those are about all the skills you need to create your very own Linux distro. We're going to take a look at some scripts that'll help you customise different distros.

This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM's Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator. QEMU 0.13 will be the next big release and Anthony is hoping it will be completed by June and boast a large number of new features.

Carla Schroder wrote an editorial piece this week on Linux Today (a website I enjoy and frequent daily via their RSS feeds) entitled Editor's Note: What is User-friendly, Really?. In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz. [...] There is a trend to dumb Linux down in a fruitless attempt to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. Which is wasted effort, because in doing so computer-savvy users are being ignored and frustrated, and Jane and Joe Sixpack don't care anyway."