Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Nothing brings Linux gotchas into sharp focus like coaching a non-geeky computer user. My wonderful significantotherperson, Terry, has done more to teach me about usability than the smartest Linux gurus. Terry is smart and willing to dig in and learn. She uses her PC for complex tasks like college coursework, audio recording and production, and digital photography. Like a lot of computer users, she learns better from a live teacher and visual aids than from text howtos.

What do you get when you mix Python and C? According to Google, it’s Go – a new programming language developed in-house and later open sourced. Go was created by a small team inside Google, including the well known Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and major influence on C. It was created out of a lack of satisfaction with existing languages, mainly the excessively (in the minds of Go’s developers) long compile times needed for other languages. With Go, even a very large and complex application can compile in a few seconds, often less. Additionally, Go has built in concurrency support, so you can code for multiple CPUs without resorting to outside libraries of unknown quality. While we don’t usually cover much programming here at MakeTechEasier, Go is such an interesting language that we just had to dip in a bit, and where better to start than by covering the system setup needed to get Go up and running on your Linux box.

After its recent acquisition of Sun, enterprise software vendor Oracle began making some significant changes to Solaris licensing policies. Solaris 10, the latest stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, was previously available for free without official support. Oracle changed the license last month, however, limiting it to a 90-day trial. The new license is relatively clear, but left a number of questions unanswered.

The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer - how well it plays with the printer. With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor. The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.

Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Linux distributions don't simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren't involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian's ftpmasters team.

There will always be people who can't help but engender dissent, and there will always be those who betray their allies. This sad reality is on display in the Open Source world this week as another of the community's foremost commercial supporters is merrily thrown under the bus. Of the more recent examples, two come to mind. First was Cisco, which was burned at the stake last year as an Open Source archenemy over its Linksys product line. Cisco, as we said at the time, is a gold member of the Linux Foundation (at $100,000 a year), and counts on its rather long list of Open Source activities some 0.5% of contributions to the Linux kernel. Truly the heartless beast.

Let's face it. Most people don't back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it's too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.

Android's deviant Linux could be re-admitted to the main kernel following talks at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco today and Friday. Developers from Google's Android team are due to meet the Linux kernel devs in the hope of working out their differences and closing an awkward chapter in the history of Linux.

Frustrated by Oracle's delay in releasing the latest version of OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) is growing uneasy over Oracle's lack of communication regarding the future of the Unix OS code.

ZaReason is shipping a Linux-ready, 10-inch netbook that uses the Intel Atom N450 processor and is claimed to offer eight hours of battery life. The ZaReason Teo Netbook offers 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard disk drive, a WVGA display, and 802.11n WiFi, says ZaReason.

Where is Linux headed? That's a question the Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, is focused on as his organization gears up for the Linux Collaboration Summit this week. In Zemlin's view, Linux is strategically placed at the intersection of a number of major IT trends that will serve to bolster adoption of the open source operating system. With the increasing growth of the mobile web and cloud services, Zemlin thinks Linux will end up the big winner.

KDE is currently moving in three directions: adding functionality, extending the concept of the social desktop, and the introduction of KDE on to every possible hardware platform. Bruce Byfield learns where KDE is going from lead KDE developer Aaron Seigo.

We have already published a look at the Fedora 13 Beta, delivered ATI Radeon benchmarks atop Fedora 13 Beta, and have other articles on the way covering this new Fedora release, while in this article we are investigating Nouveau's power performance using this newest Fedora release. If you are a mobile user planning to use the Nouveau stack right now, or you care the least bit about energy savings with your desktop, its power consumption alone may rule this open-source driver out as even a current possibility.

Late last year, getting a Google Wave invite was reminiscent of getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in 1983. It was the newest gizmo everyone just had to have. As a geek, I was one of the kids begging the loudest. Thankfully, one of our readers from across the pond (Paul Howard, thanks!) sent me an invite, and I cleared my schedule for the product that was going to change the way I communicate. Only, it didn’t.

I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds. But what, exactly, does "Open Cloud" mean? And what role does open source play? Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, likes to say that open source and the cloud go together like peanut butter and chocolate. But does open source necessarily mean open cloud, and vice-versa?

With Linux and free software making a name for itself in the world of big business, many people are testing the feasibility of switching small and home office software to their open source equivalents. Regardless of how you feel about the Linux desktop, this is one area in which Linux can have a real impact, both financially and productively, and any small or home office has the potential to be transformed by just switching one application or two to their open source equivalents.

The GIMP has been a poster child for the open source movement ever since it came out. It has been compared to Photoshop and has often been spoken of as the only worthy open source contender in the graphics editor category. While that statement may or may not be true, it is definitely a rival to photoshop when it comes to complexity. And I’m not the only one who thinks that the GIMP is complex. Apparently the Ubuntu development team also thinks the same way and have removed GIMP from their default distribution. It is still available in the online repository but the Ubuntu 10.04 CD will not ship with GIMP on it. The point is that with all that power comes complexity and GIMP is definitely not a tool for casual users.

To most people, boot loaders aren't the most exciting aspect of an operating system, but they are extraordinarily important. Without a functioning boot loader, nothing else works. Currently, a transition from the old Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) Legacy tool to the new GRUB 2 is underway. GRUB 2 is the default boot loader in Ubuntu 9.10, and it's an option in most other major Linux distributions. Sooner or later, other distributions will deploy GRUB 2 as the default boot loader.

The Perl 6 project, which aimed to radically reinvent the open source programming language, first began to take shape in 2000. A decade later, there are several implementations with varying levels of completeness, but it is still not ready to replace Perl 5 in production environments. In order to ensure that Perl doesn't completely stagnate during the protracted revamp, a group of developers have decided to pull Perl 5 out of maintenance mode and begin actively enhancing it with new features. The result is Perl 5.12, which was officially released this week. It was preceded by 5.11, an experimental development release that was issued last year.