Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Put on your favorite self-pitying emo music and get ready for some developer frustration. I'm running down the top 10 things I love to hate about Android.

If you've ever wondered how IT departments come across and adopt open source software, consider Lance Rae. Lance is an IT Director for a mid-sized law firm in New York City. We were chatting about his firm's use of open source, and I decided it was worth recording our Q & A for posterity - and posting on OStatic. In this conversation, we discussed Nagios, the process of evaluating software, MonitoringForge, and how utilizing one open source tool can lead to a cascade effect, with others surely to follow.

Richard Stallman raised more than a few eyebrows when he signed the letter objecting to the MySQL purchase. Endorsing, or seeming to endorse, the practice of selling proprietary exceptions to GPL'ed software seemed entirely out of character with Stallman's comments on Free Software up to that point. To clarify, Stallman has written up an essay that spells out his opinion on exceptions and when they're acceptable.

Fedora 12 is a great Linux distribution with an impeccable pedigree. While it might not be the best distribution to throw at a total newbie, it is technically solid and stable. Paul Ferrill reviews the latest Fedora release.

KMail is a feature-rich desktop email client for KDE that is part of the Kontact suite of PIM (Personal Information Management) applications. Last week, we covered email template creation in KMail, and this week, we will continue the series with a look at KMail’s sophisticated filtering system. An email filter allows you to categorize incoming emails based on a plethora of criteria and then assign them attributes, move them, or even reply to them based on those attributes. KMail provides a good deal of options, making it easy to wade through even large volumes of incoming messages.

The first smartphones based on Intel's Moorestown, the Mini 5 with Android and the Lenovo LePhone: the mobile Linux highlights from this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is often described as "Copyleft" because it turns traditional copyright on its head to make code freer than traditional proprietary copyright licenses. Taking that a step further, some developers are embracing the Unlicense, a license that "disclaims" copyright interest in a piece of code altogether. If the BSD, MIT, or WTFPL aren't Free enough for you, the Unlicense should fit the bill.

Verizon Wireless announced Jan. 25 availability of two modified versions of Palm's WebOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre Plus and the newly WiFi-enabled Palm Pixi Plus. Meanwhile, Palm announced that its WebOS developer program is now open to all developers, and plans to launch a WebOS plugin development kit, says eWEEK.

OLPC is widely known as the organization which - indirectly - started the netbook revolution by pioneering affordable, mobile computing devices. The second iteration of their low-cost educational laptop, the XO-1.5, is about to be released. "Released" in a sense, that it will become available to large scale educational projects but not to individuals or smaller, grass-roots projects. The current lean production cost of the XO-1 is at around $180, the XO-1.5 may go below that if a sufficient volume is achieved. The XO-1.5 is expected to provide full internet browsing with Flash support, ebook reading and the more traditional learning functions of the Sugar Learning Platform.

Upgrading a CPU is always a what-if proposition. Sometimes you can do it, sometimes you can't. First question to answer is does your motherboard support a newer CPU? If the answer is Yes, chances are you will then get sucked into a whirlwind of Yes-Buts. Yes, but maybe I'll need a bigger CPU cooler, and maybe there isn't room. Yes, but it doesn't support faster RAM, and shouldn't I have faster RAM to get the most out of my CPU? Yes, but it might require a BIOS upgrade, and do I really want to hassle with that?

Mozilla has been forced to justify its decision to herd third party coders, whose add-ons sometimes break the Firefox user interface, away form the browser's components directory. In a meaty blog post on Saturday, the open source browser maker’s development boss, Mike Connor, explained the rationale behind Mozilla’s move to debut a "lockdown" feature in Firefox 3.6.

LXer Feature: 11-Jan-2010

Google's Go programming language, registered the largest amount of growth among all the languages in the TIOBE Programming Community Index over the past year. Go has syntactic similarities to C and Pascal but with type safety, concurrency support and fast compilation. It was introduced in November 2009 as an open sourced language implementation. Go is only 0.01 per cent behind over Apple's Objective-C in the rankings.

For those of you attending the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) next month in Los Angeles, Matthew Tippett and I will be hosting a talk. This talk is entitled "5 Stages of Benchmark Loss: PTS and You" and, of course, covers the Phoronix Test Suite software and its capabilities and more for autonomously testing Linux and other operating systems.

The Ftrace tracing utility has many different features that will assist in tracking down Linux kernel problems. The previous article discussed setting up Ftrace, using the function and function graph tracers, using trace_printk(), and a simple way to stop the recording of a trace from user space. This installment will touch on how user space can interact with Ftrace, faster ways of stopping the trace, debugging a crash, and finding what kernel functions are the biggest stack hogs.

Ever since Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems along with MySQL, all hell broke loose in the open source community. With EU questioning the deal, there is a war (of words) erupting inside the community with one side asking EU to block the deal or, at the very least, change the license to another open source license from GPL and the other side urging EU to allow the transaction to go through. Even though I have no love for Oracle, I think it is time to let the deal go through at least for the sake of Sun employees who are sitting there with their future unknown. At the same time, I am not unduly worried about the future of MySQL because I have complete confidence in the open source license of MySQL. Let me try to explain my position here in this post.

This article is part of the on-going 15 example series where 15 examples will be provided for a specific command or functionality. In this series, earlier we discussed about find command, crontab examples, grep command, history command, ping command, and wget examples. In this article, let us review 15 examples for Linux top command that will be helpful for both newbies and experts.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab's data center hosts some of the Linux community's heaviest hitting projects including the Linux Master Kernel and the Linux Foundation. It is also the primary location for the Apache Software Foundation and Drupal, open source content management software. The lab, aka OSUOSL, also hosted the core infrastructure for Mozilla's Firefox project, and currently host's six of Google's servers. Despite housing such high-profile open source projects, the lab's systems administrators are actually OSU computer science students. In the following Q&A, Lance Albertson, an OSUOSL systems administrator and architect, talks about his job -- managing a data center with a staff of 18- to-21-year-olds. SearchDataCenter.com recently visited the OSUOSL data center on OSU's Corvallis, Oregon, campus and talked with Albertson about the rewards and challenges of his job.

Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go. Choosing primarily online tools for your productivity workflow is a great way to address the issue of source agnostic accessibility. It's also a convenient method to ensure you have a backup of your important day-to-day items and files in case a particular computer or device fails. One other not insignificant factor in selecting cloud-based tools to keep you and your business on track is cost: the online equivalents of once desktop-bound applications are often much cheaper in both raw cost and maintenance cost, as tool upgrades usually happen behind the scenes and don't require an in-house IT staff to keep up and running.

Software auditors risk becoming "revenue-generating" traffic cops as the recession put pressure on vendors to collect every penny of revenue. Organisations are being put under increasing pressure from software licence audits, with some vendors exploiting technicalities and loopholes in order to meet revenue targets, according to a report by research firm Forrester.