Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.

Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony's announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns. Sony's upcoming April Fool's Day update, which prohibits alternate OS installations on systems prior to the new "Slim" models launched in September, is no laughing matter to Linux hackers who have enjoyed a four-year run of loading distributions such as Yellow Dog Linux on the gaming box. Yet the last laugh may be on Sony if well-known hacker Geohot (George Hotz) gets his way.

IBM and Indian company Simmtronics are marketing their 10" netbook at a cost under $200. The Simmbook netbook with a 10.1" screen at 1024 x 600 pixels (VSVGA) works with the Atom N270 processor (1.6 GHz and 533 MHz FSB), a GByte of DDR2 RAM (maximum 2 GBytes with a slot) and a 160-GByte SATA hard drive.

According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday. The beta version of REV 2.2 will include a number of new programs that will allows customers to run a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI). "It will allow you to deploy a RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] desktop, or Windows XP, or Windows 7, on a secure high-performance hypervisor platform," said Andrew Cathrow, who is a Red Hat senior product marketing manager. "By using a VDI, you are moving the [operating system] from the end user's device into the data center, where it is easier to manage and maintain."

Security expert Andreas Bogk warns that, despite recent PHP improvements, the session IDs of users who are logged into PHP applications remain guessable. Upon close examination, the alleged improvements display frightening weaknesses.

I work on a project on which I regularly want to grep the directory tree for a particular word but without including the cvs/ and doc/ directories. Happily, grep has an exclude-dir option to do just this..

Larry Ellison likes to buzz rotten fruit off some corporate type’s head. Over the years Microsoft, PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, SAP, and Red Hat have lined up to be been duly pelted during calls with Wall St or during Ellison's company's mega OpenWorld customer and partner conference.

Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.

The PlayStation 3 Sony launched has very little in common with the system you can buy now. The PS3 launched when rumble was a last-generation feature, backwards compatibility was a core part of the hardware strategy, and the ability to install Linux on the hardware was attractive for those who liked to tinker with their hardware. So what happened?

LXer Feature: 29-Mar-2010

The Linux/Free Software/Open Source world is cram-full of first-class security applications. Best of all, they're not just for Linux, but protect Mac and Windows too. Cynthia Harvey collects 75 to share with us.

You often may need to compare one version of a file to an earlier one or check one file against a reference file. Linux provides several tools for doing this, depending on how deep a comparison you need to make.

Ubuntu is set to release their next Long Term Support version at the end of April, and we now have a beta version to look at and see what we can expect. There are some pretty big changes coming in Lucid Lynx, many of which are partly or fully implemented in the current beta. There are the surprising changes, the controversial changes, and the just plain cool. Though the full release is still a month away, Ubuntu 10.04 is clearly shaping up to be an impressive release.

One of the driving mantras for us is “less is more”. I want us to “clean up, simplify, streamline, focus” the user experience work that we lead. The idea is to recognize the cost of every bit of chrome, every gradient or animation or line or detail or option or gconf setting. It turns out that all of those extras add some value, but they also add clutter. There’s a real cost to them – in attention, in space, in code, in QA. So we’re looking for things to strip out, as much (or more) as things to put in.

Dell has announced that it will be adding Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) to its infrastructure solutions. The company plans to offer "blueprints" for optimising deployments of UEC of Dell hardware such as the PowerEdge C-Series. UEC joins the ranks of the proprietary solutions from VMWare and Microsoft, for which Dell already offers blueprints for deployment.

IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics today announced they will market a low-cost, Intel Atom-based Simmtronics netbook in emerging markets. The Simmbook will be preloaded with the IBM Client for Smart Work Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and will first be made available in Africa for just $190, says IBM.

Although Ubuntu is generally regarded as a desktop Linux distribution, the sever variant is becoming increasingly popular in the cloud. It is silently infiltrating server rooms and gaining traction in enterprise environments. A recent survey published by Canonical provides some insight into adoption trends of Ubuntu on production servers.

Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term "computer virus" may be in for a new meaning. Social networking can do many things for users: help them kill vast amounts of time, expose career-ending after-hours antics, and sometimes even connect them to new and interesting people. According to the Teesside (UK) Director of Public Health Prof. Peter Kelly, they can also help users catch VD.

Red Hat announced fourth-quarter financial results showing a 15 percent increase in revenues year-over-year. In other news, the company announced new JBOSS and SOA tools, tipped a collaboration with IBM on cloud technology, and revealed customer wins with the Symbian Foundation and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.