Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I am the proud owner of an ereader. I have had a Sony PRS-600 (Touch) for less than 24 hours. But unless something changes dramatically, I am unlikely to be an ereader user 24 hours from now. To say I am disappointed would be an understatement. For what I have paid for the unit, I almost feel taken. Before I delineate the short comings, let me tell you how I got here.

I'm sure that most people hardly think about page options in OpenOffice.org Writer. The average person may change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape, or narrow the margins to squeeze more words into a page, but not much else.

If you have noticed, Ubuntu Karmic comes with a new xsplash that allows you to set custom wallpaper as the background. Not only is it more visually appealing, it is also much easier to customize than the previous usplash. In this article, we are going to do some thing more interesting – change the bootsplash and login screen concurrently when you change your desktop wallpaper.

Openmoko, the company that first gained attention for its Linux-based phone platform, launched a new pocket-sized open source product in time for this holiday season, the WikiReader. The WikiReader is an inexpensive ($99), low-power, 4-inch square touchscreen LCD display device pre-loaded with the text of three million Wikipedia pages on a microSD card. In the smartphone era, skeptics might dismiss the device as woefully underpowered, but to the open source community the more pertinent question is what else can it do?

Since Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn's lawyer, Bonnie Fatell, reportedly opined at the most recent bankruptcy hearing that SCO would never have given away its Unix intellectual property rights to UnitedLinux, I thought I would show you exactly what was in UnitedLinux -- some, if not all, of the very code they now claim IBM had no right to put into Linux and others can't use without infringing SCO's rights. But they put it in their very own SCO Linux Powered by UnitedLinux distribution themselves, and under the GPL.

When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling. On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

[A great example of how the term 'open-source' is both misunderstood and misrepresented. - Scott]

I was checking out the forums of some recently added items to the On-Disk.com catalog when I found a really interesting post about recent updates to Enlightenment .17 (aka E17). I had been following development of E17 for several years, and it has replaced other desktop environments numerous times on my PC, but I always ended up going back to something else simply because there were just too many things missing. E17 has been in development for so long because it is written completely from the ground up. It has it's own libraries and does not depend upon QT or GTK toolkits, even if many of the applications we use do. E17 also provides an excellent looking desktop while at the same time having very low system requirements....meaning it's fast, light, and beautiful all at the same time.

As an emerging sci-fi novelist (see my books here), I've actually been taking a vested interest in Ebooks of late. Of course, I've also been taking interest in them from the perspective that they've become yet another battleground in the widening war of media freedom, an important theater in the much larger war of user freedom. And like any digital product, you need a device that can handle the format. Preferably one that is powered by an open source operating system. That's where the Astak 5" Easy Reader Pro ebook reader comes into play here. The Easy Reader pro is a nice little device that keeps things sleek and simple without sacrificing features, or going overboard.

There were already two computers in our kitchen but that wasn’t enough for Fallon, age three, who needs his daily fix of YouTube Scooby-Doo clips. So for Christmas Fallon (who refers to himself as “the small boy”) got a Dell Vostro A90 netbook running Ubuntu Linux. That’s the business version of a Dell Mini9 with a black case and Bluetooth installed. Fallon would probably have preferred the more colorful Mini9 but he got the Vostro, instead, because I was able to buy a new one from Dell for $199 with free shipping. Heck of a deal.

On the last day of the year part four of the gamers recommendations offer some adventure games, sports and action. Have fun!

Before jumping into this, let me say that's what popular isn't the same thing as what's important. So, I'm giving you a twofer list. The first is the most popular of my stories, and then there are the stories, which I think are the most important for Linux's future. OK? OK!

Things move pretty fast in the open source development world. A new kernel release comes out around every three months. Projects like GNOME, KDE, and PostgreSQL pop out releases every six months, as well as some major Linux distros. Open source development moves at a rapid and relentless pace. It's refreshing, then, to see an open source developer reminding people to have a little patience.

Welcome to The H's look back at 2009. We've categorised events by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say "Meh". From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source to the worst mis-steps in the community.

We recently asked readers for requests on new articles you’d like to see (and thanks for all the great ideas!). One such request was a beginner’s guide to Arch Linux. As a Linux distro addict, I’ve heard of Arch many times over the years but for some reason, I’d never actually given it a shot. In particular, one aspect that’s always interested me has been Arch’s homegrown package management system, pacman. Today we’ll be finding out what Arch is all about, how to use it, and what makes it special.

In 2009, mobile consumer devices including netbooks, e-readers, tablets, MIDs, PMPs, and mobile phones were increasingly dominated by embedded Linux or the Linux-based Android. LinuxDevices presents four updated showcases of story summaries for netbooks, phones, and other portable devices, recalls 2009 highlights ranging from the Kindle to the Droid, and looks in on new rumors about the Google Nexus One and Chrome OS netbook design.

I think it is time that Sugar Labs and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play YouTube videos. Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by Microsoft and Apple. Like it or not Sugar Learning Platform's success or failure lays on its 1 million users with XO-1 (and hopefully XO-1+). If they are successful and happy and the data pile in to support it, everybody will pay attention and traction will be gained even in the developed world. However, even then Sugar's aim should be the virgin markets.

Long-frustrated network neutrality advocates headed into 2009 with high hopes. After all, there was a new administration headed by a man whose campaign promises included the assurance that he would "take a back seat to no one" on the issue, a decidedly Democratic Congress and a general warming to the idea that unfettered access to content and applications on the Internet was somehow essential to the new economy and the sacrosanct rights of the First Amendment. In many ways, they weren't disappointed. But the gears in Washington turn slowly, and, for all the talk and proposals, 2009 saw little material action on the Net neutrality front. Next year will be different.

In part 3 of our gamers recommendations we present more strategy games, puzzles, card games, language skill training and more. To be continued..

Editors' Note: The author's main source is not very reputable in my opinion and I see a lot of old information copied and pasted as one liners throughout the article. I would take anything gleaned from it with a grain of salt at best. - Scott

Bruce Byfield, avoiding a look back at his last years' predictions, looks ahead and makes nine specific predictions about what to expect in 2010.