Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun and critics' concerns about its impact on Oracle's open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database -- some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.

Redeye, wrong exposure, blemishes, and other defects can afflict your holiday photos. But despair not, for GIMP can fix them. And here's a little secret: it's easy. Akkana Peck shows how.

I got a phone call yesterday from a recruiter wondering if I would be interested in a Linux administrator position. The first question she asked was did I have any experience with Oracle RAC and I could hear her eyes glaze over as I answered her with a brief description of what I have done with RAC. After shaking herself back to life, she asked if I had any experience with Unbreakable Linux.

Intel announced its new "Pineview" Atom processors, touting a 20 percent improvement in average power consumption and a smaller package size. The N450, aimed at netbooks, is a single-core Atom processor clocked at 1.66GHz, while the D410 and D510, single- and dual-core respectively, target entry-level desktop PCs, the company says.

After a wave of operating system releases, it's easy to become somewhat bored with the software side of computing. Windows 7 is here and looking like the "real" Vista for many; Mac OS X 10.6, meanwhile, adds spit-shine to Leopard and gives its engine a good tuning too. In the Linux camp, distributions are taking regular steps forward in usability. But it's all become rather routine; a case of incremental improvement rather than revolution. So where's all the real fun happening? Where are the radical new ideas, the Wild West code commits and the geekery and hackery that really drive innovation?

One of the difficulties open source software faces is in implementing support — where it is even possible to do so — for the wide variety of codecs, formats, and other proprietary technologies that users have come to rely on. One such technology is Microsoft's Silverlight framework, which until early this year, was a no-go for Linux users. That changed in January, when the first version of the Moonlight project — a collaboration between the Novell-sponsored Mono project and Microsoft, begun in 2007 — was released, providing Linux users with Open Source Silverlight support. Also included, provided that Moonlight has been obtained via Novell and meets certain other conditions, is a license to Microsoft's free but closed-source Media Pack, containing codecs needed to decode audio and video streams.

With the end of the next kernel version's main development phase, the most important new features of Linux 2.6.33 have been determined: DRBD, Nouveau, support of the Trim ATA command and a bandwidth controller for block devices. The developers have also improved the Radeon drivers and the support of Intel Wi-Fi chips. New stable kernels also fix a vulnerability in the code of Ext4, but will shortly be superseded by even more current versions.

Digikam is a powerful and complete photo management tool for KDE. Among its many features is the ability to run batch processes, thanks to the Kipi plugin set, which is also used in other KDE software like Gwenview. With a few simple clicks, users can manipulate multiple photos simultaneously, without having to remember long command line strings or taking countless hours to edit each file.

Jolicloud aims to be a solid netbook OS that "just works." But then, don't they all? Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and learns if it lives up to the hype.

A first shot at creating a port of the Qt toolkit to Google's Native Client (NaCL) environment allows Qt applications to run as applets within a browser. The port is not yet complete, but it already offers mouse and keyboard support, rudimentary support for the QtGUI and QtCore libraries and several more complex widgets. The biggest problem with the current port though is that the event handling in NaCL is polling based which makes applications spin using 100% of the CPU; the developers descibe this as "not quite our preferred style".

When Google first announced its Linux-based Android mobile phone platform just over two years ago, many were sceptical. After all, the reasoning went, the world of mobile phones is very different from that of computers. Similar doubts greeted the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1), when it appeared last year. But something strange has happened in the last twelve months, with a growing chorus of approval for the Android platform and its phones.

If you’ve worked in Windows long enough, you have come across the .chm file format. This format is nothing more than a compressed html directory with an included index for easy viewing. Problem is, you can’t view these files in Linux without the help of another tool. And sometimes you want to be able view these files in another format. Well, fortunately the Linux development community has solved that problem by creating various tools to manage these .chm files.

This week – The H launches a new Update Check service to identify and replace old software (with known vulnerabilities) with the latest version. Oracle reassures the MySQL community, Novell simplifies its infrastructure and Microsoft comes to an agreement with the European Commission over the browser antitrust case. Google offer a new URL shortening service, Adobe says it won't budge from its scheduled updates and Twitter gets cracked again.

When your editor was in Tokyo recently, he had the privilege to talk with KaiGai Kohei at some length about the SE-PgSQL patch set. This work, developed by KaiGai for the last two years or so, integrates SELinux with the PostgreSQL database manager, enabling fine-grained control over access to data stored within a database. The SE-PgSQL patch has struggled to get into the PostgreSQL mainline; it is now preparing for what may well be its last push to be merged. Whether it's successful may, in the end, depend on whether it receives support from potential users.

Remember when SCO said it never released any of its own code under the GPL? Methinks it spoke with forked tongue. I have now had an opportunity to look at files in another Caldera Linux distribution, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3-16, and I see Caldera's GPL fingerprints all over the place, much as I discovered using emacs to open up source files in OpenLinux eServer 2.3 the other day. And Caldera did write code itself that it released under the GPL. It also tweaked GPL'd packages and distributed with its own branding under the GPL. And it can't seem to stop distributing binutils under the GPL, while claiming in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit that it never did so.

Novell has released Moonlight 2.0, a major update to its open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework. The new version introduces support for managed code and the DLR.

Synology America Corp. is shipping a two-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 4TB of sharable storage for home and entry-level business users. The Linux-based DS210j is equipped with an 800MHz processor, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB ports, and version 2.2 of Synology's DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software.

Since I discovered just how great KDE 4 is a couple of months ago, I've been using it full-time and am loving it. In all that time, I've discovered a few tips and tricks that I couldn't live without, and all of them are listed here. Some of these include an inline CLI, split folders, setting up a media keyboard and using advanced wallpapers.

Yesterday, Mozilla fixed ten security bugs in Firefox. If you haven't upgraded Firefox to 3.5.6 yet, you can do so now. I'll wait for you. Done? Good. You're better off than a friend of mine who, I discovered, was still running Firefox 3.0.0. His logic? It's Firefox and open source therefore it's still safer than, say, Internet Explorer 6. Oh dear. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. He was right that open-source programs tend to be safer than proprietary programs. And, yes, he was right in thinking that the ancient IE 6 isn't safe at all. But, just because a program is open source doesn't mean that it's always safe, and an old program, no matter how it was made or who made it, is very unlikely to still be safe.

During the FUDCon in Toronto, the Fedora team discussed changes to central infrastructure, among which the change to Git.