Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

From March 2-6 CeBIT Open Source 2010 called open source projects, enterprises, and organizations to Hannover, Germany. Here's our photo gallery from the talks in the Open Source forum, the project lounge, and the Linux New Media awards.

The development of Linux 2.6.34 has started and is causing heated discussions on the LKML. LWN.net has analysed Linux 2.6.32.9 for security fixes and found almost twenty of them. Linux-Libre removes proprietary files from the kernel, and new graphics drivers for Radeon cards offer numerous improvements.

Appcelerator has taken the beta tag off its open source Titanium development kit, a means of building native desktop and mobile applications using traditional web-development tools such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, html, and CSS. Titanium 1.0 was officially released today, with the Silicon Valley–based startup claiming significantly improved performance on iPhone and Android handsets after reconstructing the kit's mobile setup. In beta, Titanium built its native iPhone and Android applications by way of the WebKit browsers built into those high-profile mobile platforms, but after a three-month rewrite, it now bypasses the browser entirely, according to director of marketing Scott Schwarzhoff.

One of the major innovations of OLPC consists in the idea that a computer given to a single child (also called 1:1 computing) is the best way to enhance the pupil's ability to learn effectively. It's called ONE-laptop-per-child after all.

You don't need a PhD in computer science and years of experience to hack the kernel. Sure, they help, but the nature of Linux development means that it's open to all by default. All you have to do is get stuck in. You use the Linux kernel in whatever shape or form every day; wouldn't you feel just the tiniest swell of pride if you'd helped work on it, no matter in how small a way?

Search engine maker Google is again providing scholarships in 2010 for student open source works. Information is now first hand this week in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe.

Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments are often referenced as being lighter-eight Linux desktop environments than KDE and GNOME, but what are the measurable performance differences between them? Curious how much of a quantitative impact the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops have on netbook systems, we carried out a small set of tests to look at the differences in memory usage, battery power consumption, and thermal performance.

Developer Joshua Wright intends to release KillerBee, an open source collectionPDF of Linux tools intended for testing the security of ZigBee networks. According to Wright, many ZigBee implementations are a mess – he hopes that his tool, which is coded in Python, will ultimately lead to more secure products. Wright lists ZigBee applications which include controlling water flows in dams and natural gas control valves. The technology is also widely used in building automation; many thousands of ZigBee devices have been used in the brand-new MGM CityCenter in Las Vegas, for example. Some intelligent electricity meters in use in the US also communicate using ZigBee in a mesh network.

Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.

LXer Feature: 08-Mar-2010

In the area of window managers Linux users are completely and totally spoiled rotten. We constantly debate the merits of one desktop environment/window manager over another. We argue over what programs are better than others, what versions of those programs we like over another and getting in world class pissing contests all the while crying about what we wish they would do better or differently. I wish Windows users had this problem, but they don't. Why? Because they have no choice.

The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month. The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest I think. - Scott]

We reported a month ago that Unigine Heaven on Linux is still trash with the ATI driver so Unigine Corp is continuing to hold off on releasing the Unigine Heaven tech demo with the OpenGL renderer that supports hardware tessellation until there is a good Catalyst release. Unigine Heaven was released for Windows 7 back in October on this operating system's launch day using a DirectX 11.0 renderer, but buggy Linux drivers have held back the public Linux-OpenGL build. We have been fortunate to run Unigine Heaven on Linux internally and it's a beautiful tech demo / benchmark to say the least even without a bug-free tessellation experience.

Welcome to another interview with a KDE contributor. Last time we interviewed Marco Martin from KDE Plasma team, this time we talked with Tobias König from KDEPIM about Akonadi and the TV series Lost ;) The original interview in Italian is available in Giovanni Venturi's KDE blog.

MySQL Cluster is used to provide high-availability, high-redundancy for the distributed computing environment. You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I’m using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition. I’m using 3 servers (1 Management and 2 data) to setup cluster in CentOS 5.4 Linux box. The steps mentioned here can be used for quickly deploying a cluster and worked out for me but no guarantee that this will work for you, So its always advisable to go through official MySQL guide as well for production environment. In case you are also riding on cloud computing wave, I’ve already blogged way to setup MySQL cluster in Amazon EC2 environment.

Without an operating system – Mac OS X, say, or Windows XP – a computer is just a dumb box of chips, and even the most exciting application will have no environment in which to run. And, it's easy to forget that you have a choice of which OS you run. In fact, as a Mac user, you're uniquely positioned because an Intel Mac is the only computer in the world that can legally run all three major operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Indeed, you can, if you like, load all three on the same computer and pick which one you want to load when you switch your Mac on.

LXer Feature: 07-Mar-2010

In the LXWR this week we have Munich showing off its migration to Linux at CeBIT, Ubuntu opens up a music store, a nice review of OpenShot, Jeff Hoogland 'mints' his girlfriends laptop, the three giants of Linux and a LXer feature about contributing upstream..enjoy!

Google's purchase of DocVerse March 5 validates the market for applications that bridge the gap between the Google Apps cloud computing suite and Microsoft's Office on-premise applications. Google will stitch this technology into Google Apps, appealing to customers who want to use Google Apps as their main collaboration suite, but still use the documents they created offline in Office without losing any of the data. The move comes as OffiSync is building its own suite of software that creates ties between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers.

One of the things that's been wandering around my mind lately (one of thousands) is the thought of the wild woods. In other words, places in the world that are away from civilization, away from the normal creature comforts of daily life, such as areas in Northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, sections of Africa, and others like that. Places where you have enough power to run a machine, but no internet connection, or if you do, it's sparing at best. Places like this sometimes have computers, and a reasonable amount of use for one, but they're way outside the normal network connected sphere of influence you see in the regular world. That then begs the question, how do we get Linux into areas like that?

There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.