Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Continuing in this series of slide show backgrounds, in this article I will explain the process of creating a set of desktop backgrounds that will transition like a slide-show in XFCE. Note that I am using XFCE version 4.6.0 in this tutorial. Other versions may be able to use this tip, but the screen shots may look different. See corresponding howtos for GNOME, and KDE3 also.

Google has been in talks with at least one hardware manufacturer about a Google-branded Chrome OS netbook, according to internet rumor. And it only stands to reason. We now have the Googlephone. Why not the Googlenetbook? Citing multiple unnamed sources, TechCrunch says that the Mountain View Chocolate Factory has sent an RFP, or "request for proposal," to the mystery manufacturer and that the two have actually discussed building a Google-branded Chrome OS device.

Apple has succeeded in gaining a permanent injunction against Mac clonemaker Psystar from selling computers with any version of OS X installed. The court also declined to exclude Rebel EFI, Psystar's software that enables an end user to install OS X on a non-Apple machine, from the injunction.

In the continuing soap opera of Oracle's battle against the European Commission for the right to acquire Sun, and with it, MySQL, we have had to rely on the bloggers and analysts to get it right, because the media surely have not. Before you read any further, stop right now and read Matthew Aslett's excellent summary of Oracle-MySQL through last week, Pamela Jones' excellent piece on the matter (and her later update), and Matt Asay's highlighting of Monty Widenius' conflict of interest in opposing the Sun acquisition.

Most Windows users know about the utility of the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys when dealing with an unresponsive application. A program is said to be unresponsive when it doesn’t respond to any user interaction and neither does it perform its intended actions. There are plenty of jokes surrounding the whole Ctrl + Alt + Del combination that brings up the task manager in Windows and allows you to end unresponsive applications. Things seldom go this far in the Linux world, however claiming that such Linux unresponsiveness doesn’t occur would be a plain lie.

Cisco announced a Linux-based WiFi router touted as the first 802.11n dual-band clustering access point for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The Cisco AP 541N Wireless Access Point includes 802.11n, gigabit Ethernet, "robust" security, voice roaming, and clustering technology, enabling a single point of administration for multiple access points.

Bruce Perens, former Debian project leader and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has been critical of the most recent GPL infringement lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). On behalf of several BusyBox developers, the SFLC sued 14 vendors over devices running embedded Linux and including the BusyBox tool. Perens is the author of the first few versions of BusyBox.

Even though our friends the giant globalcorps are often not very Linux-friendly, fine people like the TurboPrint developers make it possible to do high-quality Linux printing.

The KDevelop team is proud to announce the seventh beta of KDevelop4. At the same time we're a bit sad as this beta also marks our drop-out of the KDE SC 4.4 release cycle. We feel that we didn't manage to get the needed features for the 4.4.0 release working properly and that we'll need a longer freeze period than what is available in the release cycle. We're now concentrating on getting the existing features shaped up and ready for release as well as fixing as many of the bugs as we can. No new features will be introduced into KDevelop anymore until the first release, which is currently aimed at end of March.

The European Commission - Directorate for Competition has officially dropped its antitrust charges against Microsoft, after Microsoft agreed to provide users of its Windows operating system a choice of web browsers. Under the new deal, Microsoft will avoid future E.C. fines and, from March, consumers will have a choice of up to twelve other web browsers. "Millions of European consumers will benefit from this decision by having a free choice about which web browser they use," said Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

I have at least four machines running at all times – all using one monitor. Not only does space dictate this setup, so to does budget. Because of this I am relegated to using a KVM switch. If you’re not sure what a KVM switch is, it is a device that allows you to use multiple machines with only one monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Some KVM switches even allow the sharing of a single audio output source (speakers). There is one problem that can arise when using a KVM switch with a modern Linux distribution. This problem has to do with the latest releases of Xorg. Because Xorg no longer uses the xorg.conf file, it depends upon receiving identification signals from the monitor in order to automatically adjust the display. On a single system/single monitor setup this works perfectly. But in some instances a KVM switch will get in the way and the X Windows display will be far from ideal (and some times not even usable). How do you get around this situation? In this article you will read a few tips that will help you get around this.

Cherrypal has released a device touted as the "world's first $99 laptop" and announced an upgrade to a previously released netbook. The "Africa" has a seven-inch display and runs Linux on a 400MHz ARM9 processor, while the "Bing" has an Atom N280 and offers five hours of battery life.

The Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS), held November 16-20 in Dallas, while kicking off the development cycle for the next Ubuntu release, "Lucid Lynx", had a surprising amount to interest a kernel hacker with embedded tendencies. The Summit covered a wide range of topics from low level kernel details, to best community practices, but the ARM netbook support sessions were particularly interesting. At this UDS, the Ubuntu ARM developers set out to enable support for many ARM machines in a single distribution, a difficult task due to the lack of a standard firmware interface on ARM systems; a familiar problem to embedded developers. This report covers the solutions debated at UDS — including Kexec bootloaders and the flattened device tree — and the choices made for the next Ubuntu release.

My recent article about transitioning slide show backgrounds in GNOME garnered quite a bit of attention, so here's my first reminder of how to do the same thing in other desktop environments. This one will show you how to create a custom slide show backgrounds in KDE3.

After a long wait, Mozilla finally releases version 3.0 of Thunderbird. This latest version of Thunderbird brings much changes and makes it even more powerful than its ancestor. In this article, we take a look at the Thunderbird 3.0 and show you what you are going to expect in this great software.

For the past three years, Jono Bacon has worked as community manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest and most diverse projects in open source software. Consequently, when he recently published his thoughts on building and managing communities, people listen. More unusually, as I found out in a recent interview, when people like me critique his book, he listens, too, with a view to improving the second edition.

In order to appease European regulators, Oracle has made a number of commitments to the future of MySQL. According to a statement overnight (Australian time), Oracle has made a number of public commitments regarding MySQL in order to ease the concerns of European Union regulators investigating the proposed Oracle – Sun merger.

According to AndroLib, Google's Android Market has just crossed the 20,000 application milestone. The new milestone comes just over three months after reaching the 10,000 mark and shows strong application growth for the open source mobile operating system.

As the weaker forms of wireless encryption fail, migrating to stronger encryption protocols becomes more urgent. Eric Geier shows how to configure Linux clients to use strong encryption to connect to wireless networks.

Richard Stallman's strong position against proprietary applications is butting heads with some members of the GNOME Foundation. A call to split with Stallman's GNU Project is being considered.