Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Canonical is updating Ubuntu's look and feel with a new style that departs from the popular Linux distribution's traditional brown theming. The new theme, which was announced yesterday as part of an initiative to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity, will be used in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx. The design documents that Canonical published Wednesday left a lot of questions unanswered. Fortunately, the new themes were rolled out to Ubuntu 10.04 alpha testers today in the latest set of package updates. We used the Ubuntu alpha to conduct some hands-on testing so that we could see how the new theme looks with a number of popular applications.

For the tinkerers and testers, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfect year. Almost every desktop and application we can think of is going to have a major release, and while release dates and roadmaps always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, many of these projects have built technology and enhancements you can play with now. We've selected the few we think are worth keeping an eye on and that can be installed easily, but Linux is littered with applications that are evolving all the time, so we've also tried to guess what the next big things might be.

For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix (UNR), but I’ve never given it a shot up until now. Being a KDE guy, I usually lean toward applications based on the Qt toolkit and I’ve never really liked GNOME much. For some reason though, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been lingering in my mind for a potential review, and now I’ve finally been able to give it a shot. I’ve actually been using UNR for a couple of months now. When I first started playing with it, I didn’t even own a Netbook, so instead I tried it out on a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. About a month later, I was gifted a Dell Mini 10 netbook, which afforded me the opportunity to try UNR in it’s intended environment.

The Free Software Foundation is gearing up for a big event March 19th through 21st to be held in Cambridge, Mass. at Harvard's University Science Center. LibrePlanet 2010 is a three day event with workshops on using free software for everything from Web development to video editing and graphics. This year's LibrePlanet is going to feature a new "Women's Caucus," a day-long track on Sunday to boost participation by women in free software projects. There's no shortage of events focused on free and open source software. You can't swing a penguin without hitting a conference these days, so we interviewed FSF membership coordinator Deborah Nicholson to find out what makes LibrePlanet different from some of the other events going on this Spring.

The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and "configurators."

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org. This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers. Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Bruce Byfield is already grumpy from the Olympics invasion of his hometown, and now KDE and GNOME are causing vexation. They both have many wonderful abilities, but some things leave users scratching their heads and wondering "why."

The BBC has tried to draw a line under its decision to bar open source implementations of RTMP (real-time messaging protocol) streaming in the iPlayer, after The Register revealed the Corporation's quiet switcheroo last week. BBC online managing editor Ian Hunter claimed in a blog post today that the term "open source" had been "conflated" by users who had grumbled about third party RTMP plugins being locked out of the catch-up service.

A lot of the news I come across is contentious — of the Linux vs. Microsoft variety — and then there are the lawsuits, claims and counterclaims, and forum flame-throwing that go along with it. That’s why I was charmed by this little story by columnist Mike Cassidy from last week’s Southern California Linux Expo about three young girls who submitted proposals for their own presentations. Sisters Saskia and Malakai Wade (ages 8 and 12, respectively) and friend Mirano Cafiero (also age 12) talked about Gimp, TuxPaint, and OLPC XO computers. Malakai showed a stop-action Barbie video that she made with OpenShot.

At CeBIT this week, Motorola demonstrated an Android-based "HS1001" cordless IP phone manufactured by Binatone and built around the DSP Group's DECT-compatible XpandR chipset. Meanwhile, DSP Group showed its own Android-based IP phone reference design based on the XpandR II chipset.

Linux at retail has been a hit-and-miss proposition for more than a decade. Canonical's new CEO explains her company's strategy for getting desktop Linux into more customers' hands.

In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough. Microsoft. Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split off the old NetWare business, and auction off Suse Linux.

During a visit to Google's London HQ we grabbed some time with Chris DiBona. He's the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, overseeing everything the corporation does that's open sourced and making sure it's "correct and useful." We talked Google Chrome and, later, Android. We put to DiBona the issue that if users buy a netbook, they still tend to expect Windows on it, so will they take to Chrome OS? "Yeah. Windows or Mac. Is this going to change? We're going to find out. We're willing to say, you know what, let's give it a try, let's see if it works.

The Linux ecosystem is a complex entity. On one hand everyone gets along and benefits from work done by others, while on the other there’s often animosity and conflict between distributions and their communities (remember when Ubuntu came along?). People often complain that there is simply too much choice in the Linux world and that we’d all be better off if there was just one, or two. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The multitude of Linux distributions exists for a reason. They exist because not one single distribution can satisfy the desires of every user on the planet. Different people like different ways of doing things. Not only that, the distribution that one might want to use for a server won’t necessarily suit a laptop. So thankfully there are thousands of distros to choose from.

You are reading a standard-form news article, and when new information comes to light, the piece you're reading might just be referenced in a follow-up — but it won't be displayed in context or be easy to navigate. However, if Google's Living Stories experiment takes off following the release of its code, that won't always be the case.

A loop in music is a section of the music that repeats itself continuously until receiving a signal to either stop or move on to the next section. A loop can be assigned to a single instrument or to a group of instruments. Compositionally, loops are used for a variety of purposes. For example, they may function as formal bass patterns over which a composition is built, or they may suppy a long but consistently repeating series of chords used to define the harmony for independently composed bass and melody lines. For many computer-based music-makers the loop's most popular implementation is the drum loop, a rhythmic pattern of one or more measures of percussion sounds that can be repeated unchanged for simple lines or mixed & matched with other loops for more life-like variation.

Kontron is readying an Intel Atom Z530-based box computer designed for rugged railway applications. The MicroSpace MPCX28R Railway Box PC is protected for railway use with EN50155 certification, TX compliance, extended temperature support, 1.5kV isolated power, and M12 connectors for Fast Ethernet, USB, and power, says the company. The Linux-compatible MicroSpace MPCX28R is suitable for passenger infotainment, security, and other railway applications, says Kontron. Built around the original 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU and SCH US15W northbridge/southbridge, the MicroSpace MPCX28R supports up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM, the company says.

A long while ago, I pledged Magnatune to pay 10% of its sales due to Rhythmbox (a fantastic music player for Linux), back to the GNOME Foundation. Today, I wrote the check. Rhythmbox has really excellent integration with Magnatune (for four years now!), which makes for a wonderful marriage between open source and open music. The latest versions support Magnatune memberships, for all-you-can-eat music support on Linux.

Canonical is replacing its signature brown color scheme with the debut of Ubuntu 10.04, the next major release of the popular Linux distribution. Departing from six years of interface tradition, Canonical has revealed a new "light" default theme and updated Ubuntu logo that introduces a pallet of purple, orange, slate grey, and tan. The new look made its public debut on the blog of Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon on Wednesday.

Building a Linux distribution with the novice user in mind has been tried many times over the years. If you had to pick one area where many new users struggle, it would have to be installing new applications. Missing dependencies or improperly configured repositories lead to frustration and, ultimately, abandonment of the entire platform.