Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Kernel versions 2.6.27.40, 2.6.27.41 and 2.6.31.7 offer minor improvements and correct several bugs – including one security hole. Torvalds has already incorporated more than 5,000 changes for Linux 2.6.33. Its merge window will probably be open for just over another week. Various developers are working on significant improvements to the open source Radeon graphics drivers.

Today I’d like to talk about my experiences with Fedora 12 over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been running it as my main desktop and really getting a feel for how it ticks. Fedora is the community release from corporate Linux giants Red Hat. I’ve used it on and off since its inception back in the early 2000’s, it’s fair to say there have been big highs and lows in that time. I considered Fedora 11 a definite high though, and I was interested to see how this release would stack up.

It's now fair to say that the Linux desktop is at the forefront of visual effects, a cornucopia of eye-candy overflowing on to your desktop. And with a few tweaks, it can look even better. With both Windows and OS X continually upping the ante in what the average desktop user expects from their desktop experience, it's vitally important that Linux stays ahead of the game - even if that only means turning on a genie effect for minimized applications when your friends come over, or using a more usable version of virtual desktops when you lend your machine to someone.

US software vendor Oracle has accused the European Commission of partiality in its assessment of the planned takeover of Sun Microsystems. At a private hearing in Brussels yesterday, Oracle accused the Commission of having focused on critical third party opinions on the transaction. The Financial Times reports that many if not most customers who have submitted comments do not share the European Commission's concerns. Oracle accuses the Commission of simply ignoring the views expressed by major customers, including General Electric, Fujitsu and Siemens.

"The Book of Inkscape" by Dmitry Kirsanov (No Starch Press) calls itself "the definitive guide to the free graphics editor." Inkscape is a professional-level vector graphics editor, and if you don't know what that means this book tells you right away, in nice understandable real-people English.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem. In this article, your editor looks at the quality of the Fedora 12 release and ponders what Fedora 13 may bring.

Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.

Canonical, and the Ubuntu developers, have announced the availability of the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The first development milestone is the first of three planned alpha releases.

You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the "world's smallest fully-functional commercial desktop." In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile. Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.

Sugar Labs has revised the LiveUSB version of its education-focused "Sugar" Linux distribution. "Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry" offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined activities updating, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash, and activities designed for reading electronic books (ebooks), says the non-profit organization.

Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence. "Our goal is to have a release candidate next week," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile. "If things go smoothly, we'll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks," with the debut planned for this year, he added.

I can say that Linux on netbook is gaining momentum right now contrary to what others believe. Just take a look at the growing number of Linux distributions that are optimized for netbooks so that you will know what I mean. For those of you who are interested, I've compiled a list of well-known, netbook-oriented Linux distributions.

Connector integrates development activities performed in Eclipse IDE with project management in Mingle 3.0

IBM has expanded its server lineup with a new mainframe system designed just for Linux that may be aimed, in particular, at higher-end x86 systems. The new system uses IBM's specialty Linux processor and runs either Novell SUSE or Red Hat systems. It does not use the mainframe operating system z/OS but includes mainframe management software as well as IBM's z/Virtual Machine system. Together, they constitute the company's latest "solutions edition," or what IBM says are lower-cost, integrated stacks for the mainframe.

Richard Stallman's free software organization seeks to assemble a loose and open group of supporters on a voluntary basis to distribute information on the Web and promote free software.

A downloadable beta of a fundamentally re-jigged version of open source media centre Boxee has recently been made available to a closed circle of users. As well as sprucing up the user interface with a tidier home view, the media library has been revised and now also lists internet, in addition to local, content. Multi-episode TV series, as offered by US service Hulu, for example, can now be sorted by series and episode.

D-Link is readying a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) based on the open source Boxee home entertainment stack. The singularly styled "Boxee Box DM-380" incorporates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI out, as well as analog and digital audio outputs, says the company.