Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Mozilla Project has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox contest. The contest required entries to make use of new features in the Firefox 3.5 series, and included categories for best new add-on, best updated add-on, best shopping add-on, and best game & entertainment add-on. The winning entries for Best New Add-on were FireFound by Chris Finke, Multifox by Jeferson Hultmann, and Voyage by Hsiao-Ting Yu. FireFound sends your machine's location to a secure server, with the idea that if your machine is stolen, it can send its location using Firefox's Geolocation API to help track the machine. This assumes the thief uses Firefox after stealing the machine, of course. It works with Firefox and mobile Firefox.

Linux newbie and excellent writer Emery Fletcher weighs in on the subject of documentation for Linux users, and why it is a good thing.

Most of us still rely on CD/DVD writing software applications for file backup, data transfer and distribution, and for ripping audio and video content among other things. If you are using Linux, there are plenty of optical disc-authoring programs to choose from. Here are some of those that I like..

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy. My regular job, my hobby and working with the folks at Linux Journal. Along the way, I have been thinking about the Open Source world more than I have in the past. And as I have been talking about it with people, I have been getting the standard responses you might expect.

The SCaLE University training program continues for SCALE 8X. It is presented by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) in partnership with SCALE. The classes give a more intense and personal learning experience than a 45-minute seminar. We are offering four half-day classes for system administrators of all skill and experience levels. The SCaLE University Pass includes a full day of training (two classes of your choice) and full access to all three days of SCaLE. To register, select the "SCALE 8X Full Access Pass" and then the "SCALE University Pass" which will include a $60 discount on your total charge. The SCALE University classes will be held on Friday, February 19th. 2010.

Writers at MakeTechEasier taken more screen shots than many other computer users will take in their lifetimes. We all use our favorite programs and usually do not give them a second thought. The user who might occasionally want to give an instructional lesson or just show off some desktop eye candy will probably need a little more guidance. After all, there are many screen shot programs to choose from, and not all of them are equal. KSnapshot for KDE stands out as one of the best screen shot tools available and is unquestionably the best one for KDE. It is a standard KDE program and should come packaged with any Linux distributions that offer KDE. It is very easy to learn, but as we always do at MTE, we are about to make it easier.

Concurrent has revised its Red Hat-based real-time Linux distribution, adding support for Intel Nehalem and AMD Opteron processors with up to 48 cores, among other enhancements. RedHawk Linux 5.4 also improves NUMA performance and provides enhanced Nvidia drivers that support Nvidia's "Cuda" parallel computing technology, says the company.

Dell Technology Strategist Doug Anson has announced that, after "doing some tinkering", he has gotten Dell's Mini 10v netbook working with Google's Chromium OS, the open source branch of the Chrome OS. In a post on the Direct2Dell Blog, Anson says that "Without a network connection, Chromium OS is not very interesting. With a network connection, Chromium OS shines."

Sometimes it's the little things that trip us up, like a filename that begins with the wrong character. Juliet Kemp knows what to do when Linux becomes confused and won't operate on a file the way we want it to.

Mainstream Linux distro developers have to make decisions that affect thousands of potential users. Should they include or remove a particular package? Should they apply a patch that may break compatibility with older machines? These matters are discussed fiercely in forums where trolls growl, flames burn and project leaders defend their decisions against an onslaught of dissident. But as an individual you have none of these issues. You can install and remove packages as and when you want to, and you can choose whether to install free or non-free software on your system. Why should you have to live with community decisions when you can make Linux work your way?

LXer Feature: 30-Nov-2009

A team of Dell engineers has released a very unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS for use on the PC manufacturer's Mini 10v netbooks. Dell isn't on the official list of Chrome OS hardware partners. And the company's founder and CEO believes his netbooks go sour after 36 hours. But you now have ready access to an early open source incarnation of Google's browser-happy "operating system" that's been tweaked specifically for those 36-hour machines.

One of OpenOffice.org's greatest strengths is its emphasis on styles. Some users balk at styles, claiming they are restrictive, but no other feature repays a little organization with so much ease of use and saving of time. Yet even those who are used to styles in Writer tend to overlook the styles used in other applications. That is especially true of graphic styles. read more

And now, as promised and thanks to your donations, we have the 158 exhibits, attached to Novell's response [PDF] to Microsoft's cross motion for summary judgment in the WordPerfect antitrust litigation. This is the other side of that story.

GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called "Klassrooms". For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of "students" towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

Kristian Høgsberg on the 6th of November had wrote a message on the DRI development list regarding the libdrm repository. With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Well, three weeks later with dozens of replies, this change is continuing to cause debate.

Google unveiled an experimental open source project in early November aimed at reducing web site load times. SPDY, as it is called, is a modification to HTTP designed to target specific, real-world latency issues without altering GET, POST, or any other request semantics, and without requiring changes to page content or network infrastructure. It does this by implementing request prioritization, stream multiplexing, and header compression. Results from tests on a SPDY-enabled Chrome and a SPDY web server show a reduction in load times of up to 60%.

The 4.0 release of the KDE software compilation marked a major milestone for the KDE community. While the underlying development platform has seen a modernization to better work with increased demand of applications, the community also saw a shift in its development methods. Interaction design has become much more important, and hence the need to collect feedback from the user in a structured manner. Ultimately, this leads to more understandable user interfaces and simpler handling of the underlying complexity of modern computers and portable devices. Nuno Pinheiro, a well-known artist and icon designer in the KDE community and engineering psychologist Björn Balazs from the Open Source Usability Labs and director for analysis, design and testing at Apliki decided they wanted to help with this.

During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. As a participant who attended the session in person, I want to shed some light on how and why the decision was made.