Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this two-part interview he speaks candidly about MySQL and Sun, and we will run the second half of the long interview tomorrow.

Two days ago we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed switching between graphics processors on notebook computers that utilize dual graphics processors, one that's meant to deliver the best energy efficient performance while the other GPU is for maximizing the graphics performance in demanding environments. Just 24 hours after this kernel patch hit the Internet it already went through four revisions by Red Hat's David Airlie, which delivered better switching and greater notebook compatibility. Since yesterday this patch has already undergone a few more revisions.

"What’s holding it back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft."

The Britain Loves Wikipedia scheme will see UK museums and galleries opening up to the free online encyclopaedia. Throughout February, volunteer authors can take part in special tours to document artworks and natural treasures at a total of 20 institutions.

Days after a hacker broke open the inner multi-touch capabilities of Google's Nexus One, Google announced it is now offering pinch-to-zoom capability on the Android phone via a software update. In other Google news, the company has posted pictures of the Linux-based Chrome OS running on a tablet prototype.

Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping.

It happened like this. Recently our online banking authentication procedures changed. For the better I might add. While these security measures are far more secure they also prevented me from accessing our joint bank account whenever I wished. The end result was that I didn't check the account status often enough and an automatic payment didn't go through. Enough was enough I shouted out the window at two o'clock in the morning. After dodging a few smelly shoes and empty beer bottles I decided to set up my wifes phone to enable it to use the new security measures..

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

Leeenux Linux is a netbook distribution for the EeePC 701G, and is now available as version 2.0, complete with many new applications. The Linux distribution focuses on ease of use, even on the 8.9 inch display of the EeePC 701G. Leeenux is also perfect for use on other Netbooks, and uses Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Easy Peasy. The distribution contains only free software.

Bugs are a reality of software development, and a pain for both coders and users. Security bugs are a particularly nasty variety, and in an effort to kill as many as possible, Google is now coughing up cash for catching Chrome and Chromium glitches. The new program, modeled on Mozilla's successful Bug Bounty program, will pay rewards to bug-catchers who report "interesting and original vulnerabilities" in the code of either the Open Source Chromium browser, or Google's Chrome implementation. Google's Chris Evans, who announced the program on the official Chromium blog, described it as both a "token of our appreciation" for existing contributors and an incentive for new participation.

Viruses. They happen to almost everyone. If they don’t happen to you, it’ll be your cousin Stan who get joins the malware-of-the-month club, and you’re the only person he knows who can fix a computer. The problem is, things are so screwed up that Windows won’t even start properly. And if it does, the virus has embedded itself so deeply that you can’t access the files and tools you’d need to remove it. Enter Linux. By booting from a Linux Live CD or USB, you can remove the offending programs manually or with a Linux-based anti-virus program. This guide will cover creation of a bootable USB Linux system as well as a comparison of the antivirus software options.

The open source legal profession has established the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) to discuss topics including copyrights, licensing, software patents, open standards, case law and statutes in the open source arena. The IFOSSLR now appears in its second issue.

How many SUSE subscriptions can you get for $240 million? Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft. According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership. And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out. The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft."

Video editing in Linux is never an easy stuff. While there are several top-notch video editing software available for Linux users, most of them are not meant for the faint-hearted. With the release of OpenShot, the averagae users (like you and me) now have an easy to use video editor that they can fire up, drag their photos into the time frame and quickly produce a slideshow movie. OpenShot is a non-linear video editor for Linux. It can easily combine multiple video clips, audio clips, and images into a single project, and then export the video into many common video formats. Things that you can do with OpenShot include creating photo slide shows, edit home videos, create television commercials and on-line films, or anything else you can dream up.

Diamond Systems announced that it has originated a new, mezzanine-style expansion standard for SBCs (single board computers), COMs (computer-on-modules) and other embedded products. Involving a single low-cost connector and expansion modules "three-fifths the size of a credit card," the standard will be open and support any host form factor and processor, the company says.

On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites. SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn't provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time. The changes have been described as either a re-write of the PHP runtime or a compiler for PHP. A change to PHP would be Facebook's latest donation to the language, which has also had contributions from Microsoft and the former Sun Microsystems over the years.

ActiveState, the dynamic languages experts, today launched ActiveState Business Edition, commercial-grade language distributions for Perl, Python and Tcl providing organizations open source compliance, commercial support, and cross-platform access. A slide presentation around ActiveState Business Edition is available on Slideshare.net: http://bit.ly/ayd49J

With all of this iPad buzz stirring up the tech world over the past couple of weeks, Chrome OS has almost been forgotten. That may have something to do with the fact that Google has yet to officially release the netbook-centric operating system to the public, but still, you'd expect a company like Google to keep the details flowing about a forthcoming operating system. Today it seems we're getting exactly what you'd expect, in response to all the recent tablet fanfare.

Apple turned up the heat in the mobile market last week when it unveiled its new iPad mobile computing device. Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, has responded to Apple's product launch with a candid appraisal of Linux's strengths and weaknesses in the mobile market relative to Apple's mobile operating system. Zemlin, one of the Linux community's most vocal advocates, speculated last year that Linux could eventually become the dominant operating system for consumer electronics products. His argument was based largely on the assertion that Linux's lack of licensing costs will make it the most practical and affordable option for hardware vendors.

Now that the Sun acquisition is a done deal, Oracle has begun picking and choosing the products that will live on and which will fade out. While CEO Larry Ellison was adamant that there would be no wholesale slaughter of products or staffing cuts, the reality is that not everything can survive or receive full Oracle investment. Most of these discussions are available online from a collection of videos made during Oracle's (NASDAQ: ORCL) Product Strategy day earlier this week.