Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The open source software turned 18 last year, and its maturity is evident to hackers and corporate types alike.

[A slideshow with some debatable facts inside. - Scott]

One of the most common complaints I hear about Linux is that it’s just no good for gaming. Some complain about hardware support, others the lack of titles, others that it’s just too complicated. It’s true that Linux probably isn’t the first platform that comes to mind when I think about PC gaming, but some parts of that reputation are inaccurate or outdated. Sabayon Gaming DVD takes on that myth to see just what a Linux gaming system can do. It’s got a fast Gentoo base, built-in codecs and 3D driver support, Compiz, and many of the best games available for Linux. On top of the usual Gnome games, you get such titles as Neverball, Battle for Wesnoth, OpenArena, Tremulous, Warsow, Nexuiz, and Warzone 2100, all playable from the live DVD.

To get a sense of how the health of the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community is in general and to monitor the interest in FOSS and Linux in the region in particular and at the 36-hour mark before the expo starts, pre-registrations for SCALE 8X are running over 30 percent higher than at this time last year. Friday marks the start of SCALE, highlighted by the Women In Open Source (WIOS) and Open Source Software in Educaction (OSSIE) segments.

There has been a sea change in public opinion. Google is now seen as the evil empire. Microsoft, they’re the feisty little guys up in Washington state. The change has also been marked by a new attitude toward open source. Google’s delivery of open source code for Living Stories is treated as ho-hum. The donation of $2 million to Wikimedia is quickly followed by snark. Is that all they’re giving? Well, their search engine likes Wikipedia best.

The SIM cards in cellular telephones might be smaller than a postage stamp and less than a millimeter thick but that hasn't stopped South Korea's SK Telecom from cramming all the major components needed to run Google's Android OS inside one of them. The carrier's Android SIM, a prototype of which is on show at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, includes an ARM-based processor, companion memory and 1GB of flash memory to store the OS and other data.

Aava Mobile announced an "open" Aava smartphone reference design that employs Intel's "Moorestown" CPU, with current or planned support for Moblin Linux 2.1, Android, and MeeGo. Meanwhile, LG will port its Moorestown- and Moblin-based GW990 phone to MeeGo, says an industry report.

From the "Maemo, to Moblin to LiPS' files: There have been multiple efforts from multiple vendor groups over the last 5 years to develop a successful mobile Linux operating system. Now we've got another one with MeeGo that my colleague Andy Patrizio reported on yesterday. The pairing of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin was a bit surprising to me initially, but in many ways it does make sense. To be blunt, Nokia's Maemo Linux platform was going nowhere fast.

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community over the project's potential future with database giant Oracle. OpenSolaris developers have complained they've been "completely ignored" by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project's future going unanswered.

The Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) was recently held in Newport Beach, California. FOSS 2010 was an invitation-only workshop aimed at identifying the key research projects and challenges for free and open source software. FOSS is funded by the Computing Research Association and the National Science Foundation, and hosted by the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine.

The Twitter microblogging service has created a Twitter loves open source page, listing the projects it has released or contributed to. The page lists programs written in Ruby, Scala, Java and C/C++ and some tools.

I worry that modern Americans have lost both manual skills and the curiosity to explore how things work. I probably worry too much, but look how computers have progressed: from a text command prompt, to all kinds of rich GUis, to smartphones and PDAs, culminating in the iPad. The iPad doesn't even use a keyboard, all you do is grunt and point.

A few media technology companies have joined the LiMo Foundation, Adobe Systems among the newest ones. The fact that the LiMo platform supports Flash should motivate developers and content providers to create corresponding LiMo applications, said Adobe in what the LiMo Foundation considered worth a special press release.

I love WordPress. I love its user-friendliness and how easy you can get it installed and running within 5 mins. I love its extensibility and the plugin system that enable us to increase its functionality without any coding needed. However, despite all the love, WordPress is not perfect. There are plenty of times where you will wonder why a simple and basic feature is not included in the WordPress core and you have to go hunting for plugins/hacks/solutions just to solve a simple problem. Take this as my letter to WordPress (and Matt Mullenweg) and I seriously hope they can add the following features to the core in the future.

One of the features that was talked about and proposed a few months back was a music store for Ubuntu where one could easily purchase music and somewhat fits in with Canonical's plans for the Ubuntu Software Store (or the "Ubuntu Software Center" as it's now called). Plans were laid out for an Ubuntu One Music Store and the first packages to support this in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are now available.

If the concept of cloud storage and applications is appealing, but not the idea of handing control of your data over to someone else, then why not set up your own little cloud? Dmitri Popov shows us how with Tonido.

The open source PHP dynamic language is one of the most widely deployed languages on Web servers today. But what operating systems are PHP developers using to develop and deploy their applications? It's a question that has been asked before and now it's being answered with a new study from Zend, one of the lead commercial backers behind PHP. The study surveyed 2,000 PHP developers in December and found that 85 percent reported that Linux was their primary operating system as a production environment for PHP.

Although Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu, Google has no intention right now of targeting the mass market. Instead, Chrome OS will be certified to run on specific hardware, which at the very least will need either an x86 or ARM CPU and a solid-state drive (SSD) for storage. Most SSDs are faster than hard drives, which enables Google to squeeze the boot time as low as possible. SSDs are also much more expensive, but that's mitigated by the fact that Chrome OS is designed to operate in as little storage space as possible – we think you might be able to buy a Chrome OS netbook with just 1GB of storage.

Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo's internet search and search advertising businesses have been cleared by both European and US regulators. The European Commission ruled that the deal "would not significantly impede effective competition". Under the deal, Yahoo's website will use Microsoft's Bing search engine, and the two firms will share the revenues. Microsoft is seeking to increase its share of the search engine industry, which is dominated by Google. It and Yahoo first announced the planned tie-up in July of lasts year.

While I was at linux.conf.au 2010 last month, I finally met Ted Ts'o, one of the most senior figures in the Linux world, and, like many of them, now working for Google. Indeed, few people go further back in the world of Linux than Ts'o: he made his first contribution to version 0.10 of the kernel, which came out in December 1991, and he also set up the first site in the US that carried the Linux kernel and related software.

Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support. Android drivers have now been escorted from the staging area, while Ramzswap (formerly Compcache) framework for compressing RAM has been added.