Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google has made the source code for the current 2.0 release of Android available to download from its Android Open Source Project page. So far, Android 2.0 has only been released in the US on the Motorola Droid from Verizon. The developer of the CyanogenMod builds of Android, who was recently in the news over a copyright dispute with Google, has already compiled the sources to allow the operating system to run on the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1.

LXer Feature: 16-Nov-2009

Microsoft has released part of its .NET Framework - the part for internet-connected smart devices - into the open-source community. The company said on Monday that it's releasing source code for the .NET Micro Framework under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft is also creating a community of "interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product." The community's web site was still under construction at time of the announcement.

I was enjoying football Sunday with a few fellow IT friends over the weekend. Naturally, between plays, the topics tended to veer towards that of IT. I was the lone Linux guy in the crowd, so my opinion was not the norm (I’m used to that, of course). During the course of the day I pieced a few bits of conversation together and was able to finally draw a conclusion to that age old question, “Why don’t more consultants roll out Linux?” The answer should have been obvious to me all along as I long had all of the information I needed. But after hearing what I heard from the collective mouths of an IT group with years of experience and a metro city’s worth of clients, it became all too clear why Windows is always rolled out.

Next year's US Red Hat Summit 2010 will take place in conjunction with JBoss World in Boston, Massachusetts from the 22nd to the 25th of June, 2010. While Red Hat acquired JBoss in April of 2006, the two events have only been linked since 2009. The JBoss World site has yet to be updated to reflect the 2010 event.

You want to know the funniest thing is about compared Corel Linux 1.0, released in 1999, with a typical modern desktop Linux -- say, Ubuntu 9.10? How much hasn't changed. It's sort of like comparing the then-current Windows 98 Second Edition and today's Windows 7: You wouldn't doubt for a moment that the newer version is much more polished than the earlier edition, but you'd be able to get around in both operating systems and get work done.

Dell announced a miniature PC using single- or dual-core AMD processors, available with Ubuntu Linux. Starting at approximately $230, the Inspiron Zino HD sports up to 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive, comes in ten colors, and is available with discrete graphics, says Dell.

Apple has filed a patent application for an intrusive ad-presentation system that requires users to acknowledge adverts before getting on with their work. The recent patent filing carries the unusually straightforward title "Advertisement in Operating System." The described system would be buried deep in a device's OS - so deep that, in the words of the filing, "the advertisement presentation can in effect 'take over the system' in relevant aspects for a limited time."

In this third and final installment of how to survey the airwaves with Linux tools, Eric Geier shows us more tools for network surveying and discovery, deep snooping, and intrusion detection and alerting.

Google isn't content with providing us with fast search and a fast browser: we need a faster protocol between servers and browsers. The search giant would like us to start forgetting about HTTP:// and learn to love SPDY://. Ars takes a look at the proposal as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

I'm surprised that more people in the Linux community aren't talking about Lenovo's smartbook, which it announced yesterday. Powered by a Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon processor and sold by AT&T, the new smartbook is Linux-based. Lenovo has had an up and down relationship with supporting Linux, and smartbooks may represent a good way for the company to get back on track with an open source platform.

China-based Menq has launched a smartbook/mini-netbook that runs on an ARM9-based Samsung S3C2450 processor, and offers WiFi, Ethernet, SD storage, and a 7-inch 800 x 480 display. According to one review, the Menq EasyPC E790 costs only $80, and though it ships with Windows CE, can also run Android.

Lanner Electronics is shipping an entry-level, Linux-compatible DVR for the surveillance market that records NTSC and PAL video using H.264. The VR-1208 offers a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB ports, and dual 3.5-inch storage bays, and supports eight channels of D1 analog video.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you grew up with classic video game consoles like the NES and Sega Genesis. For years Windows users have been enjoying high quality game emulation software, but many of the Linux options have been buggy or incomplete. It’s time to take a look at where things stand when it comes to playing console games in Linux. Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on console game emulation here and there, but never done a guide covering multiple systems. Today, we’ll show you how to run games for NES, SNES, Genesis, original Playstation, and Dreamcast. Before we begin, it’s important to note one thing right up front – many console manufacturers do not look kindly on emulation, and some emulators require proprietary software (like the game system BIOS) in order to run. Because of the legal grey area occupied by some of this software, there may be some files or programs for which MTE cannot provide links, such as the actual game files (commonly called ROMS).

A research group in the computer sciences faculty at North Carolina State University has written a prototype to prevent rootkits from manipulating kernel object hooks to do their damage.

After Cavium announced that it will acquire MontaVista for $50 million, analysts are now weighing in on the acquisition. Both Jay Lyman of The 451 Group and Bill Weinberg of LinuxPundit view the acquisition as a sign of a consolidation trend in embedded Linux, while Weinberg points to MontaVista missteps that led to sale.

Following previous reports that Dell's Mini 3i smartphone was merely a proof of concept, the computer giant has now confirmed that it's planning on releasing the device. Dell says that it's Android-based phone will feature a 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen display and that it will be launching this year in Brazil and China. Additional specifications have yet to be released, but, according to reports, the mobile will be available in 2G and 3G models.

The Novell-backed OpenSUSE Linux distro project today released the final OpenSUSE 11.2, which received a mostly positive, in-depth review from eWEEK. Meanwhile, Novell released its Mono Tools for Visual Studio for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, says another eWEEK story.

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux.

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago. I was in Nicaragua doing anthropological research, when I was asked to give a talk at the yearly Debian Day in the capital city of Managua. I spoke on Latex, which really had nothing to do with agriculture, but afterward Denis Cáceres of Debian Nicaragua approached me.