Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In my last article, Teaching with Tux, I wrote about teaching children with the Tux Educational programs. Today, I'm going to discuss the Gcompris education suite. Gcompris is meant for younger children from 2 to 10 years old, though it seems to focus on the younger part of this range.

It was over a year ago that I wrote about the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), a new global standard for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies currently being discussed by representatives of the United States, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Since then, the secret negotiations have been continuing, and the threats it poses to the Internet as we know it grow ever larger.

The Free Software Foundation is having a video contest on the subject "Why is free software important to you?" It's a timely topic, with Windows 7 just out and with the free software community's bickering so bitter as of late that common goals sometimes seem in danger of being forgotten. I lack any talent for making videos, but the contest has me thinking: Why is free software important to me? And why isn't it important to most people around me? The two questions are more closely connected than you might at first think.

Opponents of cloud computing cite data loss and vendor lock-in as a primary dangers of relying on such services. They're valid points, but since cloud computing isn't going away anytime soon, it's time to start finding solutions instead of simply sounding alarm bells. Today's guest editor, Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange, shares his thoughts about what it would take to make cloud services more reliable and trustworthy.

Samsung announced an "open" mobile platform called "Bada," which appears to be a programmable UI layer that runs on its proprietary feature phones, although one report defines Bada as Samsung's own Linux OS. Meanwhile, a Korean analyst report claims that Samsung plans to discard Symbian and downshift Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

In a talk at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Grenoble, France, a speaker took a critical look at the design and development model of Google's first step toward Linux.

The European Commission has launched an in-depth investigation of Oracle's planned takeover of Sun Microsystems. According to a press release, preliminary investigations have indicated that there may be competition problems in the database market. The investigation now has to decide by 19th January 2010 whether the merger will seriously hamper effective competition.

While I like the Linux desktop a lot, I don't pretend that it's that popular. That's why I found it fascinating that, despite everything Microsoft has been able to throw at it, desktop Linux still managed to claim 32% of the netbook market. And Microsoft has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at desktop Linux. For example, the Redmond giant has strong-armed vendors into not selling Linux-powered netbooks; lied about Linux sales; and all but gave XP Home away to keep vendors from including Linux instead . Despite all that, it seems, according to ABI Research, that desktop Linux has actually grown in the last year.

Martin Michlmayr has published several guides about running Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 ("Slug") router/NAS device, including one on migrating a Debian NSLU2 installation to Marvell's SheevaPlug NAS design. With the latest guides on troubleshooting, booting, modifying, and cloning Debian on the NSLU2, the documentation is essentially complete, says Michlmayr.

SourceForge Inc. has announced that it has officially changed its name to Geeknet. According to Scott L. Kauffman, President and CEO "Renaming the company Geeknet is the latest step in our rapid transformation.” The company believes that the new name will be a more accurate articulation of its business. Kauffman said "With Geeknet as our calling card on Madison Avenue, we are now able to clearly define the audience we serve and more effectively capture the business opportunity that we are addressing,”.

Like other Open Source activities, the 'rising tide' is lifting SCALE: SCALE 8x will add developer and beginner tracks along with the regular general interest conference tracks. The Try-It lab, which was a huge success at SCALE 7X, will also return. If you'd like to speak at SCALE 8x, see http://socallinuxexpo.org to submit your presentation proposal. The deadline for proposal submissions is 15 Dec, 2009, but if you are considering speaking, we recommend submitting your proposal very soon. There are limited speaker slots, and if last year is any indication, the Expo will have a tidal wave of proposals to wade through. Don't be left out!

It was on the 9th of November, 2004, that the Mozilla Foundation released version 1.0 of its Firefox web browser. The community celebrated the new browser with parties all over the world. Before the launch, the Foundation had even collected donations via the promotional American spreadfirefox.com site and its German Firefox kommt counterpart to pay for full-page spreads in the New York Times and the German FAZ newspapers, informing the general public about the new browser.

Google Chrome OS may still be a year away from making its debut, but TechRadar readers are champing at the bit to get hold of the Windows competitor. More than 2300 votes were cast in a poll to gauge interest in Google's operating system, following the arrival of the excellent Windows 7. And, although 35 per cent were happy with the latest Windows, 16 per cent contented with OS X and 10 per cent confessed to being wary of Chrome OS – a big percentage admitted to being intrigued.

The initiator of the free K Desktop Environment (KDE), Matthias Ettrich, was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit in Berlin on Friday. The highest German state decoration for the common good was awarded to him for his contributions in the field of open source software.

One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.

LG has launched its first Android phone, a QWERTY slider called the "Eve," on Rogers Wireless' network in Canada. In other Android news, LG is prepping a second Android phone, this time with a Snapdragon processor, for Korea, and Philips has launched a V808 oPhone handset in China.

It's been a week since Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmix Koala, was unleashed on the world. I wanted to post a general review after having used the special K since it went RC in late September and early October. In general, I've been very impressed, especially in comparison to another, recently released, operating system. This mini review will focus on using Ubuntu as a desktop system. When I drop it onto my Linode server, I'll provide commentary on server usage as well.

There may be no single organization which runs more Linux systems than Google. But the kernel development community knows little about how Google uses Linux and what sort of problems are encountered there. Google's Mike Waychison traveled to Tokyo to help shed some light on this situation; the result was an interesting view on what it takes to run Linux in this extremely demanding setting.

After ABI Research projected that Linux will take a 32 percent share of netbooks in 2009 and wo;; overtake Windows in 2013, we spoke with ABI analyst Jeffrey Orr on the findings. Orr notes the rise of international consumers and ARM Cortex-A8-based netbooks, and discusses Ubuntu, Moblin, Android, and Chrome OS.

JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.