Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For those of you who use GIMP, you know it is a really great alternative to Photoshop. Like any program, free or not, there is always room for improvement. Plugins are a an easy way to add functionality. GIMP has two different types of plugins, Script-fu and Python-fu. Right out of the box, you can add Script-fu plugins. To add Python based plugins, there is some additional steps and add-ons needed.

Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom. Flashrom allows users to perform BIOS, EFI, coreboot, or firmware flashes without having to undergo sophisticated boot procedures that require bootable floppy disks/CD-ROMs or even opening the computer's casing. We first featured flashrom here in an article entitled BIOS flashing comes to Linux at last. If you have no idea what flashrom is, that article can help you grasp the basics.

Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market. Luc has worked on support for flashing the BIOS on ATI graphics cards, native VGA text mode support, and other work to help the CoreBoot project. Today at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc Verhaegen is about to give a talk on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS.

The openSUSE Project has reached its first milestone for the upcoming 11.3 release, due in July. Milestone 1 is the first of seven planned between now and late May. The development team said its primary goal is to test build interactions between newly-added features. The first milestone features version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, development version 2.29.5 of GNOME, and the first release candidate of KDE 4.4 desktop environment. The release also includes an openSUSE debut of a new desktop option: LXDE, short for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LXDE is designed for computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks because it uses less CPU and RAM than other environments, the developers said.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle. Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum."

Canonical announced a few hours ago the immediate availability of a new Linux kernel security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The update also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and it patches 10 important security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts. Kuhn, who plays a major role in the SFLC's GPL enforcement efforts, contends that Black Duck's patent is far from novel and describes techniques that he has been using for licensing compliance analysis for over a decade.

Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing "Open NFC," an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014.

Building on the success of its first contest, the Linux Foundation has announced the launch of a second "We're Linux" video contest. The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux says that videos entered into the contest should demonstrate what Linux means to its users and should inspire others to try it. Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs, said that “We have been inspired by the creativity and level of participation we have seen for the ‘We’re Linux’ video contest and want to provide a forum again this year for people to share".

Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse is a free set of certified plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform where Eclipse is the preferred Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This release delivers an extension to Eclipse with unique Oracle WebLogic Server features, WYSIWYG Web page editing, SCA support, JAX-WS Web Service validation, an integrated tag and data palette, and smart editors. Also new with this release is Oracle's AppXRay feature, a design time dependency analysis and visualization tool that makes it easy for Java developers to work in a team setting, greatly reduce runtime debugging, and improve code quality.

Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday. After Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer in 2008, it said it would continue offering and updating standalone versions of the company's ESP platform for Linux and Unix, wrote Bjorn Olstad, CTO for Fast and a Microsoft distinguished engineer. "Over the last two years, we’ve done just that." But the products being released this year will be the last containing a search core compatible with Linux and Unix, he said.

After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer. I am excited, humbled, and, candidly, torn by this opportunity. In late 2005, John Powell and John Newton, the co-founders of Alfresco, took a chance on me, an open-source evangelist at Novell. I was the 13th employee and the company's first U.S. employee. My prior history had been with embedded Linux (Lineo) and semiconductors/silicon (Mitsui), but they gave me the chance to grow as general manager of the Americas and later as vice president of business development.

The 2010 edition of linux.conf.au was held on January 18 to 22 in Wellington, New Zealand. A number of the talks from this event have been covered elsewhere on LWN, with more to come; this article will talk about several other sessions and your editor's impressions of the conference as a whole. In brief: it was a highly successful event which easily lived up to the high standards set by LCA.

Nokia, the new steward of Qt, and Linux kernel contributor, says it has has completed the largest transition from proprietary code to open source in software history.

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project. Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

When we last reviewed Linux Mint, it received high marks for usability and productivity. Does the new release also rate highly? Paul Ferrill takes it for a test drive to find out.

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 second part of this two-part interview he adds to his thoughts on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and more.

Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.

Every few weeks, I like to browse the OpenOffice.org Extensions site to see what is available, and what people are using. New extensions that are both useful and well-designed seem to be getting few and far between. However, if you search patiently, you can still find extensions worth trying. Below, in no particular order, are the extensions that I have explored in the past couple of months. None radically transform the office suite, and some work better than others, but all of them show some aspect of what can be done or needs to be done to make OpenOffice.org more efficient or convenient.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a "System Information API" specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object's SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods. set can only be applied to some screen properties such as brightness and orientation, while all other hardware properties are marked as readonly. watch is used for monitoring readings, for example those of a heat sensor.