Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Read an excerpt from the 4th Edition of the book Python Essential Reference by David Beazley. Chapter 6: Substantial programs are broken up into functions for better modularity and ease of maintenance. Python makes it easy to define functions but also incorporates a surprising number of features from functional programming languages. This chapter describes the basic mechanisms associated with Python functions including scoping rules, closures, decorators, generators, and coroutines.

The introduction of KDE 4.0 was met with such an avalanche of outrage and criticism that Gnome developers can be forgiven for being a bit gun-shy. Gnome 2.28 appears to be almost a stealth introduction of Gnome 3.0; will anyone notice?

Just days after Gentoo resurrected itself with a new LiveDVD release in celebration of its 10th birthday, the developers behind the Yoper Linux distribution have come around with a new development release of its own. Yoper dates back to 2003, and one of their goals is to be the fastest out-of-the-box Linux distribution, but there has not been a new stable release in 28 months and it is not on a rolling release cycle like Gentoo or Arch. The new release for this distribution is Yoper 2009 Beta 1 "Dresden" and ships with all of the latest Linux packages and offers a new installer and various other improvements. Yoper also remains one of the few distributions shipping with a Zen-powered kernel, and on top of that, they even offer a kernel with the BFS scheduler.

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

The Jetty developers have released version 7 of their popular Java Servlet container. The source code for the new release is available from the Eclipse Foundation under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL); Jetty 6 continues to be available from the Codehaus project under the Apache 2 license. Jetty 7 is the first major release of Jetty from the Eclipse Foundation since the project moved under the Eclipse umbrella.

Iomega announced a Linux-based, dual-drive networked attached storage (NAS) appliance for the home-business and consumer market. The Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and offers RAID 1 support, user-replaceable storage, a QuikTransfer copy button, 5-18 Watt power consumption, and a DLNA/UPnP media server, says Iomega.

We’re seeking the greatest, most innovative minds in our community for mind-altering, life-changing discussions. We are reaching out to key community members and requesting their suggestions regarding potential speakers for our events. For our first event, our theme is innovation in health care and collaboration. If you have in mind a person in your network that is truly a world-class innovator in their field, please contact us here.

Customizing and building your own Linux kernel, rather than sticking with the kitchen-sink distribution kernels, means you can add new experimental drivers, get rid of drivers you don't need, fix mistakes created by your chosen distro, and make a lean, mean and fast kernel. Akkana Peck continues her series on kernel building.

The Italy-based Sabayon community released a stable version 5.0 of its Gentoo-based Linux distribution. Sabayon Linux 5.0 is available in separate editions with either the GNOME 2.26 or KDE 4.3.1 desktops, and moves up to Linux kernel 2.6.31, XBMC 9.04.1, and the Ext4 filesystem.

In the last several years, governments — and particularly those in Europe — have been snapping up Open Source alternatives like little old ladies at Loehmann's. The push towards Open continued this week as the Dutch police ditched Windows for the rosy cap.

Red Hat and Microsoft have deepened their partnership even further in the virtualization realm under the concept of "interoperabiity." Cross-certification should lead to more satisfied customers.

We've been impressed with the speed increases that rooting and moving apps to SD cards can bring to sometimes sluggish Android phones. If you're not about to crack your phone's firmware, the AndroidGuys blog suggests a few optimization tips.

The availability of netbooks that ride on the maturity of cloud infrastructure is heralding the return of the thin client, says Jolicloud founder and CEO, Tariq Krim. Krim, who earlier founded personalized homepage service Netvibes, told ZDNet Asia the "thin client concept is "more feasible now than ever", and is targeting his new Jolicloud OS squarely at this niche.

Imad Sousou is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, which is behind the Moblin project aimed at providing optimized Linux technology for netbooks and mobile Internet devices. ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK caught up with Sousou at the Open Source In Mobile 09 event in Amsterdam last month, to discuss the nature of Moblin and the hardware on which it will run.

Ubuntu 9.10 had its beta release last week and the final release is coming in just three weeks, but this late in the release cycle, it has been decided to pull in the final Mesa 7.6 version. Pulling in this newer code that provides OpenGL acceleration on Linux provides numerous bug-fixes along with support for a greater number of OpenGL extensions on different hardware and other improvements.

The X Window System quietly hit its 25th anniversary back in June; it is, undoubtedly, one of the oldest and most successful free software projects in existence. Keith Packard has been working with X for most of that time; at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland he used his keynote address to look at the highlights (and lowlights) of those 25 years and some of the lessons that have been learned.

The recently announced Netgear RangeMax WNR3500L, dubbed an "Open Source Linux Router" by Netgear has been criticised for not being sufficiently open. Founder of gpl-violations.org, Harald Welte, points out in a blog posting that the router ships with binary-only kernel modules and that these modules only work with a Linux 2.4 kernel, such as the Linux 2.4.20 based firmware that Netgear ship with the device.

Christian Perrier (Bubulle) issued statistics in his blog that show which countries of the world have the largest per capita Debian developers. First place goes to Finland.

Linux 2.6.31.2 not only offers minor bug fixes, but also selected major changes. The X.org hackers have adapted their development strategy and, in the long term, plan to merge several drivers back into the X Server code.

Microsoft and Red Hat have now consummated vows to love and cherish each other's operating systems on their corresponding hypervisors. The interoperability pact was inked in February of this year, leading the companies to "synchronize testing" in counterpart validation programs over the months. Starting today, businesses can mix and mingle Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on visualized environments with joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat.