Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

e reported earlier on a blog post entitled "Ubuntu Report Card (2009)" where the author detailed how they felt the Ubuntu experience had improved over the years. In a follow-up series of articles looking at the future, Tanner Helland has written 10 different broadly-scoped feature requests that [he] 'and many others would like to see by the time Ubuntu 10.10 rolls around'.

Akonadi is the magic word for data storage for the KDE 4 desktop. Unfortunately none of the KDE 4 apps really use it. The KDE address book, KAddressBook, should become the first to do so.

The Amarok team is excited to announce the release of Amarok 2.2. In three and a half months, Amarok has made a huge leap forward, gaining many new features and a lot of old features from 1.4 have returned. Amarok 2.2 brings back support for sorting and shuffling the playlist, for an external MySQL database as well as for playing audio CDs to name a few. It brings a new video and photo applet to show media related to the current song. The layout can be modified to suit your needs thanks to dock widgets and the sidebar has been changed to be easier to navigate with bread crumbs.

Mark Shuttleworth delivered the closing keynote at this year's inaugural Linuxcon. He delivered an enticing vision of the future of Linux and Free software, with a catch-- it means breaking drastically from the old ways. Carla Schroder reports on the highlights of his keynote, and readers can view the keynote as well.

The OpenSUSE Project has released the last milestone of OpenSUSE Linux before an anticipated final release in November. OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8 (M8) features numerous bug fixes, Linux kernel 2.6.31, improved partioning, social networking clients, and new versions of packages including GNOME 2.28, says the project.

Like other word processes, OpenOffice.org Writer makes creating tables of contents (ToCs) quick and easy. Unfortunately, it also works with unaesthetic defaults and allows you to make choices that complicate your work flow rather than improving it.

OpenStreetMap Founder Steve Coast has announced that the main OpenStreetMap (OSM) website is now available in 26 additional languages, bringing the current language choice to 51 in total. OpenStreetMap is an open source project run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. While the project was started in August of 2004 it has become increasingly popular in recent months.

It’s simply stunning some of the terrific instrument and effect plug-ins available that are now free and open source – yes, free as in freedom, not just freeware. I had commented in the past something along the lines of, “boy, wouldn’t it be great if this now meant, say, a Linux port?” and then went on the business of my daily life, which tends not to include re-compiling plug-ins. But now, the folks of JUCETICE have been busy doing just that, serving up delicious instrument and effect goodness, running native on Linux. Translation: fire up that netbook and make some music.

The administration of the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk is installing OpenOffice on some 1700 school desktop PCs, the administration announced yesterday. The first school where OpenOffice will be installed is the Lindegård school. At the school earlier today mayor Rolf Aagaard-Svendsen showed the first desktop running the open source suite of productivity tools.

As with our Ubuntu wishlist, we can't actually tell everyone contributing to Google's open source Android mobile phone software what to do. All we can do is suggest five things that would make its smartphones even smarter.

Among the countless announcements in the Intel Developer Forum regarding Moblin was a joint press release from Intel and Microsoft. In it is announced that Microsoft wants to port Silverlight to Moblin.

On the Noisebridge hacker mailing list, security specialist Jacob Appelbaum has published an SSL certificate and pertinent private key that together allow web servers to avoid triggering an alert in vulnerable browsers - irrespective of the domain for which the certificate is submitted. Phishers, for example, could use the certificate to disguise their servers as legitimate banking servers – which would only be detectable by subjecting the certificate to closer scrutiny.

Last week we talked about a new X.Org release process proposal for improving the consistency and quality of X Server releases through taking a number of relatively simple steps. Well, this week from XDS2009, a revised proposal has been agreed upon now making it policy for X Server 1.8 / X.Org 7.6 and later.

When you say "log-structured file system," most storage developers will immediately think of Ousterhout and Rosenblum's classic paper, The Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System - and the nearly two decades of subsequent work attempting to solve the nasty segment cleaner problem (see below) that came with it. Linux developers might think of JFFS2, NILFS, or LogFS, three of several modern log-structured file systems specialized for use with solid state devices (SSDs). Few people, however, will think of SSD firmware. The flash translation layer in a modern, full-featured SSD resembles a log-structured file system in several important ways. Extrapolating from log-structured file systems research lets us predict how to get the best performance out of an SSD. In particular, full support for the TRIM command, at both the SSD and file system levels, will be key for sustaining long-term peak performance for most SSDs.

There are a plethora of opportunities for geeks to meet and greet one another throughout the year: linux.conf.au, Linux Congress, OSCON, Linux Plumber's Conference, LinuxCon, the list goes on. There is one, however, where the focus is purely on the customer, so-to-speak — the end user. The conference in question, aptly named the End User Summit, is quickly drawing near, and the Linux Foundation is wondering who wants to be there.

Your Linux computer may have hundreds of applications installed. How can any system menu be organized sanely? How can anyone find anything? Bruce Byfield examines the different approaches taken by the Gnome and KDE teams to deal with this.

A group from the ETH technical institute in Zurich is working together with software giant Microsoft on a new kind of operating system called Barrelfish. The first results are now available under an open source license.

Hot on the heels of Android 1.6 (code name Donut), the Android development team has now released version 1.6 rel 1 of the Android NDK (Native Development Kit). The NDK is a toolkit comparable with the standard Android Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows Android developers to write parts of their applications in native code languages such as C and C++.

Microsoft has received support from an unexpected quarter in the dispute over Chrome Frame, an extension which embeds Google's Chrome browser in Internet Explorer. Mike Shaver, Vice President Engineering for Mozilla Corporation, gives his views in a blog posting in which he criticises the plug-in.

Plymouth, the nifty boot splash program developed by Red Hat to replace RHGB and leverages kernel-based mode-setting to provide a flicker-free experience, is in the process of picking up more features. Committed to the Plymouth repository is now a DRM plug-in.