Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user's permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

Only days after Google took action against the CyanogenMod project for offering customised Android firmware (which copied portions of proprietary code), a group of Android developers formed the Open Android Alliance. According to the project's site, the group is "pro-Android" rather than "anti-Google". Their aim is to replace all of the closed source, proprietary applications included in OEM Android installations with open source alternatives that can be freely distributed.

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue.

With regular expressions you can perform some mighty fine-tuned search-and-replace in text files, such as changing all the US-style date references (09/22/09) to UK style,(22.09.2009). Juliet Kemp open her vast tips and tricks toolbag to share a number of useful and excellent examples.

Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining. Tornado is designed to suit specific types of web applications and is reportedly very fast, while Grand Central Dispatch may cause some developers to re-think task-parallelism.

It's been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though -- on the same day as NVIDIA's OpenCL driver launch for Windows -- they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

Three days after Google told an independent developer to stop bundling proprietary applications with his alternative Android operating system, fans of the popular package have shot back with plans to work around the move. The developer, who goes by the name Cyanogen, said here that he plans to overhaul his CyanogenMod platform so it no longer includes GTalk, YouTube, and other Google-supplied apps that are widely regarded as essential to any Android OS. But in a clever work-around, he will include software with his bare-bones offering that will allow users to install those closed-source programs without molesting Google's copyrights.

Hewlett-Packard is rolling out Update 5 for the HP-UX Unix operating system that runs its Itanium and PA-RISC lines of Integrity and HP 9000 servers, keeping to its pattern of two updates per year for its flagship operating system. As has been the case with the prior HP-UX updates, the changes are important to existing HP-UX shops, but they're probably not going to cause a stampede of buyers for HP-UX systems. It's no different with the updates to IBM's AIX or Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unixes do.

With the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.32, last night, Linus Torvalds completed the main development phase of the next version of Linux on the main development branch. As the kernel hackers already integrate most of a new kernel version's major changes into the source code management system during this phase, called the merge window, 2.6.32-rc1 is already a good indicator of the most important new features due for release with Linux 2.6.32 in early December.

The code analysis specialists Coverity attest to a quality improvement in the open source software they tested. Coverity investigates code from diverse open source applications in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The agency sees the investigation and the resulting improvement in quality as important because more and more state agencies are relying on free and open software.

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2009

The long-running data storage technology could be headed for trouble. We look at the problem -- and potential solutions.

I'm a big fan of Matt Asay's writings about free software. He combines a keen analytical intelligence with that rare thing: long-term hands-on experience in the world of open source business. But even though I generally look forward to reading his posts, I have been rather dreading the appearance of one that I knew, one day, he would write...because it would be wrong. And now he has written it, with the self-explanatory headline: “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

Last week Eric Geier introduced us to the open source Web OS project, eyeOS. We installed eyeOS, and today we'll continue by configuring our network and setting up the office file support. Plus we'll learn how to get our files onto eyeOS, create users, and configure other system settings.

As computing and the internet become ever more a part of everyday life, reliable and strong security becomes increasingly necessary. Security is critical in the areas of business communications, online banking and online shopping, but until quite recently security has not been an integral part of the core computing hardware. Hardware manufacturers have been taking steps to rectify that by introducing the idea of trusted computing based on devices such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Many of these ideas, and the methods to implement them, have come from what the open source community see as the proprietary commercial establishment and so are greeted with some suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to continue to flourish, open source will have to somehow accommodate them and provide support for secure functions such as TPM.

Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year. There has not been a new official release of Gentoo since July of 2008, albeit they are one of the distributions to use a rolling release approach, but in honor of their tenth birthday they have begun work on a new LiveDVD. Gentoo has been producing timed snapshots of their installation media, but this will be the first Gentoo release in 2009.

The public sector is ignoring government guidelines on procuring open-source software, according to open source database company Ingres. At a roundtable event on Thursday, Ingres worldwide operations chief Steve Shine praised the guidelines--issued in February--but said they were being ignored because there is nobody in place to enforce them.

Intel hosted their developer conference this week in San Francisco (Intel Developer Forum) where several new announcements were made, with Linux being involved in some of these announcements. It was revealed that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix on one of their Atom-powered netbooks, Moblin 2.0 was released, and there was a snapshot of Moblin 2.1 was released. This week we also showed off some new Lynnfield Linux benchmarks that Intel had sent over to us using the Phoronix Test Suite.