Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Simple access to desktop computing: It's something that myself, among countless others, take for granted every single day. With proprietary operating systems, there are programs readily available for those who need accessibility assistance with their computers. But what is it like for someone who needs accessibility options on the Linux desktop? We often hear how the Linux desktop is ready for the masses, how ready is it for those with special accessibility needs?

The European Union held its meetings on Oracle's acquisition of Sun last week, and the decision should be forthcoming by January 19th. In the meantime, MySQL creator Monty Widenius is calling for a letter-writing campaign to "help save MySQL from Oracle's clutches. At the same time, Oracle has been moved to put up a list of commitments regarding MySQL should the company be successful in acquiring Sun.

Consolidation for everyone is IBM's stated reason for releasing a Linux version of its System z mainframe. The new Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) is a stand-alone system specifically designed for Linux environments. According to IBM, the financial savings can be up to 80 per cent. Furthermore, a "save-as-you-grow" pricing model is intended to facilitate investment decisions by allowing customers to gradually purchase resources at considerably lower prices than that of a complete system.

With Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 now out the door, developers are already turning their attention to the spring releases. KDE3 has definitively gone the way of the dodo as far as openSUSE and Mandriva are concerned. Google is taking its first steps in the operating system market with Chrome OS.

How much of the market dominance of Windows over Linux is due to people who either cannot or do not want to use pliers, who are afraid that any attempt to alter their machine is doomed to failure?

In a wide-ranging announcement, Novell has laid out plans to blur the boundary between on-premises and in-the-cloud computing. In a recent statement, Novell claims that their "approach to Intelligent Workload Management integrates identity and systems management capabilities into an application workload, thereby increasing the workload's security and portability across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Behind closed doors, over Thursday and Friday, the European Commission has been holding a hearing on the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The Wall Street Journal reports that several Oracle customers, including the Spanish bank BBVA, Vodafone UK, the National Health Service and the Oracle user group, spoke in support of the acquisition.

The SCALE Call for Papers has been extended to Dec. 24 to allow more time for submittals. Additionally, the Calls for Paper for both WIOS and OSSIE are now open as well. If you've been considering submitting a presentation proposal to SCALE, don't wait any longer - send it in today! SCALE 8X is February 19-21, 2010 at the Westin LAX Hotel in Los Angeles.

One of the stated goals of the staging tree is to bring widely-used drivers into the mainline kernel tree. This effort has been quite successful; the number of out-of-tree drivers has dropped considerably over the last year or so. There is one high-profile holdout, though: the Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) subsystem. LIRC is used to obtain input events from remote control devices and feed them through to applications; Linux-based digital video recorder systems are heavy LIRC users, but there are others as well. Back in October, Jarod Wilson posted a new version of LIRC for consideration. One month later, the kernel developers have started talking about it; what they lack in punctuality has been more than made up for in volume.

For those of you who like to keep their installations lean and swift, installing software can be a problem at times. There’s lots of useful software out there, but some can be really bloated and slow, while others are small themselves, but have large or many dependencies. This is especially true for Gnome-Do. When you install Gnome-Do, Evolution get installed along as a dependency. If you are using Ubuntu (or GNOME), where Evolution is already pre-installed, this is not an issue. However, if you are using other distro, like Linux Mint, or other desktop managers, then you won’t want to install the bulky Evolution just to use Gnome-Do.

Microsoft had released a tool in mid-November that generated bootable USB media or a DVD from the download version of Windows 7 and that conflicted with the GNU Public License. They now followed up by putting the tool under GPLv2.

Not that this should surprise anyone familiar with the open source community, but a new study shows bugs in open source software get fixed more quickly than issues in commercial software. Technology news Web site V3.co.uk got an early look at the results of research conducted by application security firm Veracode, which indicate "security issues in open-source software typically take less than a week to remediate and report on, or three man hours of effort."

Timesys announced that its LinuxLink embedded Linux development framework supports NetLogic Microsystems’ MIPS32-based Alchemy Au1250 and Alchemy Au1300 system-on-chips (SoCs). The LinuxLink framework provides access to hundreds of open source Linux middleware packages, as well as automated development tools for processors used in mobile consumer electronics, says the company.

Kernel versions 2.6.27.40, 2.6.27.41 and 2.6.31.7 offer minor improvements and correct several bugs – including one security hole. Torvalds has already incorporated more than 5,000 changes for Linux 2.6.33. Its merge window will probably be open for just over another week. Various developers are working on significant improvements to the open source Radeon graphics drivers.

Today I’d like to talk about my experiences with Fedora 12 over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been running it as my main desktop and really getting a feel for how it ticks. Fedora is the community release from corporate Linux giants Red Hat. I’ve used it on and off since its inception back in the early 2000’s, it’s fair to say there have been big highs and lows in that time. I considered Fedora 11 a definite high though, and I was interested to see how this release would stack up.

It's now fair to say that the Linux desktop is at the forefront of visual effects, a cornucopia of eye-candy overflowing on to your desktop. And with a few tweaks, it can look even better. With both Windows and OS X continually upping the ante in what the average desktop user expects from their desktop experience, it's vitally important that Linux stays ahead of the game - even if that only means turning on a genie effect for minimized applications when your friends come over, or using a more usable version of virtual desktops when you lend your machine to someone.

US software vendor Oracle has accused the European Commission of partiality in its assessment of the planned takeover of Sun Microsystems. At a private hearing in Brussels yesterday, Oracle accused the Commission of having focused on critical third party opinions on the transaction. The Financial Times reports that many if not most customers who have submitted comments do not share the European Commission's concerns. Oracle accuses the Commission of simply ignoring the views expressed by major customers, including General Electric, Fujitsu and Siemens.

"The Book of Inkscape" by Dmitry Kirsanov (No Starch Press) calls itself "the definitive guide to the free graphics editor." Inkscape is a professional-level vector graphics editor, and if you don't know what that means this book tells you right away, in nice understandable real-people English.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem. In this article, your editor looks at the quality of the Fedora 12 release and ponders what Fedora 13 may bring.

Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.