Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux operating system, but it's where the dream of a usable, completely free desktop is closest to reality. If every Ubuntu developer were assembled at one place, here are five things we'd ask them to accomplish.

Microsoft has been making overtures to the open source community of late, but suspicion abounds, and it was only heightened by Redmond's legal challenge to TomTom earlier this year. In an effort to stockpile ammunition against Redmond if it should declare war on the FOSS movement, a Linux-friendly group of companies have bought 22 patents Microsoft recently sold to a patent trust.

With the Linux 2.6.32 kernel merge window opening up this month, open-source developers around the world have been busy working on their code that they wish to push into this next major kernel update. There is already 3D and KMS support coming to the R600/700 hardware from ATI with this next kernel release along with the KMS page-flipping ioctl and other graphics-related changes, but now Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman has written a lengthy message detailing the status of the different drivers in the staging tree for Linux 2.6.32.

Tonight we experienced a world premier - the XO-1.5 laptop from OLPC debuted at the OLPC Learning Club DC - and we broadcast it live via OLPC News on Twitter. This newest laptop from OLPC features the VIA C7-M a 1GHz variable speed processor, which SJ Klein of OLPC says will empower learning in several key ways..

Ipoque of Leipzig, Germany has published parts of its deep packet inspection technology under the LGPLv3 open source license. Called OpenDPI, the software library is based on Ipoque's commercial Protocol and Application Classification Engine (PACE), which the vendor says classifies internet traffic.

TomTom is launching OpenLR™ as royalty-free technology and open Industry Standard, and it invites the ITS Industry to join and adopt it. This step will facilitate new business opportunities in various areas of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) such as traffic information services, map content exchange and Cooperative Systems where precise and compact dynamic location information is needed. The map-agnostic feature of OpenLR™ enables reliable data exchange and cross-referencing using digital maps of different vendors and versions.

[A GPLv2 licensed standard from TomTom? Really? - Scott]

In this article I finish the process we started in the last episode. After all the preparation described in the first part of this article the build process itself is rather anticlimactic. Building from sources with the GNU autotools is this easy..

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield broke a story on Microsoft selling a group of patents to a third party. The end result of this story is good for Linux, even though it doesn’t placate fears of ongoing attacks by Microsoft. Open Invention Network, working with its members and the Linux Foundation, pulled off a coup, managing to acquire some of the very patents that seem to have been at the heart of recent Microsoft FUD campaigns against Linux. Break out your white hats: the good guys won.

Good old-fashioned cron and mail can easily be set up to send yourself email reminders for anything you want. Juliet Kemp shows how.

Videos, some keynote speeches and talks and PDFs of many of the presentations given at the Red Hat Summit 2009 and JBoss World Chicago 2009 conferences, held in parallel last week, are now available from the conference websites.

Earlier than previously announced, the OpenOffice Project has released information regarding the newest security updates, spurred on due to gaps in security.

As the launch of Windows 7 approaches, Microsoft is distributing literature to American retailers claiming that Linux works with few peripherals or online services, offers limited software capability, affords no authorized support, does not work with games "your customers want," and cannot use video chat on any of the major IM networks. "What most customers want" is Windows, the literature says, not Linux. According to a sales employee working in an Office Depot store on the east coast of the United States, a Microsoft representative recently provided him and his fellow sales staff with booklets that attempt to put Linux in an unfavorable light. And the booklets mirror information from a Microsoft online training course given to Best Buy employees, just brought to light by the Advanced Linux Technology blog.

Creating a sandbox—a safe area in which to run untrusted code—is a difficult problem. The successful sandbox implementations tend to come with completely new languages (e.g. Java) that are specifically designed to support that functionality. Trying to sandbox C code is a much more difficult task, but one that the Google Chrome web browser team has been working on.

Kernel developer Ingo Molnar has done a benchmark test to compare his Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) with the recently released BFS from Australian Con Kolivas.

According to the roadmap for the open source browser, the Mozilla developers plan to launch the next major Firefox release in October or November 2010. Around the same time, Mozilla plans to release version 2 of its Fennec smartphone browser. The organisation plans two further updates to the current three-series before the new release, Firefox 3.6 within the next few months, and version 3.7 in the first half of 2010.

Companies with inferior products are often tempted to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Paul Rubens wonder if Novell's FUD campaign a sign of a company that is afraid of the truth.

This morning Intel has introduced their new mainstream desktop chipset, the Intel P55, and has brought forth the Core i5 processor family along with new Core i7 processors for use with this new chipset and socket. Intel sent us out a review kit of this new hardware so we are already able to comment on its Linux compatibility. In this article we are talking specifically about the Intel P55 and its Linux compatibility with regard to the Intel DP55KG motherboard while in the next article we have Ubuntu Linux benchmarks using an Intel Core i5 750 and Core i7 870.

Skype's version 1.2 for the iPhone, released Friday, has been deemed "no good" by a number of users, with reports online that it crashes immediately after dialing.

According to a report published online by the Wall Street Journal, the Open Invention Network (OIN) has announced plans to purchase 22 former Microsoft patents. The consortium consists of numerous major software and hardware firms, including a number of Linux distributors; it is currently systematically setting up a portfolio of patents to protect the Linux ecosystem from charges of patent violation. In return for the promise not to use their own patents against Linux, OIN members can license the patents for free.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that VIA Technologies, Inc. has become its newest member. VIA offers highly integrated low power x86 processor platforms that are being adopted in a wide range of netbooks, notebooks, desktops, servers, and embedded devices from leading brand names such as Dell, HP and Lenovo.