Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Canonical, and the Ubuntu developers, have announced the availability of the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The first development milestone is the first of three planned alpha releases.

You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the "world's smallest fully-functional commercial desktop." In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile. Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.

Sugar Labs has revised the LiveUSB version of its education-focused "Sugar" Linux distribution. "Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry" offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined activities updating, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash, and activities designed for reading electronic books (ebooks), says the non-profit organization.

Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence. "Our goal is to have a release candidate next week," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile. "If things go smoothly, we'll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks," with the debut planned for this year, he added.

I can say that Linux on netbook is gaining momentum right now contrary to what others believe. Just take a look at the growing number of Linux distributions that are optimized for netbooks so that you will know what I mean. For those of you who are interested, I've compiled a list of well-known, netbook-oriented Linux distributions.

Connector integrates development activities performed in Eclipse IDE with project management in Mingle 3.0

IBM has expanded its server lineup with a new mainframe system designed just for Linux that may be aimed, in particular, at higher-end x86 systems. The new system uses IBM's specialty Linux processor and runs either Novell SUSE or Red Hat systems. It does not use the mainframe operating system z/OS but includes mainframe management software as well as IBM's z/Virtual Machine system. Together, they constitute the company's latest "solutions edition," or what IBM says are lower-cost, integrated stacks for the mainframe.

Richard Stallman's free software organization seeks to assemble a loose and open group of supporters on a voluntary basis to distribute information on the Web and promote free software.

A downloadable beta of a fundamentally re-jigged version of open source media centre Boxee has recently been made available to a closed circle of users. As well as sprucing up the user interface with a tidier home view, the media library has been revised and now also lists internet, in addition to local, content. Multi-episode TV series, as offered by US service Hulu, for example, can now be sorted by series and episode.

D-Link is readying a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) based on the open source Boxee home entertainment stack. The singularly styled "Boxee Box DM-380" incorporates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI out, as well as analog and digital audio outputs, says the company.

Mozilla Messaging has announced the official release of Thunderbird 3. Ars takes a hands-on look at the improvements in the new version—including tabbed messaging and enhanced search—and finds a lot to be excited about.

Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. 2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of many of the tools and underlying infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. There were also lawsuits over software patents, arguments over licensing, and various security flaws found and fixed. Distributions were packaged up and released, more phones and other devices with Linux and free software were sold, and so forth. All part of the march to "world domination". We look forward to 2010—and beyond.

I've been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed. Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn't have all the GNU extensions.

Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain's resource centre on open source and open standards.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. It is heavily utilized in many applications, including animation, automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many others. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics (both hardware and software), and discrete differential geometry.

In the last decade, I've done plenty of formal research into corporate adoption of open source. For example, I designed a survey and wrote up the results of one research study about business open source use. So I can say authoritatively: At least as of that 2008 research, the major business executive barriers to FOSS adoption are product support, the awareness of available solutions (that is, vendors come calling with a sales pitch, but the CIO might not know an open source option is available), and lack of support by management (i.e. "the boss won't let us"). I've also written the Evans Data open source report for several years, so I know that developers' FOSS perceptions of what's important are very different than the murmurings on the deep-plush-carpeted executive floor.

A project that could bring an unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS to 64 bit computers has launched. Using the Chromium OS code that has been open sourced by Google, the ChromiumOS64 project allows people who like a little more RAM to consider the new operating system/browser hybrid concept from Google.