Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As we all know, OSCON provides a multitude of opportunities for those in the Open Source world to learn not just the ins and outs of what's new, but how to improve their projects on fronts ranging from code to documentation to community members. One such opportunity at this year's convention came in the form of a panel presentation on press relations, a subject that can be both touchy and treacherous where PR pros are scarce. As that's the business we're in, and our readership includes many in target audience, we thought it would be beneficial to pass on.

Over the weekend, I decided to see which of the major operating systems would be the easiest to update. The answer may surprise you.

Wikipedia wants to give users more confidence in the reliability of its information, so it has come up with a color-coding scheme that will assign an orange background to less-trustworthy information -- the darker, the more suspect -- and a white background to content that ranks high for accuracy. However, Wikipedia hasn't said much about how it will arrive at its rankings.

If you have any (non-tech support) questions about NVIDIA and Linux, ask away! Phoronix will be hosting a Q&A with NVIDIA regarding their Linux graphics driver. If you have any questions to ask, click on the "Comments & Discussion" button below and ask away in our forums. After a few days we will be narrowing down the list of questions before NVIDIA begins answering them.

In my post two weeks ago, I introduced you to KDE’s KIO slaves and gave you a brief overview of the services they offer. One of the KIO protocols is remote:/, which relies on KNetAttach to create virtual network folders. With it, you can create folders for the following services: 1. WebFolder (webdav) 2. FTP 3. Microsoft Windows network drive (using Samba) 4. Secure shell (ssh) Each one has its slightly unique features and requirements, and in this post, you will learn about each one.

According to a new report, the market for netbook computers grew 40 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2009, almost twice the rate of standard notebooks. Netbook shipments actually outstripped notebooks in Latin America and Greater China.

Apache Wink is a new framework for developing "RESTful web services". The project currently resides in the Apache Incubator, where newly introduced projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are matured and evaluated for promotion to full Apache projects, having entered the incubator in May. The code base for Wink was contributed by HP and IBM, who also intend to oversee the project in the future.

Anyone wanting to watch just a short video on YouTube probably won't need Minitube, for those that want more, it's a must-have app. Minitube is a classic Unix program for the playback of YouTube films. Enter a keyword and the program will retrieve all relative URLs from YouTube and play them one after the other. With a binary of just 440KByte, Minitube does without Flashplayer, is advertisement-free and relies fully on the Phonon framework for audio and video support.

The Slackware team released version 13 of its venerable Linux distribution, now supporting 64-bit computers. Slackware 13 provides "completely reworked" X packages, upgrades to KDE 4.2.4 and Xfce 4.6.1 desktops, a new .txz package format, and support for Ext4 and the GRUB bootloader, says the project.

In my last article I wrote about accessing a PostgreSQL database in C/C++. In this article, I'm going to discuss performing the same functions in C against an SQLite database. Unlike Postgresql and the supporting libraries, SQLite creates completely self-contained databases that aren't dependant upon a client-server architecture.

Wayan and I and others have wrangled over the last two years over what OLPC programs would cost, and whether countries can afford it.

Ruben Unteregger discloses how he created a Skype trojan under contract from the German government while working for a Swiss company. Linux users may not be exempt. He has now released the trojan source code under GPL.

Whether you call it Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SAAS), Cloud Computing, or some other trendy buzzword, it still means ceding control of your data and applications to someone else. Bruce Byfield examines some exciting possibilities in KDE4 for incorporating networked functions into the desktop in a different way, one that keeps control in the user's hands.

Tightening of the belt has seemingly paid off for Novell. The enterprise earned 38 million USD in the last quarter with Linux products. Novell’s turnover for the third quarter this year is lower than that of the third quarter last year, but the figures are still in the black. Novell closed out 2009’s third quarter with a profit of 17 million USD.

Many operating systems can already be booted over the net, especially so for the installation systems of the major Linux distributions, but the netboot.me web service offers a universal boot loader which presents them all in one menu. The boot loader can be installed on a USB stick, burned onto CD, or on a floppy disk. This allows users to start an always current selection of operating systems over the internet using one single boot medium.

OpenCL is present in NVIDIA's Linux driver as well as the just-released Mac OS X 10.6, but there is support for the Open Computing Language coming forward in the open-source world through the Gallium3D driver infrastructure.

Novell's Linux business is keeping the company buoyant in trying economic times, the company's third-quarter earnings indicate. On Thursday, the software maker published its third-quarter results, which revealed that revenue from its Linux platform products had increased 22 percent, year-on-year, to US$38 million. However, overall revenue for the same period declined sharply to US$216 million, from US$245 million.

Sometimes developers have a prickly relationship with their users. Users may have unrealistic, or overly demanding, requests that can be difficult to respond to. The most vocal of these users are often unwilling to take "no"—or even "not yet"—for an answer. Some KDE developers are currently struggling with that problem, and trying to find ways to smooth the dialog between users and developers.

LXer Feature: 31-Aug-2009

The name Ruben Unteregger may well become more newsworthy in the next few days. Unteregger has been working at the Swiss ERA IT Solutions company to develop the trojans MegaPanzer and MiniPanzer and has released the code under GPL.