Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mainstream Linux distro developers have to make decisions that affect thousands of potential users. Should they include or remove a particular package? Should they apply a patch that may break compatibility with older machines? These matters are discussed fiercely in forums where trolls growl, flames burn and project leaders defend their decisions against an onslaught of dissident. But as an individual you have none of these issues. You can install and remove packages as and when you want to, and you can choose whether to install free or non-free software on your system. Why should you have to live with community decisions when you can make Linux work your way?

LXer Feature: 30-Nov-2009

A team of Dell engineers has released a very unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS for use on the PC manufacturer's Mini 10v netbooks. Dell isn't on the official list of Chrome OS hardware partners. And the company's founder and CEO believes his netbooks go sour after 36 hours. But you now have ready access to an early open source incarnation of Google's browser-happy "operating system" that's been tweaked specifically for those 36-hour machines.

One of OpenOffice.org's greatest strengths is its emphasis on styles. Some users balk at styles, claiming they are restrictive, but no other feature repays a little organization with so much ease of use and saving of time. Yet even those who are used to styles in Writer tend to overlook the styles used in other applications. That is especially true of graphic styles. read more

And now, as promised and thanks to your donations, we have the 158 exhibits, attached to Novell's response [PDF] to Microsoft's cross motion for summary judgment in the WordPerfect antitrust litigation. This is the other side of that story.

GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called "Klassrooms". For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of "students" towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

Kristian Høgsberg on the 6th of November had wrote a message on the DRI development list regarding the libdrm repository. With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Well, three weeks later with dozens of replies, this change is continuing to cause debate.

Google unveiled an experimental open source project in early November aimed at reducing web site load times. SPDY, as it is called, is a modification to HTTP designed to target specific, real-world latency issues without altering GET, POST, or any other request semantics, and without requiring changes to page content or network infrastructure. It does this by implementing request prioritization, stream multiplexing, and header compression. Results from tests on a SPDY-enabled Chrome and a SPDY web server show a reduction in load times of up to 60%.

The 4.0 release of the KDE software compilation marked a major milestone for the KDE community. While the underlying development platform has seen a modernization to better work with increased demand of applications, the community also saw a shift in its development methods. Interaction design has become much more important, and hence the need to collect feedback from the user in a structured manner. Ultimately, this leads to more understandable user interfaces and simpler handling of the underlying complexity of modern computers and portable devices. Nuno Pinheiro, a well-known artist and icon designer in the KDE community and engineering psychologist Björn Balazs from the Open Source Usability Labs and director for analysis, design and testing at Apliki decided they wanted to help with this.

During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. As a participant who attended the session in person, I want to shed some light on how and why the decision was made.

Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.6 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that's only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. The latest release includes several bug fixes, changes and updates.

Drop your bags, grab a drink, and grab the XP CD—it's time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives' computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you're cursing all the auto-starting cr@pware. For this guide, we're going to do a bit of assuming. We're assuming the relative with the busted computer is running a Windows system, and has an internet connection that works when the computer does. We're assuming all the physical pieces of the computer work—hard drive, memory, disc drives, and anything else that's crucial. We'll also assume the computer's in one of two states: Failing to boot and needing an OS re-installation, laden with unnecessary system tray/startup applications and/or spy/mal/ad-ware, or just needing a little optimization.

Ever since the Ubuntu One cloud service played an important role in Ubuntu 10.04, a new prototype of a KDE client has become available. A port to Fedora is also in the works.

If you just can't get away from email over the holidays, you can at least help test the release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. The Mozilla folks released Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on Tuesday with more than 100 changes in the release. It's been a long time in coming, the first release in the 2.0 series was back in 2007. But Thunderbird 3.0 looks like it might be worth the wait when the final is released.

Wind River and Kontron announced a global, multi-year agreement under which the embedded system manufacturer will distribute Wind River's VxWorks and Wind River Linux distributions. The agreement is expected to extend software and service offerings across a range of industries, says Wind River.

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press. I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.) Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle has become an ongoing saga, one that is reportedly seeing Sun hemorrhage cash at an alarming rate. The company's troubles have now found their way to the hallowed halls of Congress, where a majority of the U.S. Senate has entered the fray.

The KDE community has modified its product branding and expanded its focus beyond the KDE Linux desktop to support a wider range of open source projects, says eWEEK.. Meanwhile, the community has released Version 2.1 of KDE's KOffice suite, featuring improved OpenDocument support and KWord enhancements.

In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?