Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Some people are already convinced that Google will fail with its Chrome operating system. Others think that Chrome can't possibly be a threat to Windows. Both groups are so, so wrong. First, for those who think that Chrome is simply a failure from the word "go", their reasoning is pathetically flawed. They argue that Chrome will fail because it's based on Linux. What century are these people from?

A chief information officer for engineering giant General Electric (GE) has said that open source software is only suited for internal “playground” applications and that businesses that use it for mission critical infrastructure are taking a huge risk. Responding to a question from eWEEK Europe UK on the first day of the Central and Eastern European IT Leaders Summit & Expo, in Budapest, Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE's Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, said non-proprietary code presents a significant risk to companies.

The developers of digiKam and the Kipi project came together in Essen, Germany on November 13-15 for the second coding sprint for KDE photography applications. With digiKam preparing for the 1.0 release shortly before Christmas, plans were discussed and work began already in feature branches for the following release. A lot of work was put into polishing Windows support, with collaborative testing and bug fixing. The developers of Kamoso took the opportunity to bring Kipi support to their application. A lot of discussion was centered around a future architecture for Kipi plugins for syncing with web services and how Akonadi could help in this context.

The Linux memory management code does its best to ensure that memory will always be available when some part of the system needs it. That effort notwithstanding, it is still possible for a system to reach a point where no memory is available. At that point, things can grind to a painful halt, with the only possible solution (other than rebooting the system) being to kill off processes until a sufficient amount of memory is freed up. That grim task falls to the out-of-memory (OOM) killer. Anybody who has ever had the OOM killer unleashed on a system knows that it does not always pick the best processes to kill, so it is not surprising that making the OOM killer smarter is a recurring theme in Linux virtual memory development.

Development in PHP is always a tricky road to follow, with many elements outside of your control. (Server, browser, operating systems). In this article we'll discuss the two most important things we should try to remember when developing in PHP.

Back in July, Google made BIG waves in the tech industry by announcing the development of a Google operating system based on Linux. For years there’s been speculation about if/when Google would do this, and when the announcement hit, there was no shortage of people throwing in their two cents on how this new contender would be either the greatest thing in years, or a complete waste of time. Now that Google has finally opened the code for public view, we decided to take a look at what Chrome OS is really all about. A note about terminology – The official Google products for the browser and OS are Chrome and Chrome OS, respectively. The open source versions are Chromium and Chromium OS. As they’re essentially the same thing, this article will use the terms Chrome and Chrome OS.

Acrosser announced two Linux-ready "All-in-One" boards for gaming and AWP (Amusement With Prizes) machines. The ACE-B5296 supports an Intel Pentium and 915GME northbridge, and the ACE-B5692 runs a Core 2 Duo and GME965, and both offer dual VGA outputs, PCIe expansion, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, storage, ccTalk, and JAMMA I/O.

Microsoft Corp. is, predictably, not all that impressed by Google Inc.'s demonstration of its upcoming Chrome OS today, but neither were potential rivals who make Linux and instant-on operating systems. Google released Chrome OS as open source today. It did not, however, release a beta of the operating system for users, and said that hobbyists who would want to install it on their existing netbook or other hardware were out of luck.

It worked for software, so why not science? The open source science movement has been gaining momentum, and it's shaping the future of scientific research and discovery. Everyone -- scientists, the general public, and even taxpayers -- stands to benefit from a new scientific model, says John Wilbanks, vice president of Science Commons.

GO language promoted by google is a new system programming language said to be expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected. The language is still very young and there is no ready made package available for ubuntu. You can install it and try out the features from the version control repository of go .

The kernel development team have enhanced various aspects of Btrfs, one effect of which is to significantly improve the experimental file system's write performance. A number of changes to the block layer promise better data throughputs and reactivity. There are also several new drivers for storage hardware.

Cavium announced a new line of Nitrox network security adapters that ship with a Linux SDK. The Nitrox XL CN16XX-NFBE family offers a FIPS 140-2-certified hardware security nodule (HSM) with PCI Express Gen2 connectivity and integrated Network Interface Card (NIC) functionality, says Cavium.

Laptops are often disconnected from networks, which makes running automated network backups a bit challenging. But in Linux there is always a way, and Juliet Kemp shows how to set up hands-off worry-free automatic laptop backups.

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

With the purchase of SUSE by Novell many feared that the brand would be subsumed into the corporate borg and contaminated with proprietary add-ons. But openSUSE goes its own way, and the result is a sleek, reliable distribution with all the bells and whistles. Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and reports.

Chip designer ARM is excited about the prospect of Google Chrome OS, according to the company's EVP of Marketing Ian Drew. Speaking to TechRadar after being name-checked by Google at the unveiling of Chrome OS, Drew admitted that he couldn't predict whether the revolutionary principles behind the new operating system would be successful, but that he wouldn't bet against a company with such a good track record.

If you’re running Linux, there’s a good chance your distro of choice uses Grub as the default bootloader. Grub has served well for many years, but it’s beginning to show its age. As with all software, it doesn’t take long before the latest-and-greatest becomes old-and-haggard. Features have been piling up in Grub without much thought going into revamping the core program. Eventually, this lead to a messy patchwork that no one really wanted to maintain. At this point, Grub2 was born. It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up using a completely redesigned structure. This new Grub gives us powerful features like conditional statements (if/then, etc), intelligent upgrades, and some greatly improved graphics.

Back in July, your editor stumbled across Google's Courgette announcement and promptly added it to the LWN topic slush pile. He then promptly let it sit for three months or so. The news that this software is now the subject of a patent suit brought Courgette back to the foreground; here we'll look at what Courgette is for, how it works, and how it relates to the patent being asserted.

Korean electronics giant Samsung is helping the Linux-David Enlightenment with development ressources. It's possible that the lightweight and robust window manager might be the basis for Samsung's upcoming Bada mobile phone platform.