Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google's Chromium project announced it is working on its first 64-bit version of its Chrome web browser, which will will arrive first on Linux. Meanwhile, Linux is increasingly driving development of 64-bit software -- simply because Linux power users are demanding it, says an industry blog. The mailing-list entry from the Chromium project's Dean McNamee last Thursday did not mention an expected launch date for the 64-bit Linux version of the Chromium browser, but suggested that the build was progressing nicely. Chromium, which is an open source version of the Windows Vista-based Chrome browser for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP, was recently made available in a 32-bit developers version for Linux.

According to its developers Guitarix is a monaural amplifier designed for creating the distorted sounds typical of thrash, heavy metal, blues, and other rock guitar styles. In fact, Guitarix is capable of much more than distortion sounds. In this article I'll remove the software speaker grill and pull out the virtual chassis to take a closer look at the sonic possibilities of this "simple mono amplifier".

avahi is installed by default on Debian and Ubuntu systems, but few people seem to use it to any extent. It's supposed to be a service auto-discovery, but what services exactly is it set up to discover? Juliet Kemp figures out if she can actually make it do something she wants it to do.

For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news. Also taking place this past week was the release of AMD Catalyst 9.8, which finally brought support for the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but continues to lack real public support for XvBA. X.Org 7.5 was also supposed to be released, but to no surprise that did not happen.

People contribute to free software in many ways. Some write the stuff; some write *about* the stuff, spreading the word; and some actually spread open source directly by giving away systems to those who need them. We hear a lot about the stars of first group, and the second group make a lot of noise on their own. But too often we take the third group for granted. I want to talk about one of the unsung heroes of open source – someone who has helped many, and now needs a little help from us.

If you are a Linux distributor, you have a number of possible ways to upset your user base. Breaking existing, well-established functionality is one of them. Another would be to install software which appears to be monitoring user activity behind their backs. Seeming to make money off of these activities will not help. Extra points are awarded for doing it all as a surprise. Ubuntu has risked all of the above with the "multisearch" Firefox extension included in the current "Karmic Koala" alpha release.

Every once in a while, the KDE community stumbles across a third party application that is well integrated into KDE, but has somehow managed to fly completely beneath the radar. One such application is called simon (small 's' intentional), a speech recognition program that integrates well with KDE and provides a means of interacting with KDE using voice recognition.

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

If you thought the sale saga of Sun Microsystems ended in April, Thursday's news from Washington may have come as a surprise. Months after the ink dried on the deal between Sun and database heavyweight Oracle, the U.S. Department of Justice has finally gotten around to giving its blessing.

Ctags generate index (tag) files of the names in header and source files, which speeds up source code navigation in your favorite text editor. Juliet Kemp introduces exuberant-ctags in Vim and Emacs.

The Novell-backed Moonlight project announced a beta of Moonlight 2.0, an open source Linux/Unix clone of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework. Moonlight 2.0 offers improved media streaming enabling media codecs like Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac, via a runtime for its sister project, .NET clone Mono. An offshoot of the Novell-sponsored Mono project, which created the Microsoft .NET clone, Mono , the Moonlight project introduced the first version of its Silverlight clone in beta last fall, following up with a final release in February. In May, the project unveiled a preview version of the open source browser plug-in.

Two separate U.S.-based system integrators are shipping Ubuntu 9.04-based netbooks that run on the Intel Atom N270 CPU and offer 10-inch displays and 160GB hard disk drives (HDDs). Denver-based System76 announced a "Starling" netbook, and Berkeley-based ZaReason weighed in with its Terra A20 (pictured).

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line. Another option, the one I describe here, is to just open the files and read (or write) them as you like, as you'd do in other programming languages.

The choice of a Linux desktop environment, typically between the "big two": GNOME and KDE, is one that inspires enthusiastic advocacy—some might even say religious fervor—among the supporters of each choice. So, it should come as no surprise that a distribution's default choice of desktop—the one that most new users will end up running—can be contentious, as the supporters of each desktop jockey for recognition of their choice. That battle is currently playing out for openSUSE after a proposal to make KDE the default desktop was made in the openFATE feature tracker; since then, a number of rather lengthy threads on the opensuse-project mailing list, as well as postings on various web logs, have made for a lively debate.

The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines. Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod. Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.

Researchers at the Spanish University of Granada are publishing as open source their software simulating the human nervous system, saying this is the only way to allow other teams to become involved. The department of Architecture and Computer Technology last May published Edlut (Event driven look up table based simulator) that can be used to mimic parts of the human brain. Apart from studying how the brain works, tt is meant to aid research into diseases and to test new medicines. The software can also be used to improve robots and other machines, such as accurate control and tool manipulators.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for the operation of the Wikipedia free online encyclopaedia, has received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a foundation established by the co-founder of HP and his wife. According to a press release, this grant acknowledges the important role that Wikimedia projects play in making educational information freely accessible.

The Danish Competition Authority has conducted a market analysis of office software so as to give governmental agencies recommendations for public purchases. The results are a definite "live and let live" between the competing standards ODF and OOXML.

Computers get faster and smaller every year, but in the case of servers – the building blocks for many modern businesses – the tasks we expect them to perform have increased to match. We so rely on these servers that we increasingly need to monitor what they do, how they do it and when they hit problems. An under appreciated aspect of modern server designs is that they now incorporate facilities to monitor themselves and report problems: a small computer built into a bigger server to monitor it used to be reserved for very expensive systems, but now even the cheapest 1U Dell server comes with this kind of monitoring and control.

Microsoft's earned the respect of certain sections of the open-source community for its engineering work around open-source and Linux. Specifically, its support for MySQL, PHP and JBoss on Windows and its involvement with Eclipse and Apache have been welcomed by developers and various community leaders in and around these technologies and projects. Yet, there remain many more skeptical and even suspicious of Microsoft and its motives, especially when it comes to statements and legal actions on patents.