Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor Canonical revealed late yesterday that it has been working with Google on its Chrome OS platform since before Mountain View announced its game-changing plans in July this year. The firm’s OEM veep Chris Kenyon said in a blog post on Thursday that “Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract”. His comments came following Google’s announcement that it would open source the Chrome OS.

Google unveiled its Debian Linux- and Chrome browser based "Chrome OS" today and announced the open-sourcing of the project. Due to ship on netbooks in late 2010, the lightweight, cloud-oriented Chrome OS offers seven-second boot-ups, works only with flash storage, and borrows from projects including Moblin. No beta release of Chrome OS was made available at the announcement this morning at Google's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, and no timetable for a beta was announced, but the final version should appear by the end of 2010. The distribution will not run on just any system, but can only be used with netbooks that adhere to Google's x86 and ARM-based reference designs, and offer Chrome OS pre-installed, said Google.

Google unveiled its Chrome operating system to the open-source community today and said it has designed the netbook OS to be faster, simpler and more secure than those offered by rivals.

In Part 1 I talked about the messy state of Linux documentation, and how telling users to rely on Google is not documentation. Good documentation is equally important as good code. Today we look at the different types of documentation, from man pages to glossy books.

The Fedora Project has announced the latest version of its popular open source Linux distribution. Nicknamed Constantine, Fedora 12 has quite a few impressive new features and demonstrates that the project has gained a renewed sense of direction. In the build-up to the release of Fedora 12, the Fedora community has focused its energies not just on new features, but on where Fedora is headed in the future. As the saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee. The Fedora Project's goal is to ensure that this distro remains a horse. To that end, the Fedora community has spent a fair amount of time defining its target audience. Unlike some distros that focus on trying to please as many users as possible, Fedora wants to make sure it pleases its intended audience.

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. Some fine people in San Francisco went about their unremarkable lives in 1967, only to discover years later that they were at ground zero of the "Summer of Love." In the summer and fall of 1999, I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would become known as the world's largest open source development site.

Italian firm NSEC is offering IBMs Open Office variant as a VMware ThinApp on a credit card sized USB device.

Verizon Wireless sold 250,000 units of its Droid by Motorola phone, according to eWEEK, which has also given the Droid a rave review. Meanwhile, the rumor of a Google-branded Android phone refuses to die, Palm's CEO trash-talks the Droid, and tomorrow Google will unveil its Linux-based Chrome OS, say various reports.

Samsung may be sponsoring the Enlightenment window manager project and Enlightenment may be a component in Samsung's bada mobile operating system. The Enlightenment project, which has been around since 1997, announced today that it was working with a "top-tier electronics maker" which "produces millions of mobile phones, televisions, sound systems and more".

Adobe released upgrades to its multimedia software that pave the way for full mobile device support. The company's "pre-release betas" of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 run only on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh desktop operating systems and x86-based netbooks, but showcase mobile-centric features such as multi-touch and H.264 hardware acceleration.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed "Weightless," the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Gordon Brown has announced that the government plans to open up map data from the Ordnance Survey, the UK's national mapping agency. The announcement was made by the Prime Minister in a speech at a Smarter Government seminar held at Downing Street where Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt also talked about the work being done with the "Make Public Data Public" project. According to The Guardian, the opening of map data will be part of a wider move to publish over 2,000 sets of data, which could include, for example, road-traffic counts, property prices, and motoring offence statistics.

It's not love, war, or baseball. But over the years some memorable things have been said about technology. Some have been memorably eloquent; others are unforgettably shortsighted, wrongheaded, or just plain weird. Let's celebrate them, shall we? A few ground rules for the list that follows: I considered only statements attributable to a specific individual, which ruled out most ad slogans ("Think Different") and many durable Internet memes ("You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"). I did, however, include individuals who happened to be fictional, or canine or inanimate. I also let a couple of quotes slip in that are not strictly speaking about technology, though neither would exist without it -- one from 1876, and one from earlier this decade. Sue me.

It's fairly simple to find large files on your system using commands such as find, but if you're looking for directories over a certain size find won't help you. The Perl script presented here can help you track down those explosively large directories.

Red faces all around at Redmond last week when Microsoft got caught distributing a utility to create bootable USB drives and DVD backup media from downloaded Windows 7 ISOs. There's nothing wrong with the company's USB/DVD Download Tool in and of itself, apart from the awkward fact (discovered by Rafael Rivera) that it contained code borrowed from an open source project originally made available under the GPLv2. As such, Microsoft should have made the source code for its tool available, and most certainly shouldn't have offered it under the license terms it did.

The Open Web Foundation (OWF), launched in July 2008 at OSCON, has announced that it has released its Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) and the first ten specifications that are under this new agreement. The OWFa is akin to a open source licence for specifications, allowing companies to place specifications under a common recognised license. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and SafeMashUps are the first organisations to make use of the agreement.

Bruce Byfield wonders why isn't "free as in freedom" more important to more Linux users? Is it all about free as in free of cost, or "free as in freeloader"?

errit, a Git-based system for managing code review, is helping to spread the popular distributed revision control system into Android-using companies, many of which have heavy quality assurance, management, and legal processes around software. HTC, Qualcomm, TI, Sony Ericsson, and Android originator Google are all running Gerrit, project leader Shawn Pearce said in a talk at the October 2009 GitTogether event, hosted at Google in Mountain View.

The Linux Mint team has announced the first (RC1) release candidate of the Ubuntu 9.10-based Linux Mint 8. Meanwhile, the Fedora community has released the final version of Fedora 12, and an eWEEK review praises the release for its improved system privilege management and virtualization features.

Addonics announced a low-cost, six-ounce network-attached storage (NAS) device for the SOHO market. The Linux-based Addonics Mini NAS offers a single 2.5-inch storage bay, an Ethernet port, a USB port, and multiple servers, including UPnP, and supports both SMB and open source Samba network protocols, says the company.