Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Some heavy lifting has been done to move Chrome to the 64-bit world. It's Linux-only for now, though, and don't expect doubled performance over 32-bit versions.

The Linux Foundation has published an update to last year's study on Linux kernel development. The updated study reports that for each kernel release there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of contributing developers, resulting in a 42 percent increase in patch acceptance.

Mozilla has taken a position on the European Union's proposed settlement with Microsoft about browser integration in Windows 7. Both Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker and Mozilla's general counsel feel that Microsoft is benefiting all too well from the settlement.

openSUSE is defaulting to the KDE desktop, according to an announcement on the opensuse-project mailing list by Micahel Löffler. From openSUSE 11.2 onwards, the installation process from DVD will offer a choice between KDE and GNOME, with KDE pre-selected. Users accepting the default installation settings will therefore get a KDE desktop.

[It always defaulted to KDE up until Novell took it over. - Scott]

Remember the olden days of hertzes and bytes? Now it's giga-everything. Paul Ferrill takes advantage of low hardware prices to build a super-duper high-power Linux workstation for cheap. How cheap? $1000? $500?

At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

The PySide LPGL Python binding for Qt is new and the Python::OpenCL wrapper now runs with AMD's ATI Stream SDK.

Eminent Java developers Richard Hall, BJ Hargrave and Peter Kriens have formulated a new proposal for a simple module system for Java, which could be developed as part of Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 'Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language'. The authors hope their proposal will bring the different ideas on modularisation into some sort of harmony.

Market researcher IDC predicts that Linux will continue steady growth over the next five years, reaching into the billions of dollars in 2012.

What's the point of GPLv2 libraries? What's the purpose of libraries associated with licenses anyway? Do they provide useful guidance or impose annoying restrictions? Who wants to puzzle out the legalese of licenses and their appurtenances when working with code and systems that are supposed to be open?

Terracotta has acquired EHCache, making it in turn an attractive acquisition target for VMWare. In any case, the acquisition is good for customer awareness and adoption.

The Chromium team has released an alpha unstable version of the Google Chrome for Linux and Mac platform. Those who are keen to try out Google Chrome in their Ubuntu machine, but are not willing to run it under wine, you can now grab the deb file and install it in your system. One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Way back in April 2008, the Linux Foundation published a little report that upended a lot of perceptions about Linux development. Now, they've done it again. The report in question — Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It? — revealed a number of things about the Linux kernel. At a total line count of 8,859,683, the kernel was growing at roughly 10% per year, with an average of some 3,621 lines of code added every day, while 1,550 lines were removed and 1,425 lines were changed. Possibly the most interesting numbers, however, were those regarding the faces behind those changes.

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the BEST personal finance manager for FREE users". KMyMoney 1.0 has been released. With over 3 years of development, this new stable release has many new features and a refreshed user interface.

So you think companies sell $1bn in Linux support contracts a year worldwide? Think again. That isn't going to happen until 2012, and maybe not at all if the trends of using commercial distros without paying for support continue apace. Al Gillen, the operating systems and virtualization analyst at IDC, wrapped up his worldwide Linux operating environment forecast, which spans from 2009 through 2013, just before ducking out on holiday. And according to that report (which you can get here if you feel like shelling out $4,500), the for-fee global revenues for Linux operating system support, which is mostly for servers, rose by 23.4 per cent in 2008 to hit $567m.

The Linux Foundation, which is something akin to the marketing arm of the open source operating system kernel and its related systems software, has today released its second report detailing how the Linux 2.6 kernel is evolving. The report reveals how it is coding the changes in the kernel and what companies are sponsoring the programmers who are making the changes - if any. And what is immediately clear is that Linux is much bigger than its namesake and creator, Linus Torvalds.

Greg Luck, founder of distributed Java caching technology Ehcache, is to join US start-up Terracotta. Ehcache will now find itself under the umbrella of Java specialist Terracotta, whose eponymous Java clustering application is available both as an open source edition and as a commercial edition with maintenance and support.

You think you own your stuff that you paid your own money for? The Sony PS3, the XBox, the Palm Pre? Think again---these titans of tech are not selling products...

PySide, a new API for Python programmers who want to use Nokia's Qt framework, has been released. PySide is LGPL licensed and Nokia funded. The developers hope that this first public version of the PySide library, while it is still a work in progress, will become a new standard for developing Python/Qt applications.

The Linux Foundation has released the first update to the popular "Who Writes Linux" study originally published in April 2008. The study is written by kernel developers Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman and surfaces the people who are writing the code, the companies that are sponsoring the work, and the pace of development.