Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The first development release for Fedora 12 (codenamed Constantine), Alpha 1, was supposed to be released this week. However, Red Hat has pushed back its release to next week Tuesday. While there is this seven-day delay, an Alpha 1 RC1 ISO spin is available and we decided to provide a very early and brief look at the Fedora 12 release.

There has been relatively little noise out of the realtime preemption camp in recent months. That does not mean that the realtime developers have been idle, though; instead, they are preparing for the realtime endgame: the merger of the bulk of the remaining patches into the mainline kernel. The 2.6.31-rc4-rt1 tree recently announced by Thomas Gleixner shows the results of much of this work. This article will look at some of the recent changes to -rt.

The PySide team is pleased to announce the first public release of PySide: Python for Qt. PySide is a project providing an LGPL'd set of Python bindings for the Qt framework.

A production ready version of the MySQL fork Drizzle could be ready by the end of this year. Brian Aker, Drizzle lead architect, has said the project will start to look production ready and people can begin production testing in earnest after the next milestone build. If development and testing goes as hoped that means we could potentially see this light-weight and modular version of MySQL ready by mid December - the date of the next milestone. That's a year and a half since Drizzle was unveiled.

What is commercial Linux distributor Novell going to do about server and desktop virtualization? It's a good question, and one that the company's top brass has not really addressed. In July 2006, with the launch of SUSE Linux 10, Novell was the first commercial Linux vendor to ship a Xen hypervisor tuned for Linux. And it is arguable that Novell probably jumped the gun, given the state of Xen, its management tools, and Novell's support of other operating systems beside SLES 10 at the time with its embedded Xen product.

What Dell showed at a China Mobile event Monday was not a finalized smartphone, the computer maker said -- rather, it was a proof of concept mobile device. Still, reports from the event were enough kick speculation into high gear, and for now, it looks as though Dell could be going down the Android path in developing a mobile handheld.

One of the many ways KDE makes our lives easier is by providing graphical interfaces for many of the tasks that computer users want to perform. Web browsers typically accept certain protocols that connect them to resources, such as http, https, and http://ftp. In KDE, these are called KIO slaves, and nearly all KDE applications can interact with them. What makes KDE unique is that there are over 50 KIO slaves available for use. These include everything from basic file management (file:/directoryname) to remote network management (remote:/). I have selected a few notable KIO slaves to demonstrate how they are used and have also included a list of useful ones at the end of this post.

As with any volunteer-based concept worth its salt, it would appear we are not quite in agreement here as to how one laptop per child initiatives should be implemented. Discussing what hardware platform and what operating system we should use sometimes pales in comparison with debates on the inherent ideology of education that should be pursued. The very fact that I, personally, assume that our effort should necessarily be a volunteer, grassroots, community-based movement has very strong opposition from those who are running projects from a top-down, central-government perspective.

In order for Foresight Linux to follow development trends more quickly, Michael Johnson (the founder of rPath and former head of Fedora) has proposed switching from rPath Linux to Fedora.

In Is Chrome OS Too Orwellian Or Big Brother-ish?, Chris of The Coffee Desk examined the reach of Google into our private spaces, both cyber and real. That really struck me – I knew just what he meant, because last week I had a near-miss experience with yet another in the endless series of assaults on privacy. This one came from a relatively new entity in the Microsoft hegemony, Qwest by Windows Live.

One of the significant disadvantages of being an early adopter of any new technology is what comes after it, specifically, the improvements that every technology experiences over time. Such appears to be the case for those who rushed to pick up the G1 — the first Android phone on the market — as questions have begun to pop up over whether the device is in line to see its last update.

According to the change notes for the current development branch the next release of the GIMP image editor will be licensed under the GPL3 and LGPL3. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is currently being redeveloped as the unstable development version 2.7, preparing the way for version 2.8 which will be the next stable version expected for release by the end of the year.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

Open-source Java clustering startup Terracotta is today expected to announce an acquisition that'll potentially boost the speed of clustered Java applications. The company said it's buying the IP behind the Apache-licensed Ehcache along with Ehcache founder Greg Luck, who'll be joining the Terracotta team. The goal is to integrate Ehcache with Teracotta.

It takes money to make money, and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat knows this. Red Hat has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get more of its sales through indirect channels. This is not just a matter of shifting the burden of sales to resellers, as is the case with most server makers, but is also a means of keeping Red Hat's overall revenues growing so it attains its long-term goal of becoming a $1bn, profitable software company.

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind.

Microsoft has attempted to block the court-ordered end to sales of Microsoft Word over a patent dispute. But court papers show that company officers were aware of the patent when they took the infringing action.

There are a lot of bogus VPN (virtual private network) products sold for big bucks that are not real VPNs at all, but SSL portals. OpenVPN is a genuine secure VPN that supports both site-to-site tunnels, to create a nice secure WAN on the cheap, and remote individual clients. Eric Geier shows us how to use the Untangle gateway to set up a good stout OpenVPN server the easy way.

LMMS is music creation software similar to programs such as GarageBand for OSX and FL Studio for Windows. Those programs are designed to streamline the process of making music with a computer in order to get new users into music composition as quickly and painlessly as possible. Their feature sets include preset audio loops, MIDI tracks, and other ready-made musical materials available for immediate use in a piece. Their GUIs invite involvement in the process of making music and it's clear that the designers want the user to have fun with the program and the process. In this mini-review we'll see if LMMS lives up to the precedents set by those programs.

Free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is celebrating a new milestone – an article on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen added on Monday took the English-language version of Wikipedia over the three million article mark. The encyclopaedia, which first went online in January 2001, now contains a total of more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, as the oldest version, remains the leading version. The German version is second with more than 940,000 articles, and the French version is third with 840,000 articles.