Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The developers at the Mozilla Foundation are looking for volunteers to "test pilot" the Firefox browser as they travel the Web. A "Test Pilot" add-on for Firefox allows a user to try the newest features and enhancements for the browser before other users. The add-on collects data about the behaviour of the test pilots who are involved in the tests.

Those of you who watch our Tech Tip Videos may have seen my video on how to fetch the US National Debt at the command line. The script contained here uses the idea I developed there and expands it to fetch the debt twice, with an optional pause in between, and then display the amount that the debt has increased during the pause.

The Free Software Foundation has started a community for young people interested in contributing to free software. The GNU Generation community is aimed at people between the ages of 13 and 18 and encourages them to participate in the development of free software. The projects within GNU Generation are not limited to writing code and can be anything related to free software, including art, advocacy and documentation.

Despite outward appearances, Nokia and Microsoft aren't the most unlikely of bedfellows – the phone giant has co-operated with Redmond several times and already supports Exchange and Windows Live services. We'd still bet that we'll see a Windows Mobile Nokia handset at some point, but at the announcement of their partnership both parties were quick to stress that Symbian is still very much at the top of Nokia's agenda.

There are dark areas of the kernel where only the bravest hackers dare to tread. Places where the code is twisted, the requirements are complex, and everything depends on ancient code which has seen little change over the years because even the most qualified developers fear the consequences. Arguably, no part of the kernel is darker and scarier than the serial terminal (TTY) code. Recently, this code was getting a much-needed update, but it now appears that a disconnect within the community has brought that work to a halt and thrown TTY back into the "unmaintained" column - at a time when that code has known regressions in the 2.6.31-rc kernel.

Linux distributor Novell is reorganizing: from now on, one developer team will dedicate itself entirely to openSUSE.

Have you ever feel frustrated when Mozilla releases a new build for their software (especially Firefox) and you are still stuck at the previous older version, simply because Ubuntu did not (and do not intend to) add the newer version of software packages to the repository? The truth of fact is, Ubuntu does not update its repositories for newer version of software packages, with the exception of security fixes, until the next release of Ubuntu. For example, the default version of Firefox for Ubuntu Jaunty is Firefox 3.0 and it won’t be upgraded to Firefox 3.5 at least until Ubuntu 9.10. In most cases, especially when it comes to browsers and various Web application, it is always better to upgrade to the newest version due to the new features and security improvement. This is where Ubuntuzilla comes into play.

Trains, planes, and automobiles: Juliet Kemp has been romaing the planet for months, while supporting remote servers and writing Linux howtos for LinuxPlanet and Serverwatch. It's a tough life: "...lying in my tent with a cup of tea and a stack of chocolate biscuits, watching TV series downloads on the laptop."

Another issue which become increasingly apparent was the education factor. Although I loved the tech behind it, OLPC was always clear in that "It's an education project, not a laptop project", which I agree is essential. And yet, it became clear that the primary objective of Negroponte and friends was simply to get this laptop into kids' hands. And I vehemently disagree with that. The XO cannot exist on its own. Without proper guidance from teachers well-versed in the applying and troubleshooting the technologies involved the project would fail, or become something else entirely. To allow such a situation would be contrary to any responsible educational goal. A technology is only as good as its user's wisdom.

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks. Symbian, Nokia's OS of choice to date, is said to be far too cumbersome to compete with modern operating systems, according to the report from Nokia sources. A Nokia spokesperson declined to comment on "speculation".

The openSUSE project, which creates the Linux development distro that ultimately ends up being Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise in desktop, server, and other variants, is mothballing an old development release. The project icing just as it has taken another step toward meeting its goal of delivering a new release this fall.

When Windows 7 comes to market, the Starter Edition will be conceived especially for notebooks. As they did for Windows XP, Microsoft has come up with a list of technical limitations.

Microsoft and Nokia have announced an alliance to bring the software giant's services to smartphones made by the world's biggest mobile phone firm. The deal means that the latest versions of Microsoft's range of products, such as Word and Excel, will be made available on Nokia handsets.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization, which demonstrated how you can run multiple desktop environments at the same time on the same computer, and switch between them at the push of a button. I admit, this was somewhat of a warmup for the real show – how to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time without having to deal with the drawbacks of virtualization software. Today, we’re going to be using chroot to treat certain parts of your Linux filesystem as (almost) completely isolated systems. This can let you do all kinds of interesting things, like run a full Gentoo system from inside your Ubuntu system with little to no performance loss.

The KDE Community released the 4.3 version of its popular Linux/UNIX desktop environment, representing more than 63,000 code changes by 700 contributors, 10,000 bug-fixes, and 2,000 new features. KDE 4.3 adds numerous improvements to the Plasma Desktop Shell and Application Development Framework, among many other enhancements.

Renaming a company can be a torturous process. Developing the new brand, getting the word out, and answering questions can be long and grueling, and at least some customers are bound to be upset, and possibly quite vocal about it. Not everyone is willing to brave these waters, though Nokia obviously is, as it announced today the renaming of its corporate Qt division, Qt Software.

A little color makes the Linux command line easier to read. Juliet Kemp shows how easy it is to add a little color to your command shell.

Another powerful trend that undercuts Microsoft is toward programs that look and function the same way in any operating system. "Over the past five years there's been a steady move away from Windows-specific to applications being OS-neutral," says Michael Silver, a software analyst at the research firm Gartner.

Earcandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, which for me is probably the first thing that i ever liked about pulse audio. This volume manager could mute music in your amarok or rhythombox or literally any music player when you play some video in youtube(i am not lying) or VLC or other video players. Mute is not the right word, but instead the music slowly fades away, and the sound from video player fades in. Sounds promising eh? But it is much better than you think.

Mobile content retailer, Mobile Streams, today opened a Center of Excellence for smartphone research and development in Hong Kong which it says will work on the development of new applications for the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android.