Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It was on the 9th of November, 2004, that the Mozilla Foundation released version 1.0 of its Firefox web browser. The community celebrated the new browser with parties all over the world. Before the launch, the Foundation had even collected donations via the promotional American spreadfirefox.com site and its German Firefox kommt counterpart to pay for full-page spreads in the New York Times and the German FAZ newspapers, informing the general public about the new browser.

Google Chrome OS may still be a year away from making its debut, but TechRadar readers are champing at the bit to get hold of the Windows competitor. More than 2300 votes were cast in a poll to gauge interest in Google's operating system, following the arrival of the excellent Windows 7. And, although 35 per cent were happy with the latest Windows, 16 per cent contented with OS X and 10 per cent confessed to being wary of Chrome OS – a big percentage admitted to being intrigued.

The initiator of the free K Desktop Environment (KDE), Matthias Ettrich, was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit in Berlin on Friday. The highest German state decoration for the common good was awarded to him for his contributions in the field of open source software.

One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.

LG has launched its first Android phone, a QWERTY slider called the "Eve," on Rogers Wireless' network in Canada. In other Android news, LG is prepping a second Android phone, this time with a Snapdragon processor, for Korea, and Philips has launched a V808 oPhone handset in China.

It's been a week since Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmix Koala, was unleashed on the world. I wanted to post a general review after having used the special K since it went RC in late September and early October. In general, I've been very impressed, especially in comparison to another, recently released, operating system. This mini review will focus on using Ubuntu as a desktop system. When I drop it onto my Linode server, I'll provide commentary on server usage as well.

There may be no single organization which runs more Linux systems than Google. But the kernel development community knows little about how Google uses Linux and what sort of problems are encountered there. Google's Mike Waychison traveled to Tokyo to help shed some light on this situation; the result was an interesting view on what it takes to run Linux in this extremely demanding setting.

After ABI Research projected that Linux will take a 32 percent share of netbooks in 2009 and wo;; overtake Windows in 2013, we spoke with ABI analyst Jeffrey Orr on the findings. Orr notes the rise of international consumers and ARM Cortex-A8-based netbooks, and discusses Ubuntu, Moblin, Android, and Chrome OS.

JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.

With its open source release Thursday of its Closure JavaScript tools, Google (GOOG) is starting to suggest that it may eventually become a good open source citizen. The newly released tools include a JavaScript compiler, a very broad JavaScript class library, and Java/JavaScript-friendly templates. All are released under the Apache 2.0 license, a very permissive license that essentially lets outsiders do whatever they want (rather than a viral or semi-viral license like EPL or LGPL).

A Boston-based startup named Litl is taking a big risk: they're betting people will go for a netbook that sports a Linux-based OS and focuses on Web-/network-based productivity (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The risk is in the pricetag: $700 -- almost twice the price of computers that can do twice as much. Is there a market for this?

Android 2.0 (formerly codenamed 'Éclair') is the latest evolution of the mobile OS developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. This version is a chunky upgrade, superceding the current Android 1.6 software (dubbed 'Donut'), which was actually considered "a minor platform release". The first phone to feature Android 2.0 will be Motorola's comeback phone, the DROID (aka the dull-sounding Milestone in Europe).

One Laptop per Child chairman Nicholas Negroponte told Xconomy that OLPC is prepping an ARM-based version 1.75 of its XO netbook while planning to release a "paper-thin" version 3.0 in 2012. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive is providing OLPC users with 1.6 million e-books, says the nonprofit organization.

Prominent open source personalities presented a host of information about current and future developments in Linux at the Linux-Kongress 2009 conference. This time, filesystems were discussed in several presentations. Among the topics were the advantages of Ext4 and Btrfs, fast Ext4 filesystem checks, and kernel and userspace tricks for minimising the time-consuming movements of read/write heads, all of which can speed up some tasks by several orders of magnitude!

Wondering how Adobe was able to get Flash onto the iPhone, despite Apple's prohibition against anyone's runtime modules from appearing? Look no further than University Illinois computer science professor Vikram Adve's lab, where he and his students working to support their open source Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM).

The effort putting Linux on Intel's mobile Atom processor has seen its latest release, with an across-the-board polish for Moblin. The steering committee of the Moblin Project, the Intel-initiated effort that was spun off to the Linux Foundation earlier this year, proudly announced a raft of capabilities new to version 2.1.

As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) edition has been around since Ubuntu 8.04, and has taken on some pretty stiff competition of late from Moblin. Inquiring minds want to know which version is better for my netbook? Paul Ferrill pummels UNR in hopes of finding an answer.

BitTorrent is one of the most contentious technologies available. At least, that is, to the Old Order, those lovely suit-clad corporate types bent on holding technology forever in the days of the — manual — typewriter. The technology, and the suits' dreams of a world free of it, are on trial in Australia, where Linux made an appearance today — at the defense table. The matter at hand is a lawsuit by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft — yes, that's AFACT — against iiNet, an Australian internet service provider over the ISP's role in allowing its service to be used for illegal BitTorrent downloading.

Apache Software Foundation (ASF) pioneers have toasted 10 years of independence and successful code development at their annual conference in California. Speakers who spun-up the project in its early days celebrated building a community that has stayed (mostly) friendly and dedicated to the ideal of building open-source code. Also it’s a group that’s remained beyond the control of tech vendors. To mark the anniversary, ASF announced the Subversion open-source version-control project has joined ASF, to become a top-level project. Not that things have been this harmonious - or pain free.