Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Many KDE 3 users swear by the K menu and would dare anyone to challenge it with something better. Fortunately for those people, KDE 4 retained that menu version as an option. For the rest of us, there are a couple of more robust menus that offer a variety of features. Lancelot is a third-party menu that has now entered into the KDE fold. It is the one I use, and many others have found it pretty useful. In this post, I will present to you some of Lancelot’s features so that you can decide if it is right for you.

Qualcomm has established a subsidiary to develop software for mobile open source platforms. The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QUIC) will optimize open source software with Qualcomm technology, using platforms including Linux, Webkit, Android, Chrome, and Symbian, which last week achieved a major milestone in migrating to open source.

First they wrestled down Microsoft, now they're litigating against other big IT players: Eolas intends to enforce its patent on web technologies and plug-ins for integrating interactive content at all cost. However, a partner of the legal firm representing Eolas assured the readers of German Focus magazine that the vendor does not intend to cripple the internet. The lawyer also said that individuals, such as Facebook users or bloggers, using the technologies for integrating, for example, videos into their web pages or profiles, have nothing to fear. Litigation against such individuals doesn't make sense economically, he added.

LXer Feature: 26-Oct-2009

The O is for October, harvest time here in NW Ohio USA. A beat-slicer, a book review, and a milestone release compose this trio of reviews for the Fall season in Linux audio fashion.

When it comes to video playback on Linux, the premiere choice for video acceleration is currently using VDPAU with its CPU-efficient, GPU-accelerated capabilities that even has no problems playing 1080p video files with extremely low-end hardware. However, VDPAU is not yet widespread in all Linux video drivers, and other free software developers have been working on improving other areas of the Linux video stack too.

Tasktop Technologies has announced updated versions of its Tasktop Pro task management for application lifecycle management (ALM) toolsuite, and of Eclipse Mylyn. New features include time-tracking, document sharing, and ALM system interoperability that fills a gap between software development delivery and Agile project tracking and management. Tasktop Pro is built on Mylyn, a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easier for developers.

In Part 1 we learned some basic network sniffing and stumbling with SWScanner on Linux. Today Eric Geiers shows us some more excellent network discovery and probing utilities: KwifiManager, tcpdump, and Wireshark.

While Microsoft was assembling a promotional booth to celebrate their Windows 7 launch directly opposite the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo, Microsoft's biggest competitor couldn't resist spontaneously recognizing the textbook exercise in irony.

Dell is currently flogging a cheap-as-chips netbook that apparently comes loaded with that well-known Microsoft operating system, Ubuntu 8.04. Anyone dropping in on the computer maker's UK product website will be able to buy an Intel-based Inspiron Mini 10 laptop for £199 a pop. And, according to the blurb on the site, one ickle mobile computer in its current range is being shipped with Microsoft's, er, Linux-flavoured OS. Shurely shome mishtake, we think.

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced. That explains, in part, why recent discussions of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun – and hence MySQL – have once more put free software licences under the microscope.

Motorola posted and then removed specs for its Verizon-destined, Android-based "Droid" phone, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Motorola "Calgary" and "Zeppelin" Android phones have been tipped, T-Mobile launched Huawei's Android-based "Pulse" phone in the UK, an HTC Desire photo has appeared, and HTC released source code for the Hero, say various reports.

Apple has closed down its project to develop ZFS for Mac OS X. An announcement on the project's site simply says "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly". Sun's ZFS filesystem was believed by some to be a contender for Apple's next filesystem and the appearance of some support for the filesystem in Mac OS X 10.5 Server seemed to confirm that. The arrival of Snow Leopard, which lacked any ZFS support, contradicted that belief.

Back in June, I reviewed Amarok 2.1 and was far from impressed. The layout editor was difficult to work with and felt tacked on, and the fact that a great deal of my music was placed under “Various Artists” for no apparent reason frustrated me. Amarok 2.2 has been released recently, and it’s a definite improvement, and may even be the best music player released this year.

This year's linux.conf.au — which will, despite the name, be held in Wellington, New Zealand — is fast approaching. For those waiting to get in on the action up front, the time to act is now, because the early bird will soon have flown the coop. The annual linux.conf.au conference is the grandest Linux gathering of the Australasian year, and one of the crown jewels of Linux conventions worldwide. The schedule for this year's event includes a wide representation of the Open Source community, as always, including keynotes by Jonathan Corbet, Andrew Tridgell, Matthew Garrett, and Linux Journal's own Glyn Moody. The miniconf schedule — comprising the conference's first two days — boasts sessions on the business of Open Source, cloud computing, Arduino, system administration, a distro summit, and Wave development, among others.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

Mozilla Labs developers have revealed project Raindrop, an approach to handling a large number of messages from email and RSS to YouTube and Twitter. Raindrop uses a mini web server to dig through messages from those sources and attempts to categorise them, pulling out important or personal messages and bringing them to the top of the user's view. Examples of this filtering include automatically detecting email from mailing lists, messages from friends or relatives or status messages from online retailers such as Amazon, and presenting them in context based on the preferences of the user.

All the computing world hype this week has been about Windows 7: Cheap Windows 7; Microsoft's future rides on Windows 7; etc., etc. What what if you're not that excited about Windows 7? After all, it's still as insecure as ever, and upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major pain. So if you want, or are going to be forced by your aging PC, to move to another operating system, why not give Linux a try?

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. So what do you get for the money?

Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.