Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

More intriguing Bilski briefs filed. The door is shut now, so there will be no more, I gather. Both the ABA and Patently O have them all listed, and the latter includes a helpful brief blurb giving an outline of the theme of each. So read them all if you wish.

In a recent post I wrote called "Linux has no marketing, but what if it did?" I made the point that with Microsoft's Windows 7 OS coming out on October 22nd, there will be a blitz of marketing around it, and noted that there never is any such blitz promoting Linux. That post suggested that if Linux could have an equivalent marketing blitz, a very effective campaign might be built around how very much more secure and out of the line of fire of malware purveyors Linux is.

From this week, Palm's Pre smartphone is being made available in the UK and Germany. Telefonica subsidiary O2 is selling the device both on and off contract. The Pre runs Linux and, as well as a version of the 2.6 kernel spruced up by Palm with a raft of patches, includes all the usual suspects, such as BusyBox and the Gstreamer framework for playing audio and video with an ALSA back end.

Back in July, Jonathan Corbet lamented that Amazon was making the Kindle an unattractive hacking target for Linux users. The comments to his article suggested having a closer look at OpenInkpot, a fairly new Linux distribution for e-book readers. This much in advance: It doesn't run on the Kindle. Not yet, anyway.

Following our post about Chrome OS yesterday, it looks like those wily folks at Google have removed the “chromeos” folder from the Chromium build folder. Too bad. But luckily, before they did, TechCrunch reader and Linux user, Jonathan Frederickson, was able to grab the code and managed to install it. He has posted some results in our comments section and even more on his blog.

cer announced its first Android smartphone, which will also be the first Android phone based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. The Acer Liquid offers a WVGA touchscreen, HSPA 3G support, plus Android 1.6, and reportedly also provides WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and a five megapixel camera.

Linux has all kinds of great networking abilities built-in; Carla Schroder shares some tips and tricks for navigating multiple computers at home or in an office, and keeping your files where they belong.

In Part I we tested out Android on VirtualBox. Now we'll try running Palm's WebOS as a Virtual Appliance.

The Linux desktop experience is now closer to the Windows environment than before, but the gap in mainstream adoption for the open source OS will not close anytime soon, says an industry analyst.

Basic screenshot software is really handy to have on hand, even if you don't use it often. If you rely on screengrab tools often, however, you know how important it is to have software with lots of tools and features. No matter what your screen capture software needs are, you're sure to find something you like in this list of the top six open source options.

Over the weekend someone stumbled onto a Chrome browser build for Chrome OS on Google's servers. We've seen several false-alarm looks at Chrome OS, and while it is only the browser, it provides a glimpse into the direction Google's going.

Kontron announced a fanless, Mini-ITX-based box PC that supports Intel Celeron or Core Duo CPUs and consumes 37 Watts. The Kontron Concept Box 751 offers three gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB 2.0 ports, four serial ports, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, and an IEEE1394 Firewire port, says the company.

A few RPM developers from Red Hat and Novell met at the openSUSE Conference 2009 in September. The results of the meeting are now online.

Imagine being able to search for help online without leaving your desktop application. An About dialog you could use to contact the developer. A site where you could post works in progress directly from your desktop for criticism. These are a few of the entries in KDE's recent social desktop contest. They are also some of the first examples of what Aaron Seigo of the KDE project calls "freedom services" -- applications that bring cloud computing directly to your computer and seamlessly integrate the desktop and online services.

Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was open-sourced under the Apache license last month by Apple and now it has worked its way into FreeBSD. This software, which helps in optimizing applications for multi-core systems, has ported the libdispatch library from GCD to FreeBSD and made Grand Central Dispatch more POSIX friendly.

Mandriva posted the final development release of Mandriva Linux 2010, complete with the Moblin v2.0 netbook environment. Based on Linux 2.5.31, Mandriva 2010 RC2 offers a choice of KDE 4.3.2 and GNOME 2.28 desktops, plus Intel Poulsbo chipset drivers, guest accounts, and the Nepomuk collaborative desktop.

As we reported recently, the ApacheCon 2009 conference is rapidly approaching, to be held November 2nd through 6th in Oakland, California. The conference will feature sessions and speakers talking not only about web server- and services-related topics, but about the Hadoop software framework for data-intensive queries, and the many sub-projects that the Apache Software Foundation oversees. The event is partly intended to mark the 10th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation, and we already ran a post from Jim Jagielski, co-founder and chairman of the foundation, on Apache's future.

Computer manufacturer ASUS has published the Linux source code for its Seashell line of netbooks. Previous to the companies Seashell line up, ASUS netbooks were often available with Linux as an option for the pre-installed operating system (OS), usually at a lower price. With the release of its current Seashell models, the 1008HA and the 1005HA, however, Windows XP has been and still is the only pre-installed OS option available.

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer. The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written. KOffice became faster and more stable, and the various file import filters have been greatly improved. This includes the beginnings of MS Office 2007 import support. Thanks to this work the KOffice document viewer for Maemo will be able to properly read files created with a wider range of office applications, and all other users of KOffice 2.x will benefit.

The World Wide Web is more like the Wild Wild West, and there are Linux programs to help parents steer their children away from the bad neighborhoods. Matt Hartley looks at a number of programs that put control in parent's hands.