Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Gimp FX Foundry SourceForce project made it its assignment to provide scripts for porting into the current GIMP or allow creating them from scratch. The scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. The Foundry now provides 117 new scripts for GIMP 2.6 that are not part of the graphic software's standard installation.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes is considering imposing tighter regulations on Microsoft. It says the company could be compelled to package browsers that compete with Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. Jonathan Todd, a Commission spokesman, had stated similar considerations publicly in February. A response from Microsoft was still being considered at that time, but it evidently made no impression on Commissioner Kroes.

The kernel developers have added new features to thousands of the Linux kernel's existing drivers and integrated numerous additional drivers. This further increases the variety of hardware supported by Linux. A few days ago, Linus Torvalds released the seventh Linux 2.6.30 release candidate. According to Torvalds, most of the merged changes are minor, and the next big kernel version is nearing completion – although Torvalds does still anticipate an eighth release candidate. The Kernel Log takes this opportunity to discuss what's new in the driver arena of Linux 2.6.30; the final version of the forthcoming kernel will probably be released in one to three weeks.

The folks at Tungsten Graphics, which are owned by VMware, have been busy with new software releases so far this summer. Mesa 7.5 is coming along well and the Gallium3D driver architecture is now merged into the Mesa mainline code-base for release with Mesa 7.6. When it comes to Gallium3D an OpenVG state tracker has been released along with two OpenGL ES state trackers to accelerate the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 APIs. There are also OpenCL and OpenGL 3.1 state trackers under development.

LXer Feature: 01-Jun-2009

We have a lot of big stories is this week's roundup like the news that the U.S. Army has decided to upgrade from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 and Vista in order to “bolster Internet security”, which begs the question, why isn't the entire military already using SELinux? For those who want to learn some Linux/Unix history and happen to have spare 40ft wall, then this poster might be for you, and SourceForge takes down the rtmpdump project after receiving a cease-and-desist notice from Adobe.

Novell, having reported its second quarter financial results yesterday after Wall Street closed, said it had inked a deal with Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services to have that outsourcer take over its ERP systems and related data center in Provo, Utah. While the operating system supplier is headquartered back in Waltham, Massachusetts, a big chunk of its operations are still back in Provo. And in an effort to cut costs and to get ACS on board using Novell's products in its outsourcing engagements, Novell has cut a two-way deal with the outsourcing firm.

There was a time when SCO was a great company. No. Seriously. SCO Unix was a great Unix for x86 systems, and, for a brief shining moment it looked like SCO would bring together the best things of both Unix and Linux. Then, SCO's ownership got it into their heads that trying to take IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and anyone who else who used Linux was a great plan. Ha! As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don't know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. "Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer program that Linux folk have used for ages. It allows you to turn one terminal into many, and run processes even after logging out. In this article we will give a brief overview of screen usage for the uninitiated, then talk about how Ubuntu's defaults and new screen-profiles package have taught us about new and wonderful features of screen.

The GNU C library (or glibc) is a fundamental component of the Linux operating system. It provides much of the user-space interface to the kernel as well as a sizable portion of the utility routines that are used by virtually all Linux applications. A variant of glibc—known as Embedded glibc or EGLIBC—is not very well known outside of the embedded space, but that looks to be changing with the announcement that Debian will switch from glibc to EGLIBC.

Adobe Systems is today expected to release code for an environment to unify design and development, plus code and a major re-branding for its next Flash and AIR RIA tool. The company will that announce Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed Thermo, is available as a public beta. Accompanying Flash Catalyst is beta code for Flex Builder 4.0, the next version of Adobe's Eclipse-based IDE that's yielded to the marketing iron and emerged as Flash Builder.

Database vendor Ingres has teamed up with Red Hat to offer an open source developer stack with features intended to be comparable to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM or Oracle. The Ingres Development Stack for JBoss combines the Ingres database with Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This allows the development of Java applications and provides the middleware and database software to support those applications, Ingres said in an announcement.

Back in April, we looked at the Linux kernel patches for Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), a mechanism to verify the integrity of the kernel before booting it. Since that time, another version of the patchset has surfaced. The relatively few comments on the feature were largely concerned that there might be opposition to its inclusion—not because of technical considerations, but instead because of ethical concerns about what TXT could enable.

[Well, this should start a conversation or two.. - Scott]

The Swiss News Agency (SDA) reported on Thursday, 28 May, that the Swiss Federal Administrative Court had issued an immediately enforceable ruling ("Superprovisorische Verfügung") that stops the award of a large federal government order to Microsoft. The Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (BBL) had previously awarded an order to Microsoft for the extension of licences, maintenance and support worth 42 million Swiss francs, without putting it out to public tender. Many open-source firms – including the Linux suppliers Red Hat, Univention and Collax and the groupware specialists Zarafa and Open-Xchange – objected to this award procedure.

One of the most exciting developments in the last few years has been the application of some of the core ideas of free software and open source to completely different domains. Examples include open content, open access, open data and open science. More recently, those principles are starting to appear in a rather surprising field: that of government, as various transparency initiatives around the world start to gain traction.

A new release of Blender, the immensely popular open-source 3D modeling software, is now available. This is not the much-anticipated Blender 2.5 release, but instead version 2.49, which brings forth several prominent changes and improvements while the developers continue work on the next major release. As part of the 2.49 release, the Blender Game Engine (BGE) has also received improvements too.

The KDevelop team is proud to announce the third public beta of KDevelop4. This release includes some major new features, such as a new code-writing assistant, a new documentation plugin showing you the API docs for Qt and KDE APIs, a reworked Mercurial plugin and a rewrite of the classbrowser plugin. On top of that we improved stability a lot, made loads of small improvements throughout and fixed as many bugs as we could.

Industry titans Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are getting rave reviews this week about innovative new approaches to Internet search and communications, respectively. Even Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak told a reporter that Microsoft's new Bing search engine looks "astounding" and that he's "a big fan, now." There's much to like. In a nutshell, Bing does more to surface information you're probably looking for than Google does. For example, if you search for a company, one of the top results will present links to customer service, store locator -- that kind of information.

How difficult or easy is it to obtain one of the much-touted "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licences for Microsoft patents that are part of a technology like Mono? Judging by the frequency with which references are made to such licences by those who back Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza's bid to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, it's surprising that no-one has ever ventured to test this claim.

SourceForge Inc., which runs projects like the SourceForge.net open source software site and the Slashdot news site, is taking over the Ohloh open source directory.

Novell reported Thursday that its Linux Platform revenue climbed 25 percent year over year in the midst of one of the worst recessions in history. Talk about Linux swimming against the economic current.... Novell's problem is that outside its Linux Platform and Identity Management businesses, which both grew, its other lines of business stumbled -- Workgroup was down 14 percent, while Systems and Resource Management dropped 2 percent.