Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Canonical has begun beta-testing a file-synchronization service called Ubuntu One for its Ubuntu Linux desktop operating system. The closed beta test began Monday for invited members of the Ubuntu user community, with further testers able to sign up by requesting an invitation, Canonical said. Ubuntu One offers file synchronization for systems running Ubuntu 9.04, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, and is intended to be available to the general public in time for the launch of Ubuntu 9.10, code-named Karmic Koala, in October, Canonical said.

Several weeks ago, we saw a burst of news around memcached, an increasingly popular open-source caching software framework gaining attention from web companies and investors. Gear6 announced details of a new memcached-based product, and Schooner Information Technologies launched a set of memory-dense appliances, one targeted to MySQL, one to memcached. These announcements coincided with the MySQL Conference, as some see MySQL as the killer application for memcached, or perhaps vice versa. Other companies coming out of the woodwork around memcached include NorthScale, which has released no news as of yet except a shingle-sized web site introducing its capabilities.

When working on the TCO analysis of some large scale deployments of ICTs in developing countries I was really concerned with a main impediment to the use in most schools in many rural areas: the availability of electricity. In many countries low cost devices could make a significant difference in education in rural and isolated areas. But of course, most of these areas in developing countries don't have grid electricity, and won't have for many years to come as the infrastructure needed is just too expensive.

Microsoft has defended itself against criticism over aggressive marketing techniques in Africa to win people over to its software. “Despite the wealth of information that gets around, it's sad that sometimes reality has a hard time catching up with perception,” said Dr Cheikh Modibo Diarra, chairman of Microsoft in Africa. “I think that that perception comes from the fact that we are very successful because wherever we are, we are competing respectfully and openly; you can verify that everywhere," he told the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme. For Dr Diarra, one problem alone defines Africa's situation. “Technology wise, African needs can be summarised in one word: access," he said.

In most Linux distro (including Ubuntu), the keyboard combo Ctrl + Alt + Backspace is often used as a shortcut key to restart X. However, in Ubuntu Jaunty, this keyboard shortcut was disabled, “to reduce issues experienced by users who accidentally trigger the key combo”, as quoted by Ubuntu. I don’t know how many people will find this a welcome improvement in Ubuntu. Personally, this has caused me a lot of inconvenience as I always depend on it to get myself out of a nasty crash.

May 13 VideoLAN announced and made ready for download the release candidate of its VLC Media Player 1.0. The new version supports more codecs and provides numerous enhancements.

This interview with Red Hat Community Architect Greg Dekoenigsberg is a continuation of the LQ Community Manager Interview Series. I'd like to thank Greg for taking the time to answer these questions.

Over the years, Adobe has become more Linux friendly. First, Adobe released an excellent version of its Flash Player for Linux, and, more recently, the company launched a version of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for Linux. Now, however, with Strobe, its just announced Flash framework, Adobe looks like it may be getting more open-source friendly as well. Strobe, which will show up in the 3rd quarter of 2009, is an open framework for creating SWF (ShockWave Flash) server-side players. With Strobe, content creators and Web developers will be able to easily create sites that host their own video.

Open source has become big business, suggests an article in the Investors Business Daily, but it has done so by becoming more like the proprietary-software world it purports to leave behind. The article cites recent research from IDC indicating that CIOs allocated up to 24 percent of their budgets to open-source software in 2008, up from 10 percent in 2007--a finding that jibes with recent data from Forrester. This open-source growth is propelling Red Hat to grow "at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multiyear horizon," according to research from Piper Jaffray.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am huge fan of Linux and open source. This is perhaps why I get so frustrated with the US health care industry and its general lack of interoperability. I could use many standards as an example, however, for this discussion I’m using the ASTM Continuity of Care Record (CCR) as an example. Now I’m not picking on the CCR. The format is XML (good), and while there is always room for improvement, I think the general structure is reasonable and workable. I’d also point out that David Kibbe and Steven Waldren, two keep champions for the CCR, have always been nice and helpful any time I’ve asked a question on the list serve. I’m using the CCR as example just because the barrier to access is so low ($100). Much of the following is summarized from an inquiry I made to the CCR list serve about a year ago.

As expected, Adobe patched a zero-day vulnerability in its popular Adobe Reader software Tuesday, marking the second time in three months that it delivered an update on the same day Microsoft issued its monthly fixes. But while Microsoft's PowerPoint patch received lots of attention, the Adobe update should be at the top of people's to-do list, a security expert said today. "Adobe's is more important than Microsoft's," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys. "Even though Microsoft's had more visibility, if you have to choose between the two, you should patch Adobe. [Reader] is pretty much everywhere, attackers are increasing exploiting it and [PDF] is a widely-used corporate format."

Written by award-winning author Keir Thomas, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a totally unique and concise guide for everyday Ubuntu use. It's the world's most popular Ubuntu book, with over half a million readers (and rising!)....The PDF Edition (eBook) is entirely free of charge and is identical to the Print Edition.

Columbia, MO - Students studying journalism at Missouri University are being told they must buy an iPhone or iPod from this fall. According to the University's website, "Effective Fall 2009, students majoring in Journalism at Missouri are required to have either an iPod Touch (the minimum requirement) or iPhone to allow for the delivery of freshman-orientation information as well as course material. Students will electronically download such material to either of those devices from iTunes University, a no-cost component of the iTunes Store.

Dear Asus, I write to you as a customer of your Eee PC line of computers. I'd never really considered buying any of your hardware up until you released your Eee PC line of products. When I discovered that the Eee 701 was pre-loaded with (Xandros) Linux and came pre-configured with all the usual applications that I am familiar with on my Linux Desktop I was delighted.

I'm puzzled. Desktop Linux, for the first time ever, has at least 1% of the desktop market. Linux probably has considerably more than that. So, why is Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst Matt Kohut claiming that Linux has no future on netbooks? Could it be because, as Kohut said, "there were a lot of returns because people didn't know what to do with it." Really? That's odd. Most of the time, you have to ask for Linux by name. Of the big name computer companies only Dell makes it easy to choose Linux and even at Dell, you really should head straight to Dell's Ubuntu Linux site or you can spend a lot of time looking for it.

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. oFono Architecture - Ofono.org

Your editor has long been a user of the Tomboy note-taking tool. Tomboy makes it easy to gather thoughts, organize them, and pull them up on demand; it is, beyond doubt, a useful productivity tool. But all is not perfect with Tomboy. Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility. So now, of course, people are complaining about Gnote instead.

Linux users should soon be able to use USB-connected monitors that incorporate DisplayLink's chips. DisplayLink has released Linux versions of its USB monitor source code under LGPL, and has partnered with Novell and the Linux Driver Project to develop drivers for desktops and mobile devices.

The next kernel version is to provide all that's necessary to convert, for example, a RAID 5 into a RAID 6 and vice versa. There are changes to the block layer designed to speed up the system, and new and improved drivers will offer better SAS support.

In the first piece in this series we looked at the role schedulers play in I/O optimization. But how do you actually select and tune a scheduler to increase I/O performance in practice? Paul Rubens shows us why and how.