Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Conflicts in the Open Source world — as in the proprietary world — are hardly a surprising phenomenon. Indeed, our community can't even agree over what to call one of its most popular projects — a fight we have no interest in entering, particularly not here. What is perhaps more surprising is when these disputes escalate like a deleted scene from Fatal Attraction — escalate so far that the powers-that-be must intervene.

Astro_Mike's tweets from space may be few and far between, but astronauts are known for saying a lot in a few words. Fans of Astro_Mike are hanging onto every character, it seems -- his feed was the fifth most popular on the the microblogging site on Thursday. His latest gem: "From orbit: Rendezvous and grapple were great, getting ready for our first spacewalk."

There is a lot of demand for making Google's App Engine web application hosting platform accessible to more programming languages and frameworks. Originally launched supporting only the Python language, Google recently announced that App Engine would also support Java programs. Now, developers are adding support for that platform to their JVM based languages and frameworks. The developers of the Grails web framework have announced that the framework's latest version 1.1.1 officially supports the hosting platform.

The next Ubuntu should see improved video performance, along with updates to the underlying Linux and open-source infrastructure. A change in the video architecture has been revealed as the Ubuntu development team released alpha code for the next, planned edition: Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala.

A report by the Washington Post claims China is equipping all of its government and military PCs with a version of the Kylin operating system to make hacking attempts by foreign intelligence services more difficult. The information about the highly secure operating system was made public during a US China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing in late April. In addition to the secure operating system, the computers will also contain a special microprocessor to prevent attacks.

Does FOSS need a common packaging framework? It's an unnecessary waste of time, argued opponents. It will save developers loads of time, insisted proponents. It's irrelevant, chimed in Slashdot blogger hairyfeet: "The problem with Linux is NOT the packages, it is the fact that trying to develop for Linux is like trying to hit a dartboard with a live bumblebee."

Another month has passed, and it's time to present the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.1. Besides the usual amount of bugfixes it also features some useful user interface improvements, for example the Context View has received some artistic love. More attention has been paid to detail and with the useful feedback from usability testing, tweaks have been made. From having the escape key clear the search box to standardizing the behaviour of the collection tree view to follow your KDE settings, the quirks are being ironed out. Check the release notes and grab your copy of Amarok for some testing and help us find and fix the remaining bugs before the release of Amarok 2.1.

Dell is shipping Windows and Linux editions of the new Mini 10v notebook at the same time, with intentions to announce a wireless carrier for the fancier Mini 10.

A well-known Linux analyst has published a blog saying that Linux is failing in the once-promising netbook market. Bill Weinberg's blog in LinuxPundit paints a bleak picture for Linux on netbooks this year, while a CNET story suggests that netbooks in general are seeing high returns.

Microsoft has unveiled a toolkit for PHP developers building open-source applications that help fluff its planned Azure cloud. PHPAzure is a software development kit (SDK) for programming to both Windows Azure and the underlying SQL-like Windows Azure Storage service's blobs, tables, and queues. PHPAzure is an open-source project developed with RealDolmen and hosted on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

The Open Database Alliance (ODA) has been launched. The consortium, founded by Monty Program AB, the company created by MySQL founder Monty Widenius, and MySQL specialists Percona, has been created as a focal point for all companies, organisations and individuals with an interest in MySQL and the future development of the open source database.

Ivan Krsti?, the former director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has joined Apple. In 2007, at the age of 21, Krsti? was cited as a Young Innovator by the MIT Technology Review. While working for the OLPC initiative, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for self-education, Krsti? designed the Bitfrost security specification. He believes that the OLPC Bitfrost system is a fool-proof way to defeat malware attacks and that it "defeats the entire purpose of writing a virus".

If you've ever used fillable PDF forms, you've probably noticed that you can't save a copy of the form once it has been filled in. Being sneaky, you probably might try to print the form to a file (PostScript) and then use ps2pdf to convert it to a PDF. But, this doesn't work either, because ghostscript gives you an error saying the file can't be redistilled. This article shows you how to protect your own PostScript using the same technique.

VMware has signed an agreement with Dimension Data which it says is a step towards meeting a rising demand for virtualization technology skills amidst a shortage of IT skills in the Australian market.

The Fedora 11 preview release announcement went out on April 28. Around the world, Fedora users responded by downloading, testing, pondering the ext4 filesystem, and generally feeling a little "jaunty" themselves. One Fedora developer, though, had a moderately strange response which might be a little hard to understand out of its full context:

I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Can you turn it up a bit? What do you mean, it won't go any louder? The _last_ release used to go louder."

Anybody who has been sufficiently distant from the disturbance on the fedora-devel mailing list can be forgiven for wondering what is going on here. In short: changes to the PulseAudio volume control widget shipped in Fedora 11 have made it hard for some users to get sound out of their systems in the manner to which they have become accustomed, and they're not happy about it.

Earlier this week we delivered benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.04 versus Mac OS X 10.5.6 and found that the Leopard operating system had performed better than the Jaunty Jackalope in a majority of the tests, at least when it came to Ubuntu 32-bit. We are back with more operating system benchmarks today, but this time we are comparing the performance of the Linux and Sun OpenSolaris kernels. We had used the Nexenta Core Platform 2 operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU/Ubuntu user-land to that of the same Ubuntu package set but with the Linux kernel. Testing was done with both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu server installations.

The Android smartphone platform is poised to grow nine times over by year's end, if new predictions from Strategy Analytics are correct. While that growth rate may dwarf those of heavies like Apple and RIM, Android's base is presently much smaller. Even with dramatic growth, will Android sales ever approach BlackBerry or iPhone numbers?

Sun Microsystems has released the OpenSolaris programme for CommunityOne West. The event, which aims to bring together students, developers and decision-makers to talk about open source issues, will take place in San Francisco from the 1st to the 3rd of June. Begining with the presentation of the latest version 2009.06 of OpenSolaris, the event will have over 70 sessions.

It has been two or three weeks since we were last presented with a new display driver from NVIDIA for Linux, whether it be in their 180.xx or 185.xx series, a stable release, a beta release, or any of their legacy driver updates. This timespan is quite long compared to the past few months where they have released as many as five Linux drivers per month.

The SystemRescueCD developers have announced the release of version 1.2.0 of their Linux distribution. The latest release of this lean system, mainly intended for administrative tasks, such as recovering data after a system crash, includes a wide range of software updates.