Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Earcandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, which for me is probably the first thing that i ever liked about pulse audio. This volume manager could mute music in your amarok or rhythombox or literally any music player when you play some video in youtube(i am not lying) or VLC or other video players. Mute is not the right word, but instead the music slowly fades away, and the sound from video player fades in. Sounds promising eh? But it is much better than you think.

Mobile content retailer, Mobile Streams, today opened a Center of Excellence for smartphone research and development in Hong Kong which it says will work on the development of new applications for the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android.

The saga of the GCC runtime library has been covered here a couple of times in the past. The library's license is a legal hack which tries to accomplish a set of seemingly conflicting goals. The GCC runtime library (needed by almost all GCC-compiled programs) is licensed under GPLv3; that notwithstanding, the Free Software Foundation wants this library to be usable by proprietary programs - but only if no proprietary GCC plugins have been used in the compilation process. The runtime library exception published by the FSF appears to have accomplished those objectives. But now it seems that, perhaps, the GCC runtime licensing has put distributors into a difficult position.

A new survey by the Public Sector Forums in the U.K. on public financing of IT costs was based on a sample of 168 local authorities.

Text versions of the presentations given at the Linux Symposium 2009 are now available as a PDF file. They provide wide-ranging information on current and future Linux kernel-related developments. The spectrum ranges from profiling using Ftrace, through recent changes to the PCI subsystem intended to make suspend and standby more robust, to the latest developments, such as topology patches, in 2.6.31 and the Kernel Shared Memory infrastructure planned for 2.6.32.

Business software maker VMware Inc has agreed to buy privately held SpringSource for $420 million, its biggest-ever acquisition, to beef up a portfolio of programs that help companies run data centers. VMware said on Monday the deal would hurt non-GAAP profitability through at least 2010, but not have material impact on 2009 revenue.

With its novel package manager, Slax makes it simple to install new software and easy to build your own distributions. Ideally, building a custom Linux distribution would be as simple as burning a CD. In practice, though, the process is more complex, typically requiring the expertise of a developer or system administrator. Slax is a notable exception.

Most Linux distributions have 64-bit versions for x86_64 processors, such as the AMD Athlon II or the Intel Xeon. Since these distributions maintain their own package repositories, they usually provide binary packages for all of their supported applications. If you are completely content with your out-of-box Linux installation, you may never need to run a 32-bit program. Some commercial Linux software, particularly games, only provide 32-bit versions. In these rare cases, you will need to configure your 64-bit machine to run 32-bit software.

I am of XO For All and over the next few posts, I will explain my initial enthusiasm for One Laptop Per Child, and why I have lost that enthusiasm and stopped updating XOforall.com I became enthusiastic and optimistic with One Laptop Per Child and the XO Laptop headed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT ever since I first heard of the project back in 2005. How could I not be? It had a noble goal, it was tangible, and it had some very bright people behind it.

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That's one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it's just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. "If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux," challenges blogger Robert Pogson, "let them step up."

VMware said Monday that it will pay US$420 million for privately held SpringSource in a bid to become a bigger player in cloud computing application management and the open source community.

Yahoo! is losing the founder of Hadoop, that increasingly popular open source grid platform based on Google's proprietary software infrastructure. On September 1, after three and a half years with Yahoo!, Doug Cutting will join Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop startup that launched earlier this year. As reported by the New York Times, Cutting announced his departure from Yahoo! this morning at a company meeting.

Robots can be about as complex a machine as you're ever likely to encounter, but roboticists spend a lot of time solving mundane problems that have already been solved countless times by other robot makers. A recent New Scientist article documents the efforts of researchers around the globe that have begun to collaborate on the Robot Operating System (ROS), which they hope will provide a common platform for robot research, letting its users concentrate on advancing the state of the art instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sun's Glynn Foster has announced today on the OpenSolaris Forums that they will be discontinuing the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) builds. For quite some time now, Sun has been providing bi-weekly updates of the latest (Open)Solaris code in the form of an ISO for those interested in testing out the latest work on this operating system.

Since KDE 4.3 has been released, various reviews have appeared on the web. The DOT had a look at some of them. Polishlinux once again offers an extensive review with many screenshots showing what is new in KDE 4.3. According to Korneliusz Jarz?bski, "Finally the day has come, when the curiosity about the KDE4.3 development branch took the better of me.".

The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) invites participants to the Real-Time Linux Foundation Workshop from September 28 through 30 in Dresden, Germany. Well-known names such as Jonathan Corbet will be present.

In a long posting on the Debian mailing list, Ubuntu sponsor Mark Shuttleworth sets out his position in the dispute over bringing a fixed development cycle to Debian's GNU/Linux distribution. Shuttleworth points out that he has long advocated a model of synchronisation between the various releases of Linux distributions which are based on the same versions of the same core components.

Four years ago, I wrote an article about OpenOffice.org writer called "Fielding Questions, Part 2 - Cross References and User-Defined Fields." I regularly receive mail about it, but these days I have to preface each reply by explaining that the article is obsolete. Repeating the explanation gets old quickly, so I decided that an update is necessary.

Linux offers a wealth of graphical environments to choose from, from lean barebones window managers to massive colorful desktops full of applications and special effects. Which one is for you? Bruce Byfield compares XFCE, KDE, and Gnome.

Verona is about to become famous for more than just Romeo and Juliet and opera: the university of the romantic Italian city is migrating 4000 of its desktops to Linux and open source.