Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you're thinking of upgrading from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7, why not give Linux a try? Matt Hartley ponders the pros and cons of both platforms, the relative pain of making a change, and the economic incentives for continuing to favor a buggy, insecure platform.

The recent problem with prelink in Fedora Rawhide has led some to wonder about what advantages pre-linking actually brings—and whether those advantages outweigh the pain it can cause. Pre-linking can reduce application start up time—and save some memory as well—but there are some downsides; not least the possibility of an unbootable system as some Rawhide users encountered. The advantages are small enough, or hard enough to completely quantify, that it leads to questions about whether it is justified as the default for Fedora.

As it strives to replace email, Google has open sourced two chunks of its new-age communications platform, Google Wave. Unveiled to a standing coder ovation at the Google I/O developer conference in late May, Google Wave is a (still-gestating) web platform that crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing, exhibiting a particular talent for near real-time interaction. Hoping to promote its use across the net, Google intends to open source the platform's underlying protocol and the "lion's share" of its client and server code.

Multitail improves on the well-known and useful program tail, adding colors and multiple-file monitoring. Juliet Kemp offers some great tips on using this excellent file-monitoring utility.

While NVIDIA's driver engineers are hard at work on the 190.xx driver series, which among other features does bring OpenGL 3.2 support, for those living by the stable releases there is a new driver that's out today. The NVIDIA 185.18.29 Linux driver was uploaded to NVIDIA's FTP server this morning and does bring a number of changes as listed in their official release highlights.

Recently I profiled the latest LiVES video editing system, and in that article I mentioned that I intended to buy a camcorder for use with LiVES and other video editing software. Since then I purchased a Samsung SC-D382 midiDV recorder. Studio Dave is now on its way to becoming Studio DV.

Android developers looking forward to the inclusion of multi-touch support in the upcoming release of Google's open source mobile operating system, code named "Donut", will need to wait even longer. It was previously believed that Donut, which would see a final release as Android version 2.0, would include the much anticipated multi-touch gesture support. In a post on Google Groups, Android developer Romain Guy has announced that the Donut release won't include multi-touch.

Raise your hand if you've ever used a credit card. Now, raise your hand if you love Linux. There must be octopi in the audience, because that's a lot of hands. For those who were waving wildly on both counts, the good news out of the Linux Foundation today is that now you can take your favorite penguin along every time you feel the need to shout "Charge it!"

Novell has announced the launch of the SUSE Appliance Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). With the Appliance Program, ISVs can can create software appliances, such as an email server for a small office, using SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE and SUSE Studio, test their appliances and get them to the market.

The Meta Cloud is one step closer to meta-reality. Last week, at OSCON, a San Jose startup known as Cloudkick unveiled an open source project that hopes to provide a single programming interface for a host of so-called infrastructure clouds, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers, Slicehost, and GoGrid. Dubbed libcloud, the project reaches for a world where developers can build an app that's easily shuttled from one cloud to another. You might call it The Meta Cloud API.

Google's revelation that it will create its own operating system will bring just one reaction from operating system enthusiasts worldwide. "Not another Linux distribution," they'll cry. They'll say this because if there is one problem that the Linux and open source community has suffered repeatedly over the past two decades, it's been fragmentation. It was bad enough that the Unix operating system fragmented repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s. Systems administrators (like myself, earlier this decade) were forced to learn several different platforms: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD...the list was always growing longer.

Leonidas (either named after the king of Sparta who led his troops to victorious annihilation in the Peloponnese or the chain of chocolate shops), is the 11th release of the Fedora operating system. Along the way there have been a few duds, but in recent times Fedora has been really delivering on its promise of the four Fs: "Freedom, Friends, Features, First". Fedora 10 was a rock-steady release that introduced a slew of new features, and Leonidas is promising more of the same.

Three months after Google released an "early look" at version 1.5 of its Android mobile operating system, a newer version has made its way into the eager hands of developers. Dubbed Donut, the new alpha version brings a raft of new features to 'Droiders. As demoed at the Google I/O conference back in May, when Donut is fully baked - or, more appropriately, deep-friend - it will include system-wide search that can also be accessed by handwriting gestures, text-to-speech, and an API that supports integration with Google Voice Search. MobileCrunch also uncovered screenshots that appear to indicate CDMA and VPN support.

With our international program still developing, technological kinks being worked out, and our local teacher and University students still exploring and researching ways for the XO's to be integrated into the California 3rd grade curriculum, we have not yet done extensive documentation and created a resource model. We have been conducting sit-in observations of the class, and working with the teacher to understand his needs, concerns, and ideas for the future.

In this final part of our series on laying out a book with OpenOffice.org, you will learn how to position illustrations in your book, how to use paragraph styles, and how to export in different formats. What you will take away from this is one method that has worked for me and many other people. At the end of this post, I will provide links for further study on the subject.

If you're feeling a little dizzy, maybe it's because you marched in circles too long on Pi Approximation Day. Or perhaps your head is spinning over the news that Microsoft donated about 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux kernel. Or it could be that DRM has you shaking your head back and forth in violent frustration. Just don't go pounding it against the nearest wall.

For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.

The winners of the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at this years OSCON. Over 47,000 open source projects were nominated for this years Community Choice Awards and 85 finalists were selected across twelve categories.

Eric Geier introduces the Untangle Gateway, a Linux-based user-friendly Internet shield that provides a firewall, ad-blocking, anti-malware, protocol control, secure VPN, WAN balancing and failover, and other advanced and essential services for safely navigating the big bad Internet.

Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. Yahoo's request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last week in the on-again-off-again talks. But they were revived late on Thursday, according to executives with knowledge of the situation.