Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As I wrote a few days ago, I replaced Kubuntu and Ubuntu on several of my home PCs with PCLinuxOS and 64 Studio. I was intending to wait a couple of months to post a followup because long-term performance is what matters. But a few things have impressed me so much these two newcomers to my little computing empire deserve an extra mention.

I've written quite a bit about using Linux to help educate people. In the past, I've discussed using Linux to teach astronomy, programming and computer logic design. So today, I'm writing about using the KDE Interactive Geometry (Kig) program to teach mathematics. Kig allows you to use various tools to diagram and demonstrate different mathematical concepts. With Kig, you can draw points, lines, line segments, half lines, vectors, circles and various other conic sections. When Kig refers to a “half line”, it means what I was taught was a ray—essentially a line with one endpoint. Drawing hyperbolic curves on the computer sure beats getting dry-erase marker all over yourself or sneezing because of chalk dust.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.10, which is due out this October, Canonical and the Ubuntu developers hope to fix at least 100 "paper cuts" on the Ubuntu Linux desktop. Paper cuts are rather trivial usability bugs that are small, but in one way or another could impair the Linux desktop or increase the burden placed on a new Linux user ever so slightly.

One thing that I love about Linux (and Ubuntu) is that it is fully customizable and I can configure it to the way that I want it. Previously, I have already illustrated its flexibility by showing how you can transform Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid into Mac OS X. Today, let’s bring a step further and see how we can transform Kubuntu Jaunty to Windows 7 in 3 simple steps.

SourceForge is keenly aware of its roots in the open source community, and its strategies for growth encompass ways to better serve its base. Among its goals are a transformation of the Sourceforge.net Web site into "a world-class development environment," said Jon Sobel, SourceForge's group president of media.

The company providing technology to the US intelligence community has invested in an open-source firm to provide enterprise-search technology to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Will ARM-powered smartbooks make all the difference for Linux? There's no unanimity of opinion in the FOSS world, except perhaps the general agreement that the $200 units Freescale and Qualcomm debuted at Computex are, well, interesting. Unlike Windows, most Linux software is "only a recompile away from running on ARM," noted Slashdot blogger Peter Brett.

Currently, there's a lot of hype around Android on ARM-based netbooks, a type of netbook arriving later this year. However, despite the obvious choice for Android and other Linux systems, NVIDIA has openly stated their preference for... Windows CE. ARM and Asus are also quite sceptical about Android on ARM netbooks.

Last month, Eric Geier introduced us to an open source wireless mesh solution from Open-Mesh. In Part 1, we reviewed solution and configured the basic settings. In Part 2, we reviewed the captive portal options and set up the internal one. Now we're going to experiment with the CoovaOM captive portal. Then we'll touch on how to get Web filtering up on the mesh network. Finally, we'll install and test the system.

Coders have reacted with disappointment and frustration to Microsoft's decision to cease development of a connector to Oracle in its .NET Framework, a move that looks like another budget cut. Microsoft has said it will no longer develop OracleClient, or System.Data.OracleClient, with the the up-coming .NET Framework 4.0. It will still be included with the framework but will be "marked as deprecated."

The compact and flexible nature of the Linux Kernel, plus the fact that it and all its support code is modular open source, means it lends itself very well to stripped down small and efficient distributions. This article explores a few of these distributions and explains just how useful they can be

Linux kernel development continues to roar ahead, and 2.6.30 is cram-full of excellent new features: Tomoyo, the learning framework for SELinux, NILFS (new implementation of a log-structured file system), IEEE 802.11w enhanced wireless security, and fastboot, which is a speedier boot process in the kernel itself. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Xandros-owned email and groupware vendor Scalix released Scalix ActiveSync 1.0, a push email and synchronization add-on to Scalix Server that implements Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol for wireless message synchronization. Scalix also released Scalix Server 11.4.4, touted for its over 200 improvements.

Going back to 2007 we have been talking about Valve Software and Linux games after they were hiring software engineers to port Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Late last year we also got some confirmation of a Steam Linux client through some Linux shared libraries that had mistakenly shipped with the Left 4 Dead game client along with some other information we received through the grapevine. Well, now there may be another sign of impending Linux support by Valve Software. In fact, it's listed right on the Valve Software web-site!

Larry the Free Software Guy has strapped himself into the driver's seat in test-driving Fedora 11 on three different desktops -- GNOME, KDE and Xfce -- and the results range from reuniting with an old friend to receiving divine intervention.

While every Fedora fans enjoy the newly released Fedora 11 Linux-based operating system, the developers are working hard on the next release, Fedora 12, due for release in November-December 2009. Make sure you visit our website, starting with August 8th when the first alpha will be released, as we will do a full coverage of the Fedora 12 development process. Without any further introduction, let's have a look at the release schedule..

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel. This makes the quality of those aspects more apparent, so this tends to lead to an improvement of the quality.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality. The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

The PostgreSQL developers have published a first release candidate for version 8.4 of the free database system with a final version due later this month. The release candidate from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group includes a number of bug fixes to the previous beta release, including the elimination of some crashing bugs and changes in the handling of NULL values being passed to internal functions to prevent denial of service attacks.