Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KDE release train continues to roll, delivering another beta release of KDE 4.3 to you today. The effort has shifted towards increasing stability and adding polish to the codebase so our users will find a well-working KDE 4.3.0 on their desktops when it is released in late July.

Novell is considering making a one-click "open-source app store" for its upcoming Moblin-based OS for netbooks. The scheme is intended as a selling point for average users largely unfamiliar with free software alternatives outside a Microsoft platform. According to PC Pro, Novell believes baking an open-source software repository into the SUSE edition of Moblin will help sway more netbook users to uncheck the Windows option when buying their small, cheap computer.

Although it wasn't explicitly planned this way, a whole lot of the changes made in the new kernel version have an impact on file systems and data storage. There are, however, also plenty of changes elsewhere, for example faster booting, more efficient compression algorithms and hundreds of new and improved drivers.

Firefox 3.5 was originally intended to be Firefox 3.1; a fairly minor update with small fixes and improvements. But it took on a life of its own, and major work was accomplished in a short time. Sean Michael Kerner investigates how these happy accomplishments came about.

The shift among local organizations toward open source software (OSS) is driving more IT professionals to undergo additional training to equip themselves with the right skills. For example, Yuma Tejima, telecom manager for Asia at Genesys Conferencing, was keen on the Certificate of Performance in Enterprise Linux Administration (Copela) because his employer was preparing to move from SCO to the Red Hat Linux platform.

Google has announced the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) which allows Android users to write and run scripts in Python, Lua and BeanShell on an Android phone. Scripts have access to many of the Android APIs and are able to start activities, send text messages, make phone calls and read location and other sensor information.

At Research In Motion's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando last month, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of the BlackBerry maker candidly shared with ZDNet Asia's sister site, Silicon.com, about touchscreen devices, CIOs and the future of the BlackBerry.

The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia's Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's brand new conference intended to draw "the best and brightest...including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts," is still several months away. What isn't several months away, however, is the deadline for Early Bird registration — if you want to catch that worm, you'll have to get to running.

Asus was a Linux netbook pioneer, but now it's a Windows shop all the way. So what happened, and why is their new "It's Better With Windows" ad campaign so bizarre? Bruce Byfield tries to find out.

LXer Feature: 08-Jun-2009

Queries are the database equivalent of filters in a spreadsheet. Just as a filter can limit and reorganize the information displayed in a spreadsheet, so a query limits and reorganizes the information in a database. Either can be an efficient way of finding the information you want, especially when you're dealing with thousands of records.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A young woman in a white cocktail dress sat in a chair with a purple shawl wrapped around her head. She wore high heels, bulky brown sunglasses and a surgical mask. Moments later, the shawl and mask were ripped off and she sprang into song. A model’s floral fingernails tapping a computer with Microsoft Multi-Touch software, one of many touch-screen devices shown. It was all part of a musical revue by Micro-Star International celebrating the release of a new laptop. The rather eccentric display hardly seemed out of place at last week’s Computex trade show — the annual computer industry gala held here in Taiwan’s capital city. This year’s show signified the computer industry’s move far beyond traditional desktop and laptop PCs into more exotic devices. If dancing girls and loud music at an exhibitor’s booth helped attract attention to these strange new computers — or explain them — all the better.

After Christian Ehrlicher announced that he would step down from packaging and bug fixing for KDE on Windows, some articles were written which suggest that KDE on Windows is on hold now that the main developer has moved on. Even though KDE on Windows is only a small project and from the loss of one developer will be felt, we are far from dead. The Windows port has not been a one-man-project and many other people are still involved. KDE on Windows will continue to be developed and packages will continue to be made.

On May 18, the Linux Foundation announced that it had sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute protesting some provisions in the ALI's proposed principles to be applied to the law of software contracts. That was likely the first that many LWN readers had heard of this particular initiative - or, indeed, of the ALI in general. Your editor, being a masochistic sort of person, has plowed through all 305 pages of the principles (which were made official by the ALI on May 20) with an eye toward their effect on free software. What follows is a non-lawyerly summary of what he found.

Google has made some progress in porting its Chrome browser to the Linux and Mac platforms, though it acknowledged the test versions it's made available are still rough around the edges. Expanding Chrome's availability could open the door to Mac users as well as a potentially sizable population of Android-based netbook users.

ReactOS, the project to create a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has published another news update with some interesting news items. The legal position of the ReactOS Foundation has been strengthened, and now has a VeriSign certificate that might help other open source projects as well, the new ATA driver is more or less complete, and there's some progress in the area of video drivers.

Leading up to Computex, I heard a lot of hype about netbooks running Android and machines, about the size of a netbook, running an ARM-based processor like those used in most phones, rather than the traditional x86 processor used in most PCs. So, I walked around the show floor looking for such machines and came back pretty disappointed. For the most part, the PCs on display at Computex reflected a "Wintel" world. Every PC vendor showcased a wide variety of Windows machines, and most were really pushing Windows 7, following Microsoft's own push. I was looking for some Android-based netbooks but found only one, sitting in a glass box in Acer's booth. The netbook had just a static screen—and a small one at that—running on an older Aspire One netbook model, so it wasn't very impressive.

One of the points stressed at the MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2009 is that there need not be a battle between the open-source software (OSS) group and its proprietary-software counterpart. Gery Messer, vice-president of technology solutions in Asia Pacific and Japan for open-source Linux distribution vendor Red Hat, said the two types of software can co-exist, possibly drawing on each other’s strengths.

A beta version of StormOS has emerged, which is a desktop distribution that is based upon the Nexenta Core Platform that in turn is derived from OpenSolaris but with an Ubuntu user-land. The StormOS project emerged out of the an OpenSolaris user being dissatisfied with the slow pace of OpenSolaris on netbooks and preferring the APT packaging system to Sun's Image Packaging System. The beta version of StormOS is shipping with an Xfce 4 desktop and -- unlike the current releases of OpenSolaris -- even ships with a word processor.