Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Photographers in the Free world rejoice! On behalf of the Digikam developer team, Gilles Caullier has announced the first KDE 4 release of Digikam, the photo management application.

The first beta of Mozilla's Fennec mobile web browser has been released for Nokia's N810 Internet Tablets running OS2008 ("Maemo"). The beta is the twelfth development milestone and is intended to get feedback from users, testers and Web developers. The Fennec team also want to encourage add-on developers to port their existing add-ons and create new ones for the mobile browser.

Tux, the Linux penguin mascot, will be taking a break during the Linux 2.6.29 kernel cycle. Committed to the Linus's kernel tree last night is a new temporary logo known as Tuz. Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil, which is a species in danger of becoming extinct. The Tasmanian Devil is native to Australia and during this year's Linux.Conf.Au conference it was decided that Tuz will stand in for Tux for one kernel release in order to raise awareness for this creature. Tux will return with the release of the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.

The server market is shaping into a Linux vs. Windows battle as UNIX declines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is strong and growing. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), backed by Novell, should also be strong and growing, but it isn't as it continues the Novell tradition of continually getting whipped by Microsoft. Does SLES even have a reason to exist?

Gnome fans are today looking forward to the release of Gnome 2.26, the latest release of the popular desktop environment. New Gnome releases are always worthy of attention, particularly as they become the face of popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora in the following months, but as a long-time user of Gnome there does seem to be less to be excited about than ever before. Sure, there are changes to the Gnome Media Player and some new icons and a little bit more polish, but it’s not the stuff that will have users falling over themselves to download a copy.

Linux is losing ground on the netbook front, but there lies opportunity for it in smaller, dedicated Internet-enabled appliances, said an Ovum analyst. Laurent Lachal, open source research director at the U.K.-based analyst firm, said in a research note, Linux is not doing as well in terms of market share, compared to when it made its debut on the netbook market.

CompuLabs is a month from shipping what may be the smallest, most energy-efficient PC ever. The Fit-PC2 is based on an Atom processor up to 1.6GHz, and can be ordered with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed on a 160GB SATA drive or SSD.

Medscribbler electronic medical record (EMR) uses handwriting recognition on a Tablet PC for a HIPAA compliant computerized medical practice and document management solution. CEOMike writes: We are about to release in this coming quarter Medscribbler Open Source, initially on Sourceforge, which will have both code and compiled downloads Screen shots, videos and no obligation online demos are available

The current economic downturn is set to drive Linux adoption, according to a white paper by research organization IDC. In a survey of 330 organizations with 100 or more employees, IDC found that 53 percent were planning to increase adoption of Linux on servers, while 48 percent were planning to increase Linux on clients, as a direct result of the economic climate. The survey was conducted in February, and the white paper published on Monday.

The chief executive of HTC said his company, which was the first to launch an Android phone with the G1, will roll out at least three more this year. The HTC Magic is one; it's scheduled to be sold by Vodafone in Europe. What the others are isn't quite clear yet.

With all the talk about newspapers worldwide facing financial pressures, the time now is right for tools that can be used to move newspaper content online. One such tool is Campsite, a open source content management system for print publications which this week announced a major new release.

A week ago at Phoronix we published an interview with the developers of FFmpeg (well, just three of their active developers) where topics from OpenCL to their release cycle to multi-threading support were discussed. Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain also talked about their version 0.5 milestone.

An IDC surveyPDF of IT decision makers suggests that the economic crisis is promoting the use of Linux in companies. A total of 330 decision makers in Western Europe, America and Asia responded to the Novell commissioned survey, which shows that a good half of the firms questioned are already using Linux servers.

On Friday, I received an article that was published by C|NET and reprinted on CNN entitled California lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth. I spent the weekend driving around my county with a set of maps and a GPS device, plotting and ground truthing a variety of sites where we can put operators for an upcoming drill and I finally got around to reading the article and it really has me wondering if Assemblyman Anderson has taken leave of his senses.

Low-cost and lower-power don't mean you have to settle for second-best; open source and netbooks go together like milk and cookies. Cynthia Harvey has 21 open-source ways to turn a netbook into a tiny, productive powerhouse.

The Android platform has sorely needed an application that opens Word and Excel documents, and QuickOffice is the first to offer one. It lacks editing capabilities, as well as the ability to view PowerPoint files, and it doesn't support ODF either. Still, it's got promise.

Following two release candidates, the official version 2.3 of the open source Ruby on Rails web framework has now been released. Although David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, had originally said in 2007 that there would now only be evolutionary changes in Rails, version 2.2, with its introduction of i18n API, multithreading and experimental support for Ruby 1.9, was a comprehensive release and now version 2.3 introduces further substantial changes.

Novell's SUSE Linux appears to be one of the more popular versions of the open-source OS for netbooks, but it does not work on ARM-based devices and Novell said it did not have plans to support the chips.

Recently we’ve seen some surprising comments about Red Hat’s stand on software patents and, in particular, about one of its patent applications related to the AMQP specification. It looks like clarification is called for. Our views and our position, as expressed in our work for patent reform, our Patent Promise, and our work with the AMQP project, have not changed.

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost. The XenSource developers often showed little interest in getting their code into the mainline, and attempts by others to get that job done ran into no end of obstacles. So Xen stayed out of the mainline for years; the first public Xen release happened in 2003, but the core Xen code was only merged for 2.6.23 in October, 2007.