Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There are a variety of package managers available for different Linux distributions. Mandriva uses urpmi; Debian and Ubuntu use apt. Fedora and Red Hat use yum, while Gentoo uses portage. Some distributions provide support for more than one package manager as well. This week, we take a look at yum, or Yellowdog Updater Modified. Yum is written in python and has been in use with Fedora and Red Hat for many years. Yum has been proven to work, and despite some criticism as to its speed in comparison to other package mangers, it does the job, even if it is a little bit slower.

Yes, it's apparently another netbook today on OSNews. Netbooks were supposed to become the major foot in the door, but as soon as Microsoft got off its fat bum and started offering Windows XP to netbook OEMs, the popularity among OEMs of Linux has dwindled; when the netbook surge started, Linux was the operating system of choice among OEMs, but now, the Windows version comes first, and the Linux version later - if at all. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin basically tells OEMs: "Yer doing it wrong".

Linux sound software has been the foundation of my music studio since the late 1990s, but as we all know, that software won't produce so much as a peep without the right hardware. Setting up a stable Linux system for audio production can be problematic enough, and the wrong decision about your hardware can render your otherwise powerful system mute and tuneless. This article briefly describes some of the audio production hardware I've acquired and employed here at Studio Dave during the last ten years. I hope that my readers find this information helpful when making their own decisions about their audio hardware purchases.

More than 100 people showed up for Saturday's Rewired State, held at the Guardian's Kings Cross offices (and to meetings in Brighton and Manchester), to prove that they could do a better job than the government of making government information usable by the public.

Originally from Cape Town, Stevan Lockhart now lives in the north west of Scotland in a house that is off the electricity grid. Using a wind generator, some solar panels and free and open source software he and his wife both run their businesses off just 20W of power. Here Stevan explains the software and hardware decisions that made this lifestyle possible.

Version 9.3 of the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from AMD, known as Catalyst or "fglrx", will be the last to support the R300, R400 and R500 series GPUs, used for example on Radeon models 9500 to X1950. In distinction to the Windows drivers, which are also losing support for older graphic chips, AMD plans no further maintenance for a legacy series of the Linux drivers. So AMD staff are advising Linux users who have such Radeon GPUs to change over to the open source drivers "radeon" or "radeonhd".

If you work with open source software, you have less to worry about in the current economic downturn, according to John Todd of Digium — the company behind the Asterisk telephony platform. Todd presented his ideas at SCALE in Los Angeles, arguing that many of the same factors that put jobs and revenue at risk in the proprietary software industry actually benefit open source projects and, by extension, provide job security for developers, implementers, and consultants who work with open source.

LXer Feature: 10-Mar-2009

With the introduction of the EeePC and the Aspire One I was in love.. Originally I just had to have the Asus, but with the great deal Walmart was offering on Black Friday (yeah, I know but I bought the Acer at Wallyworld) I decided to buy an Aspire One as well. Let me tell you about 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' of these two machines.

Like a plus-sized dress on a skinny runway model, Windows just doesn't fit when it's loaded on a netbook. So entrepreneurs are taking a page from the fashion industry playbook, and creating new operating systems that are tailored exclusively to fit the smaller, less powerful and inexpensive netbooks. At least four new operating systems are in the works, all promising to offer a better experience to users struggling with tiny Windows icons on their 10-inch laptops.

The SCO Group has filed an appeal against last years ruling that it did not buy the copyright to Unix from Novell. The company is hoping to overturn the judgement and resume its legal action against IBM and Linux. When SCO started to pursue IBM in court in 2003, Novell said that when it sold its Unix business to SCO in 1995 it retained copyright to the code and merely sold SCO a licence to use it. SCO then sued Novell over that claim.

Mozilla Labs has released an experimental Firefox extension that brings new functionality to blank tab pages. The Mozilla developers aim to use the extension as a prototype for exploring blank tab features that could potentially be included by default in future versions of the browser. The extension, which was released last week, takes advantage of some of the browser's most recent improvements and is designed to be used with the latest Firefox nightly builds. Mozilla design expert Aza Raskin explained the new project in a blog post at the Mozilla Labs web site. The goal is to add some lightweight navigation elements that are useful, unobtrusive, and quick to load.

Bloggers and their readers continued to pick apart the finer details of Microsoft's case against TomTom over FAT file system licensing. What they found seemed to indicate a greater effort underway at Microsoft to undercut open source software.

The release of the very nice Asus Eee PC 1000HE signals a turning point in the sub-notebook market and it's one that Linux desktop advocates will not like. It looks like the 10 inch netbook has hit the sweet spot for consumers and that sweet spot includes Windows but not Linux.

Numerous irrelevant issues and feelings about them are ventilated in comments on the case. However, there are only two important issues. One is what the law is, the other is what we think the law should be.

Plans to introduce modular features in Windows 7 have been welcomed by the European Commission's former Microsoft monitoring trustee. Windows Features allows users to turn off applications such as Media Centre, Media Player and Internet Explorer. Professor Neil Barrett said this would help promote effective competition.

I've turned off the "build" option because ...... the order queue met the "price scaling fulcrum point" (how's that for sesquipedalian pleonasticity ?) :-) In other words, there's now over 50 Illuminato slot pre-orders, which means that starting on Monday, I'm going to start placing all the orders for parts and building them up - Thanks!

Well, not quite. In fact, it’s been darn cold this week in the Mid-Atlantic USA, with lows down in the single digits Fahrenheit, wind chills below zero. But nevertheless, change is in the air — in this case, the Fedora trademark guidelines. But before I get to talking about those, I wanted to give a nod to Joe Brockmeier, with whom I’ve talked about this subject before. Joe and I share an interest in doing tough grindstone work to enable communities, and one of the things that gets in the way sometimes is the long arm of the law — in this case, trademark law. That’s one reason why I started working last summer with Red Hat Legal to revise our trademark guidelines.

A New York State Assembly bill intends to give open source developers the opportunity to offset 20 per cent of their development expenses, up to a maximum of $200, against tax. The bill summary explains that the New York parliament considerably reduces its costs by using open source software "such as Mozilla for email, Firefox for web browsing and WebCal for electronic calendars".

LXer Feature: 08-Mar-2009

In this week's LXWR we have more news coming to light on the Microsoft vs. TomTom suit, fat free XFCE, going back to dial-up to save some cash, news and opinions on netbooks, Flock ditches Firefox for Chrome, Linux gets put to the Mom test and much much more.

Last September, LWN pointed out the OpenBTS project, which is working toward the creation of a free GSM base station using GNU Radio and Asterisk. OpenBTS had just been demonstrated through the creation of a cellular network at Burning Man. More recently your editor, who had been looking in other directions, was surprised to learn that the OpenBTS developers are not allowed to tell anybody where to get the source from, despite the fact that it is available as free software. Intrigued, your editor decided to look into what is happening with OpenBTS.