Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The number of open source projects targeting mobile platforms increased at a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent between 2005 and the end of 2008 according to a new study released by open-source software management services provider Black Duck Software. After reviewing more than 185,000 projects collected from 4,000 Internet sites, Black Duck reports 2,300 of them target mobile--while 1,850 total project releases were developed expressly for the Palm platform, only 113 were created for Palm in 2008. Instead, iPhone captured the majority of open-source focus last year, with 266 project releases in 2008--Android followed with 191, trailed by Windows Mobile with 174.

It looks like server virtualization really is heading for the mainstream on Power Systems machines. If some figures provided by the top brass at IBM are any indication. While logical partitioning has been available on OS/400-based servers since V4R4 was launched with the Northstar PowerPC servers back in 1999, virtualization on Power-based servers from IBM has been embraced mostly by big shops with big iron even as Linux and AIX partitions were added to the logical partitioning mix.

A good friend of mine, who is very computer savvy, recently bought a new computer and installed Ubuntu on it rather than Windows. Now, despite being a very smart guy when it comes to PCs and Windows, he was still a newbie to the world of Ubuntu, so he and I went through a series of questions and answers before, during, and after his Ubuntu install. I’ve turned those into a FAQ for Ubuntu noobs that should answer a fair amount of questions for the first 24 hours of a first-time Ubuntu installation.*

Booting, or "bootstrapping" for us older folk, is that deeply mysterious sequence of operations performed by your computer between the moment when you switch it on and the moment it's ready for you to log in. During this time, all kinds of incomprehensible messages scroll up the screen, but they're not something you usually take much notice of, and most linux distros cover them up with a pretty splash screen and a nice encouraging progress bar.

Your editor's adventure with the Android Developer Phone (ADP1) began just before the end of the year. This phone, remember, has the nearly unique selling point that it is lacking any sort of lockdown feature. It will happily run any software which is fed to it, from the kernel on up. It thus brings the promise of free software to a market which has traditionally gone out of its way to avoid enabling any sort of freedom. It's actually possible to control the software we run on our phones - but only if we buy the right phone.

I first came across Drupal almost five years ago. I recommended it for a project on politics, since abandoned. My experience was a nightmare. We were a commercial operation that needed professional programming. The launch of Acquia as Drupal’s commercial arm last year changed that. It turned out to change a lot more. Within months, Microsoft was distributing Drupal. Acquia is acquiring a host of new platinum partners. Commercial organizations have begun adopting it. So has the government.

I think the most eagerly anticipated demo at Demo 09 here will be Always Innovating's Touch Book, slated for late Monday afternoon. It's yet another Netbook, granted, but it's got a cool detachable (and optional) keyboard, and a magnetic mount for sticking onto a refrigerator. I got a quick demo video (left) with the company's CEO, Gregoire Gentil, who is French. He couldn't show me the user interface on the prototype hardware he had with him, but says it will be easy to use with big, fat American fingers (he didn't actually say that). The product will run a Linux OS, Gentil said, and it's the first Netbook based on an ARM CPU, not the typical Atom found in most Netbooks. He says users can expect 10 to 15 hours of battery life. The product will be $299 without the keyboard, $399 with. It ships this spring, but you can preorder now.

Hard economic times have resulted in good economic news for makers of open source PBXs. In a study released by the Eastern Management Group based on a survey of 6,000 IT executives, open source-based PBX products and overall solutions now account for 18% of the private branch market

Celtx 2.0, an open source media pre-production and screenwriting application, has been released. Celtx is an XUL application writing tool that includes several built in project templates to help users develop their stories. The application helps users get their ideas from concept to production, using pre-visualisation tools, like storyboards. Version 2.0 includes several new features, changes and bug fixes. Celtx is released under the Celtx Public License Version 1.3 (CePL) which consists of the Mozilla Public License Version 1.2 with additional amendments.

Psion Teklogix has filed a counterclaim against Intel in response to the chip giant's attempt to get its Netbook trademark nixed in the US. The complaint - filed, like Intel's, with the US District Court for Northern California - wants Intel brought to book for allegedly infringing said trademark. "Intel has acted willfully and maliciously, has unlawfully attempted to trade on the tremendous commercial value, reputation and goodwill of the Netbook mark, and has deliberately and intentionally confused and deceived the public as to an affiliation, connection or association of Intel with Psion, and/or as to the origin, sponsorship or approval of Intel’s goods and/or services," the PDA pioneer alleges.

Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current. A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

LXer Feature: 02-Mar-2009

In this week's LXer Weekly Roundup DeviceGuru talks about how Lenny brightened up an old laptop, Linux has a marketing problem, how RMS may be looking at the internet the wrong way, Microsoft sues TomTom and all the rest of the previous week's big stories.

Microsoft got things seriously wrong when it released Vista and the company knows it. In the past, the absolute market dominance of Windows on the desktop has allowed Redmond to get away with such mistakes. That may no longer be the case now that Google has entered the operating system market with its Linux-based Android platform.

Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastructure for the implementation of cloud computing on computer clusters. Its name is an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". The current interface is compatible with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing interface. Tom Callway speaks to Rich Wolski, the project's director, about how Eucalyptus can be leveraged by enterprises and where it sits along side proprietary alternatives like Windows Azure.

Pricing for open source software products remains a hotly debated topic of interest. Dave Rosenberg argues in a recent post on Negative Approach that there is consensus that the price of open source software should be 10 to 20 percent of the price of equivalent proprietary software. He does not attribute that to anyone, and in our echo chamber of technology bloggers and tweeters, such a statement will quickly come to be seen as a long-established fact. Initially, my intuition told me that Rosenberg's thesis was wrong, but I didn't want to dismiss it without doing my own research. I looked into it a bit more and uncovered some interesting facts that argue both for and against the 10-to-20 percent range put forward by Rosenberg.

Usually, there are topics of discussion galore to choose from in the open source blogosphere, but once Microsoft filed suit against TomTom, it seems you couldn't read about anything else. TomTom faces a patent challenge over its use of the FAT file system in its Linux-based GPS units. Some see the suit as an attack on Linux itself.

Linux shop Xandros is launching the Presto "instant-on" platform for PCs and laptops at the Demo 09 conference. When I saw my first PC with an alternate, quick-boot Linux operating system (DeviceVM), I was impressed. But I no longer think this is a viable market. I do not believe consumers want to run two operating systems on their computers--one fast to boot but limited, and one slow but capable. They want what they know, and for most of them, that means Windows. That's why Windows XP has become the popular operating system for low-spec Netbooks. And with computers on the whole getting more powerful, and Windows 7 getting such great reviews even on midrange PCs now (which will be low-end in months), I just don't see much of a market for two-OS computers.

Last week saw the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.0, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed for both personal and business purposes. We take the live CD for a spin to see what it has to offer. In the news this past week, openSUSE develops Debian-like distribution upgrade functionality to their package manager, Red Hat looks set for a comeback to the desktop arena as it announces virtualisation plans that will centre around KVM technology, and Novell signs a virtualisation agreement with VMware over support for their products. Also in the news, the Linux Starter Kit from Linux Format magazine has been released for free and we link to interviews with lead developers of Linux Mint and Kongoni. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com February 2009 donation goes to Wolvix GNU/Linux, a Slackware-based desktop distribution and live CD.

This week we received a note from Matthias Dahl, a Phoronix reader, who wanted to remind us about current problems plaguing the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series. Using any of the newer NVIDIA Linux drivers can cause graphics corruption followed by the system locking up. These problems are certainly known by NVIDIA and are experienced by many users as can be seen from this NvNews Forum thread. Below is what Matthias had to share about the situation.

Just three days ago we shared that Nouveau will become the default NVIDIA driver in Fedora 11 to replace the obfuscated xf86-video-nv mess. Now proposed for Fedora 11 is to also integrate the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver.