Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In January, a whole slew of Red Hat engineers and Fedora Project volunteers got together at the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) to collaborate on features for Fedora 11, setting team objectives, and other initiatives. Contributors including QA experts, marketing gurus, community managers, and our friends from the One Laptop Per Child project all came together. They presented new ideas at technical talks, worked on tasks, and most of all had fun in the brilliant, vibrant atmosphere that defines Fedora

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has actively been working on improving power management with graphics processors via the various open-source X.Org drivers. There is quite a lot of work involved, but at the FOSDEM X.Org meeting he shared an update on his progress. In particular, Matthew is trying to conserve power with the GPU, memory, outputs, and displays.

As I commented last night, this is ridiculous - why can't OLPC perform remotely as well as every other computer manufacturer on the planet? Especially with a first-mover product with (for now) unmatched features. I want 1-laptop deployments, 5-laptop deployments, and 10-laptop deployments. I really hope there's a good reason why that's not as easy as it seems. Here's a business plan for selling laptops, the profits (if any) can go back into (re-)hiring and paying programmers, continuing R&D for the next generation OLPC XO-2, deployment personnel, and any excess could be offered as grants to create low-cost pilot projects or backstop community/peer support groups by defraying shipping costs and providing free parts.

The open source community is not quite as free-wheeling as it was a decade ago. Now, industry titans like IBM and even one-time nemesis Microsoft are part of the ecosystem, blurring the lines between open and proprietary models.

Mozilla Labs has shown Bespin for the first time. Bespin is a project to create a new cloud and web based development environment which will act as a collaborative working space for coders. The project has been incubating for some months and in it's debut the Mozilla developers show web based editing and project browsing using HTML5 features, such as Canvas, to create a clean and stylish interface, which is already quite responsive.

As Valentine's Day once again approaches, can we help it if our attentions turn to Linux? Of course not. So, here are a handful of tips for spreading the Linux love to your heart's desire. After all, what's *not* to love about Linux?

The release of a stable version of Debian GNU/Linux is normally a time of rejoicing and celebration for the 1000-plus geeks who provide Linux users with one of the best distributions going. But the emergence of Lenny, or version 5.0, on Saturday, February 14, will be tinged with some sadness as well, following the death of a developer in a tragic accident last year. Debian project leader (DPL) Steve Mcintyre said: "We will be dedicating the Lenny release to our long-term contributor and friend Thiemo Seufer, who was tragically killed in a car accident in Germany on December 26 last year.

Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell. Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.

Valentines Day. That one day a year when geeks everywhere find themselves whisked away from their terminals for a night filled with flowers, chocolate, and — dare we say it? — romance. This year, however, significant others of the Debian set may find it more difficult to drag their beloved beyond the box, as, barring a lovers quarrel, the Debian community and the long-awaited Debian 5, better known as Lenny, will finally tie the knot.

Software that can be used to play almost any computer game in history is to be developed as part of a European attempt to preserve digital cultural heritage. The European Union has funded a €4.02 million (£3.6m, $5.2m) project dubbed KEEP, for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable, which will develop new ways to archive digital objects endangered by the relentless march of technology. As well as games, it will work to ensure that other kinds of files and software remain accessible long after the demise of the hardware and software for which they were originally intended.

Planned celebrations will spontaneously erupt all over the globe as computer geeks celebrate when UNIX time hits 1234567890! Today! On Friday the 13th! The day before Valentine's Day!

As most any user can tell you, Linux systems think of time in terms of the number of seconds, not counting leap seconds, since the beginning of the UNIX epoch: Jan. 1, 1970. For most readers, that number will reach 1,234,567,890 this Fri. the 13th. Psyche!

Sun Microsystems has upped its ante in the rich internet application battle for mobile mind-share, just as Microsoft and Adobe Systems traded shots at each other. On Thursday, the systems and server company released a version of JavaFX for mobile devices here, branded JavaFX Mobile by marketing types but known to coders as JavaFX 1.1.

Cuba released its own distribution of the free Linux operating system this week, as the communist island seeks to wean its citizens and institutions from what it says is insecure, capitalist-produced Microsoft Corp. software, according to a report. The Reuters news service reported Wednesday that the new version is called Nova, and was introduced at a technical conference in Havana. Based on a Linux variant called Gentoo that is popular with highly technical users, Nova has been in development since 2007, according to the Associated Press, after Free Software guru Richard Stallman visited the island and persuaded government officials to move off Windows.

In November 2008 the Buzztard project maintainers announced the public release of version 0.4.0 of their flagship application. This version of Buzztard brings new features and performance enhancements, including expanded support for original Buzz songs and machines and an impressive make-over of its GUI.

Microsoft Corp. said it hired a former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executive to help the company open its own retail stores, a strategy shift that borrows from the playbook of rival Apple Inc. The Redmond, Wash., company said it hired David Porter, most recently the head of world-wide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG, as corporate vice president of retail stores for Microsoft. In a statement, Microsoft said the first priority of Mr. Porter, who is also a 25-year veteran of Wal-Mart, will be to define where to place the Microsoft stores and when to open them. A Microsoft spokesman said the company's current plans are for a "small number" of stores.

[Oh my, this is going to be good. Popcorn anyone? - Scott]

The Symbian Foundation is limbering up to face the Open Handset Alliance next week, announcing a raft of new members to take on the Android threat, while LiMo and Access Linux lurk nearby looking for scraps. Realizing that the battle of operating systems is all about applications, Symbian has announced a load of new members including MySpace, Bank of America, and Omron Software - though most of the new members have something to gain for their $1,500 membership fee and there's a remarkable degree of infidelity with companies betting each way.

If you thought installing Linux on a laptop was a fun discussion, have I got a new one for you. This comes straight out of the really, it should not be this hard category…the server side.

Bruce Perens reports that Linux is a natural for embedded systems. That's why it's popping up in more cell phones, often without the customer even realizing it's there. But cell phone manufacturers, and the broader sector of embedded systems, must cope with the problem of how to combine the GPL Linux kernel, and software that isn't Open Source. How does one do that legally?

Jeff Soble, Neil Cowles, and Edmund Billings have a response reproduced after the break to HIMSS "Call to Action". This is a sobering look at the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which looks poised to result in the demise of real competition, medical data in the hands of a cartel or monopoly for a few wealthy corporations, loss of privacy and the loss of the physician as the traditional custodian of medical data.