Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux blogs were feeling the love a bit early this week, perhaps in preparation for Valentine's Day. Much of the discussion centered on how to support those who are new to the Linux experience, and how to help them break out of the "Windows mindset."

Landon Fuller has released a beta of Plausible CrashReporter (plcrashreporter), for the iPhone to simplify the process of getting crash reports from users. Currently, to get a crash report, a developer has to ask the user to sync their iPhone, look on the hard disk for the correct crash log and then get the user to send it to them. With Fuller's solution, an in process signal handler catches the crash and writes a crash report. When the application is run again, it can check for a crash report and submit the report via a HTTP server, an email, or store it locally.

When I first heard about the project of porting KDE on windows I was very skeptical of the reason behind it but not so much of the viability of such a project since Trolltech decided to release the Qt 4 license under GPL for the windows version. KDE on windows is an audacious project aimed at porting all KDE applications on MS Windows natively. KDE also has a similar project for Mac OSX.

Much has been written about how Linux is an optimal OS for a lightweight netbook. And netbooks themselves are on a tear: ABI Research is projecting that 35 million will be shipped in 2009, and estimates that number to increase to a stunning 139 million by 2013—not bad for a category of PC that no one heard of 18 months ago. But some buyers of Linux netbooks are running into trouble. MSI’s recent return rates – four times that of Windows XP models – and the recent controversial story of a woman who couldn’t do required classwork because she couldn’t run required software on her Linux netbook indicate that, at the very least, there’s a learning curve for the average user.

The Midnight Commander file manager developers have restarted work on the, once quite popular, file manager for the Linux/Unix console. Midnight Commander was inspired by the famous Norton Commander for DOS. In recent years, there had been no development at all, but now a "Bugfix Release" 4.6.2 has been made available. The new release, as the tag suggests, contains no new features.

Since it's nigh on impossible to produce accurate figures of operating system usage, we have to make do with figures that provide a rough estimate, at best. One such set of statistics are the figures from Net Applications, which tracks the 160 monthly visitors to its hosted websites. The latest figures from January 2009 have been published, and they show that the rise of Mac OS X continues, as well as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 did quite well too.

Debian developers are planning to release their latest OS offering - called Lenny - on February 14. Debian developers are planning to release Lenny, the latest version of the operating system, on February 14. The team issued a second release candidate

As Linux personalities go, there is nobody more famous than Linus Torvalds, the man who started it all by developing the Linux kernel in 1991; read on for our exclusive interview with the chief architect of the most important part of your Linux distribution. In the news section, Fedora gets set to include KDE 4.2 in current and previous releases, Debian developers announce the imminent release of version 5.0 "Lenny", OpenSolaris focuses on improvements to compete with Linux, Keir Thomas releases his Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference book as a free download, netbook distribution Easy Peasy publishes a feature list of the upcoming version 2.0, and the Intel-sponsored Moblin project releases a new alpha build of its operating system for mobile devices. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2009 donation is the Openbox project.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2009

My apologies for the return to the old format. With the big game yesterday I pretty much forgot to put this up.

Introduced in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and then last week as a Windows XP update was exFAT. exFAT, or the Extended File Allocation Table, is Microsoft's new file-system for use on mobile devices like large USB flash drives. exFAT addresses the file-size and partition size limitations of Microsoft's FAT32 file-system and brings other improvements to the table as well, albeit it's proprietary. No read or write support for exFAT has yet to enter the mainline Linux kernel, but a set of read-only patches have emerged.

Cube was early on one of the first open-source first-person shooter games designed around its own engine. The 3D graphics for Cube were not the best, but development of this game had been going on since 2001. Based upon the Cube engine was then the Sauerbraten game that was also referred to as "Cube 2" with its engine being redesigned. Now though another game is emerging and its engine is derived from Sauerbraten. This game is called Blood Frontier and in this article we have a few screenshots of this game, which is working its way towards a stable release for the open-source community.

Networking and telecom hardware giant Cisco Systems is now squarely aiming its product line at businesses that can’t afford - or don’t want to buy - the company’s proprietary, server room-to-desktop solutions, ending a long-standing, unspoken practice of ignoring the open-source software community. Cisco officials can now openly say support for open standards is a good business strategy for the company, which is not surprising given the rapidly growing use of open-source business communications software.

Nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as web services offerings using cloud providers, according to results of a new Evans Data open source development survey. The survey found that 40% of developers are on this track. Of these developers, 29% plan to use Google App Engine while 15% intend to use Amazon services. Cloud services from other vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, were not as popular, Evans says.

The Forge.mil site is based on SourceForge.net, a public site that hosts thousands of open-source projects. Defense Department officials have launched a new Web site where developers can work on open-source software projects specifically for DOD, David Mihelcic, the chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said today. The new site, named Forge.mil, is based on the public site SourceForge.net which hosts thousands of open-source projects, Mihelcic said at an AFCEA Washington chapter lunch in Arlington, Va.

Boys and girls, it's time to dust off your Pegasos II machine, or maybe to reduce the size of your MorphOS partition, because there's a new contender coming your way: ACube Systems Srl has announced the immediate availability of AmigaOS 4.1 for the Pegasos II. It's 01:40 here, so I can't check if the sky is falling, but I'm pretty sure it is.

Their was a time when Open Source software was considered has poor man software. Now, with economy slowdown in all the industries, adoption of Open source software has increased dramatically and its common to hear from all the big entrepreneurs to adopt open source software. Open source development continues to evolve, and developers who create open source applications and open source operating systems continue to emphasize involvement in an open programmable Web, open mobile and distributed or cloud computing.

The health care system in America is on life support. It costs too much and saps economic vitality, achieves far too little return on investment and isn’t distributed equitably. As the Obama administration tries to diagnose and treat what ails the system, however, reformers shouldn’t be worried only about how to pay for it. Instead, the country needs to innovate its way toward a new health care business model — one that reduces costs yet improves both quality and accessibility.

[This article doesn't talk about FOSS directly, but it really wants too. - Scott]

Wine is one of the best known, but least understood open source projects. It is a mystic application that everyone knows about, many use, but few truly understand. Reading forum posts, blog entries and tutorials about Wine show that Wine is surrounded by many myths and half truths. In this article, we will attempt to clear up some of the misconceptions about the project.

Whenever I make a real egregious error here, like confusing FOSS with open source, I can usually count on a short e-mail from Richard Stallman, dear old RMS himself. So I hope he forgives me going all Richard Stallman on the Obama Administration. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Obama transition head John Podesta (right), has come out with a release calling the Administration’s stimulus proposal an open source stimulus, because it emphasizes transparency and will feature a Web site where voters can track where the money goes.

Dell will announce a high-end, customizable phone that runs either the Linux-derived Google Android or Windows Mobile operating system, says a report. The phone could ship as early as next month, and be available with or without a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the report claims.