Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Maths is a famously lonely discipline - I should know, having spent three years of my life grappling with a single equation (the equation won). Mathematicians meet, and collaborate, it's true; but what would a truly open source approach to the process of solving mathematical problems look like? Maybe something like this:

Next weekend, the Fedora community will be at the ninth Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM)–one of the best free and open source events in Europe. And this year again, we expect an amazing attendance. More than 40 Fedora ambassadors are coming from different parts of Europe to represent Fedora and welcome visitors. Incredible, when three years ago, there were only two of us. Another reason to say Fedora is more powerful than 2³ and e³!

Doesn't this sound like a perfect package manager? "Nix...allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software..." Bruce Byfield takes a look at NixOS and answers the question "Is this the final answer on Linux package management?"

ATI has just released its Catalyst 9.1 driver package, bringing full OpenGL 3.0 support to the table, a feature which was made available to Nvidia videocard owners for the first time a month ago. While Direct3D has emerged as a front runner for Windows gaming, it should be noted that OpenGL 3.0's features can be enabled on both XP and Vista, and also Linux and Mac OS.

Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris 2008.11 includes improvements around software package management and incorporating community packaging efforts. The updates to the free Solaris-based OS shows that Sun will not follow IBM and HP in letting Linux take over the platform space once dominated by Unix.

I am against hacking in principle, and I suppose there was a chance this could have led to traffic problems and, worst-case, perhaps injury. But funny is funny:

Despite earlier announcing that it would only ship a Windows XP version of its 10-inch Aspire One netbook, Acer now says it plans to release a Linux version as well.

The Dutch NLnet Foundation, aiming to stimulate open network research and development and more general to promote the exchange of electronic information, has decided to financially support the Lokalize project of KDE. Previously NLnet, alongside sponsoring of a number KDE projects and activities, helped to develop ODF support in KOffice. This sponsorship is to support another open standard, XLIFF, in Lokalize.

Microsoft's Web Sandbox Live Labs project is now available under an open source license. Microsoft chose the Apache 2.0 license for the project, but pointed out that the project will not become an Apache project, although the vendor has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since July 2008.

SkyOS has always been criticised for the fact that you have to pay for it in order to beta test it. I personally never saw a problem with this construction, especially since the price included a full copy of SkyOS 5 (they dropped the five) once it was completed. However, as of late, it has become increasingly clear that there may never be anything like a final version - or another test release for that matter.

You may not consider it a "killer app" but one thing restricting Linux deployment in enterprises is an implementation of Microsoft's Active Directory (AD.) However, AD for Linux is on its way in Samba version 4 and is sure to annhilate a barrier to Linux adoption in business.

Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools. Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

According to a report from the Guardian, the next version of the OLPC (XO-2) will be open source hardware. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world access to modern education by providing laptops that they can use for learning.

This anti-Linux Microsoft "ad" hit the Web a few weeks ago, but I just came across it last night and thought it was funny. It's not funny because of its content but rather because some people actually think that it's a real ad put out by Microsoft to discredit Linux, one originally placed on a page describing how to multiboot operating systems:

The founder, former chairman and chief executive of Business Objects has turned to open source for his latest venture in business intelligence. Bernard Liautaud has joined the board of open source ETL and data integration specialist Talend following a round of $20m funding by Balderton Capital. Liautaud - a pioneer in BI who helped create an industry with his founding of Business Objects nearly 20 years ago - is a general partner of Balderton, which was an early investor in MySQL.

Nearly a year ago we reported on two new games coming to Linux: Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor. These games were developed by Frozenbyte, a relatively unheard of Finnish game studio, and both are third person shooters with a sci-fi setting. These two games were supposed to be released for Linux (they are already available for Windows platforms) by last Spring, but that never came to fruition. In August we were then told that things were held up due to publisher negotiations, but that beta testing would hopefully start in a week or two. Well, we never ended up seeing any beta or any other word from Frozenbyte or IGIOS (the company originally hired to port these two titles to Linux).

I was going ask you for your take on what will be this year’s marketing trend to boost sales. We have seen things like green computing and virtualization and the ever popular security (pick your favorite subtopic – USB data slurping, laptop encryption, firewalls etc), or whether Linux is for smart people but I was talking with a couple of friends, both technical and end user and ended up shaking my head.

Linux has a multitude of handy specialized commands and fast ways to do things. Juliet Kemp shows us how to read compressed files without unpacking them first.

Akkana Peck spent an eventful week trying to see and absorb all of LinuxConf 2009. Executive summary: you want to see real innovation and a desire to get more people involved, as opposed to finding more innovative ways to exploit them, check out Linux.

The purchase of StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, a German office "productivity suite", by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The subsequent release to the free software community of the StarOffice code, in the shape of OpenOffice, came as a surprise to many. Sun was a hardware company. Its primary business was back room servers, and Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystem's CEO, was not a fan of office productivity suites. Quite the opposite. Back in October 1996, McNealy had announced to the National Press Club of Australia: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their calipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."