Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

MEPIS and Mandriva are moving closer to new releases of their Linux distributions, and a French project called Jolicloud has posted a screen (pictured) from its upcoming netbook distro. MEPIS posted SimplyMEPIS 8.0 RC2, and Mandriva released its second alpha for Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring.

Figuring out how your customers use your products — and by extension, how to improve user experience — can be a tricky process to navigate. Focus groups have their flaws, surveys suffer from selective memory, and peeping over shoulders could plant one in the penitentiary. The browser-makers at Mozilla, though, are hoping to put an Open Source spin on the process, expecting to release within the next few weeks a plugin to gather usage data from volunteers.

The online user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia is considering a radical change to how it is run. It is proposing a review of the rules, that would see revisions being approved before they were added to the site. The proposal comes after edits of the pages of Senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy gave the false impression both had died. The editing change has proved controversial and sparked a row among the site's editors.

Linus Torvalds released 2.6.29-rc1 and closed the 2.6.29 merge window on January 10. A little over 2000 changesets were merged after the writing of last week's merge window summary; this article completes the summary for this development cycle.

So apparently Linus is using GNOME right now. He mentioned it in the middle of an interview with Computer World and then Slashdot (and I'm sure others) picked it up and ran with it. On Slashdot, the entire six page interview was boiled down to "Linus Switches From KDE To GNOME". Let me address the "Linus issue" first, because it's the simpler and less critical issue. Linus is precisely one user. For every Linus Torvalds (there's exactly one of them), we have 10s of millions of other KDE users and a few billion who don't use any F/OSS solution at all yet. I don't like losing any user, though, and such a happening can be deflating and make one second guess what they are doing (which isn't an entirely bad thing either, as long as it doesn't result in bad decision making or paralysis).

The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of high tech. But as the dominant technology companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street.

While big business may be crowning open source as the king of server-based computing, most enterprise movers and shakers vehemently deny any such moves in telephony. Yet, open source in telecom is long past its debut and is, in fact, already in play in much of the Fortune 500. So why is open source a legitimate option in enterprise computing but bastardized so much in telephony?

Community Live aims to be inclusive of all parts of the open community, and with this in mind we went along to the Open Source .Net eXchange, an evening mini-conference for open source developers who use Microsoft's .Net platform. In the minds of some people, the words "open source" and ".net" do not go together, but as I discovered at the Open Source .Net eXchange, open source is actually thriving on Microsoft's platform. One thing in particular probably opened the way for this thriving community, Microsoft's attempt to reinvent the Java language as C#. C# code resembles Java; Java programmers can make sense of C# code and vice versa; what is completely different though is the surrounding ecosystem of libraries. However the similarity of code allows for Java to be ported to C# probably far more easily than any other language.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is backing a system to help prevent incorrect changes being made to entries in the online encyclopedia. His endorsement of what are termed flagged revisions has been sparked off by an inaccurate change made to an entry about Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy, claiming that he and his colleague Robert Byrd had died, after a lunch in honour of the newly inaugurated President, Barack Obama. In actual fact, shortly after arriving at the hospital, Kennedy was already on the way to recovery. Byrd, too, was examined, but members of his staff denied he had suffered any medical problems. As Wales writes on his talk page the incorrect report would never have gone online if flagged revisions had been in use.

Like me, you've probably read articles on how free software, or open source, is going to thrive in 2009, and how businesses everywhere are going to survive the recession by migrating to it. Perhaps you agree with those views; perhaps you don't. However, what I find most interesting is what people mean by the words "open source" and, to be even more specific, what business model they have in mind.

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2009

This week's Roundup starts off with Steven Rosenberg talking about his Thunderbird IMAP setup and why he wishes it was better at it. We have a couple of desktop related articles where Bruce Byfield gives us his Ideal Linux Desktop Setup and gHacks shows us how to shorten Linux boot time by going through what services you really need turned on.

I've been wanting to write this for some time, but aside from wanting to use Ubuntu for a reasonable amount of time, I'm pretty lazy. What finally prompted me to write this was Amarok, a music player I liked so much better than iTunes that it bordered on being difficult to express. At any rate, I've now been using Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" as my only work box for over six months, running it on a Compaq nx6325 laptop. I tried running Ubuntu at home as well, thus freeing myself from the annoyance of having to buy or steal most of the interesting pieces of software I like, but I pretty much just use that box for gaming so that wasn't worth it. It was still nice looking for the short time I used Ubuntu though - my brand new NVidia card powering my 30" LCD at some ungodly resolution, the same resolution Windows calls "native" for the monitor.

Based on Ubuntu 8.10, you might pass Linux Mint off as being yet another Ubuntu spin-off, though Mint has been around now for while (first release was on the 27th of August, 2006) and it's still a popular distribution, sitting in the number 3 spot on the Distrowatch page hit ranks. It shares the same Ubuntu 8.10 repositories and can also benefit from Ubuntu's large user base for support as the majority of solutions will be applicable to Mint. So why use Mint? What are the benefits? Well, the main benefits are out of the box support for audio and video codecs, DVD playback and Firefox plug-ins. This was very important when Mint first hit the scene as Ubuntu didn't provide the user with painless codec installation or DVD playback. Mint provided users new to Linux or just users who preferred a good out of the box experience with a complete Linux distribution.

Manufacturers and PC vendors would have you believe that there's only one way to speed up your machine: buy new kit. And then, in 18 months, buy new kit again. However, it's usually our software that's the real bottleneck. If you've been using Linux for a while, you'll already have discovered lighter alternatives to some of the platform's bloatfests – for example, using AbiWord and Gnumeric in the place of OpenOffice.org.

Turning your personal computer into a media server means that you will be able to play video (AVI, MPEG, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, MKV, WMV, MP4 or even DVD ISOs or VIDEO_TS folders) and audio files (MP3, OGG, FLAC or WMA) or view your favorite photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF) stored on your PC's hard drive on a big screen TV set or LCD/Plasma high-definition display, via a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console. The following tutorial will teach you how to set up such a media server, step-by-step, from configuring your PC and gaming console, to installing and setting up the media server software in your Linux box. We've offered two media server installations, so you can choose whichever fits you best.

Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt. That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.

Linux is quickly gaining popularity, but there are still many users afraid to convert as they are not familiar with the applications. Today our Linux guru Blair Mathis is back to introduce fifty of the most popular applications on this OS

The bonds of the FOSS community go far beyond software. Case in point, Arjen Lentz is stepping outside the bounds of the comfortable realm of software and launching bluehackers.org. The site is an effort to bring developers together to provide support for one another when dealing with depression.

All the Linux bashers use this as an excuse/reason why Linux is not suitable as a desktop operating system. You should never have to use the command line they say. You should have to be able to configure your whole computer just by clicking the mouse. People find the command line confusing blah blah blah.

Mobile communications depends on the availability of service. Not only have carriers been using Linux in their network equipment for years, they also are incorporating open source software into the middleware layer of the stack. It's key to maintain open and reliable standards for the health of the networks.