Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In a warm Jamaica around thirty KDE developers have gathered for the first Camp KDE. The following article is an impression of the first days of this event, a short summary of what is going on here. Read on for the full report!

Migrating business systems from high-end Unix-based systems such as Sparc/Solaris to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the last few years, but not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution -- at least not yet.

The Btrfs filesystem has been under development for the last year or so; for much of that time, it has been widely regarded as the most likely "next generation filesystem" for Linux. But, before it can claim that title, Btrfs must stabilize and find its way into the mainline kernel. Btrfs developer Chris Mason has been saying for a while that he thinks the code will come together more quickly if it is merged relatively soon, even if it is not yet truly ready for production use. General experience with kernel development tends to support this position: in-tree code gets more review, testing, and fixes than out-of-tree code. So the development community as a whole has been reasonably supportive of a relatively early Btrfs merge.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has learned the tough lessons of management. Just six months after taking the COO job at Delta Air Lines, he had to guide the company through bankruptcy and earned a reputation as a turnaround expert.

The Linux Foundation hopes to succeed where Microsoft’s short-lived Jerry Seinfeld experiment failed, namely landing a glove on Apple’s unrelenting "I'm a Mac" ads. And not a moment too soon with fear of anything not Windows at a high as demonstrated by this week’s news about a young lady dropping out of College "because of Ubuntu Linux."

Seagate Technologies' online support forum has been riddled this week with complaints from owners of the high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, which in recent months had already drawn some complaints that the drive has been freezing up during data transfers or failing all together. The Barracuda 7200.11 is the eleventh generation of Seagate's flagship drive for desktop PCs and comes in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1.5TB. Complaints have not been limited to Seagate's online support site. They have also rained in on other forums. The complaints involve drives running Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Vista.

Protothreads are a type of extremely lightweight threads - each protothread requires only two bytes of memory - that are usually used for embedded firmware programming, where memory is at a premium. Protothreads combine the low overhead with event-driven programming with the algorithmic clarity of threaded programming.

SCaLE 7x has announced the conference line up for their February 20-22, 2009 event in Los Angeles. The keynote speakers will include, Joe 'Zonker' Borckmeier and Bradley Kuhn. A full list of speakers and exhibitors is now available online. In addition to the 45+ speakers at SCaLE, there will be a number of presentations on niche topics at the SCaLE mini-confereinces including: SVN Community Day, Demonstrating Open Source Health Care Solutions, Women in Open Source, Zenoss Community Day, and more. Early bird registration for SCaLE 7x, the 2009 Southern California Linux Expo will end this Monday January 19th. Register at the reduced rate while you still can!

Earlier this week Google announced that several products will be shut down or will be modified. Included in the list were two social services: Jaiku and Dodgeball. Jaiku is a Twitter-like service that was acquired by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in late 2007. Dodgeball is a location-based meeting service that was acquired by Google in May of 2005. The Dodgeball founders quit Google in April 2007 and both were vocal that they weren't happy with how Google was handling the service.

The last version of Pagico on Ubuntu was v2.3, released a long while ago. As Ubuntu not being our prioritized platform, we didn’t put too much energy on it. However, things have changed. Now we’re more interested in supporting this fantastic desktop platform than ever, and this time we’re not going to let it fall behind. Together with the v3.2.2 software, the Pagico on Ubuntu brings you the best user experience and unique feature set as an organizer software.

Earlier this month we shared that Tungsten Graphics was creating a new VIA 3D stack for one of their clients. This new work has many improvements over the current Mesa and DRM code both on the technical level as well when it comes to what's supported for use by end-users. This morning the code for Tungsten's new support has been pushed out to OpenChrome.

The ReactOS project has seen some major progress during 2008. The project, which aims to create a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has published a 'year-in-review' article concerning 2008, detailing the various area of work. It provides some interesting insights into the project's development. Last year was a busy one for ReactOS. After the kernel rewrite, which allowed them to stabilise the kernel, the gained the ability to direct attention towards elements slightly higher up the software stack, such as the graphics subsystem and filesystem support.

God bless local news. Annie Schubert was expecting a "bread and butter" Dell running Windows for school. But when she fired up her accidental Ubuntu machine, confusion was only the beginning of her problems. You see, Annie was ready to enroll in online classes at Madison Area Technical College (emphasis mine), so she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-loaded. MATC lists as its requirements Microsoft Word and internet access, so when her Verizon DSL install CD wouldn't work and the word "Microsoft" was nowhere to be found, she called Dell. There, a gracious callcenter support drone told her that Ubuntu was just fine for everything she needed to do (true, I would say) and that it's just perfect for college students. Annie agreed.

It’s no secret that I’m a Linux fan. I love it. I use it. I tell of its goodness far and wide. It’s also true, however, that I administer and use a variety of operating systems throughout any given day. I like to think that makes me more objective than some, and I like to think more people will pay attention to me if I don’t bash every other operating system out there.

It has been gratifying to see the number of businesses and personal computers moving to Open Source software and the Linux Operating System. In our organization alone, the numbers, while small on a grand scale, are quite significant from where we stand. We've installed hundreds of Linux systems in the past two years and the retention rate of those systems are what we get excited about. However...

As a new parent, one of my concerns is the possible exposure of my daughter to adult oriented materials when she reaches internet surfing age. I’ve still got some years to go before I really need to come to the task of protecting my child from the cr@p that is pervasive throughout the internet, but as an IT professional, this is the biggest gripe I hear from parents all over. How can you protect your children while allowing them the freedom to use the internet responsibly and productively in order to become successful students and therefore successful adults?

Windows-only shops looking to do a little virtualization on the cheap need look no further than Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Hyper-V and the freebie Hyper-V Server 2008 standalone host. However, our tests showed that customers with even mildly complex virtualization requirements should run Hyper-V on top of Enterprise or Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2008 and manage guest virtual machines by adding System Center Virtual Machine Manager--which brings on licensing costs. As for non-Windows environments, Microsoft's claim that Hyper-V is capable of mixed operating system virtualization is technically accurate, but the latest version of Novell's SUSE Enterprise is the only flavor of Linux supported across the Hyper-V range.

Most software developers, whether open source or proprietary, would agree that the success or failure of any endeavour depends on building a community. This may be a community of fellow developers, advocates or just users, but unless a significant number of people take a project to their hearts, it's unlikely to make an impact. If you're an elite coder who dreams in C++, making your mark on a free software project could be relatively easy; you take the code – magically available under the GPL – and work out how to do something new or more efficient with it and then bash out your edits on a keyboard. You release your patch and the community sings your praises while you begin the process over again with the same or another project.

We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which gave us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using Sugar on various platforms via LTSP. We hooked up 2 Acer Aspire One netbooks, a Thin Client (Artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional XOs. Before going into the details of the experiment some explanation is due. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project, and refers to the use of a mainframe like infrastructure, where minimal systems without hardrives and little CPU and RAM can be used as diskless terminals.

The 451 Group, a market intelligence consultancy that proudly distinguishes itself from its "pay-for-play-propaganda" competitors, predicts that 2009 will be a big year for open-source software merger and acquisition activity.

[So even though a bad economy hurts companies selling both Proprietary and Open Source solutions, merging them will help? - Scott]