Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For those interested in turn-based strategy games, Battle For Wesnoth 1.6 is now available on Linux and other supported platforms. This major update to Battle For Wesnoth brings a new campaign (called The Legend of Wesmere), many multi-player improvements, improved game graphics, new terrain types, user-interface improvements, and an improved map editor.

The open source GNOME desktop project has changed version control systems (VCS) to Git. The Git version management system was originally created by Linus Torvalds for the development of the Linux kernel. Other projects managed with Git include Ruby on Rails, WINE, X.org and Perl.

It will only ever truly support Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk, but Synapse, a new alpha-level IM app, is a pretty—and pretty efficient—way to chat if you're all about open-source communication. The developer of Synapse has a goal of spreading the love for XMPP, which is an open, extensible chat standard. That's great for the open-minded set, and users of Google Talk, which conforms to the standard, but is obviously a bit restricting, given the number of contacts one might have on "legacy" systems like AIM or MSN.

You don't learn to ride a bike by reading books. No one can become a pilot by listening to someone else talk about plane journeys they've been on. Instead, we learn by doing, by trying, by failing and - most importantly - by succeeding. Because when you feel like you're winning, you get confidence in your skills and know that you can do anything.

The design of the Sugar Labs logo was an opportunity to create a coherent visual identity for both the revolutionary educational software and also the organization behind it - a growing community of volunteers from diverse backgrounds and professional disciplines. A simple, typographic approach was used for the logo to set it apart from the primarily iconographic Sugar. The conceptual link to the user interface is color, applied to the letterforms through an outline and an interior color - the same technique used to represent identity in the interface for icons of children and activities.

Maker Faire's got started in the US, the first being held on April 22 – 23, 2006 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Created by Make: magazine these events celebrate D.I.Y. technology with all kinds of weird and wonderful creations ranging from toys to artworks and gadgets. This year Newcastle hosted the first UK Maker Faire.

Recently, a new browser war has erupted all over the internet, with various browsers making massive improvements in each release to trumpet those made by others. While Firefox certainly ignited this new browser war, Chrome is the one who started the JavaScript war. The first release of Google's web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors, forcing them to improve their JavaScript performance as well. This whole JS thing has gotten to the heads of the folks at Google, and they've created a site for experiments which show off the power of JS.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is denying that a list posted on Wikileaks.org is the same list it maintains of sites believed to be hosting harmful content such as child porn and malware. The official blacklist is a closely guarded secret.

There are many criticisms that one can make of the applications offered by the free software community, but lack of choice is generally not one of them. Our community thrives on competition while our licensing makes it hard to keep secrets from competitors. A recent episode in the Puppet community shows that, while this competition can sometimes take unwelcome forms, there is often little to do but to welcome it anyway.

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for July to December 2008. This document includes reports of the board and the Marketing and System Administration working groups, details of the KDE e.V. activities of the last two quarters of 2008, financial information, and future plans. All long-term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

New Mexico LinuxFest! New Mexico's premier free open source software conference and expo. Coming November 2009

X Input 2, a major rework to the X.Org input extension, is a step closer to reality. Originally it was hoped that X Input 2 would be ready for X Server 1.6, but that didn't end up happening and also resulted in Multi-Pointer X being disabled in this latest X Server release. This morning, however, Peter Hutterer (of MPX fame) has his first working X Input 2 implementation.

Sun's complex software licenses are reportedly one area of interest in the due diligence. Both companies are big supporters of Linux -- an open-source software platform, but IBM is concerned if any of Sun's licenses conflict with its own, according to the report. Another reported area of interest is Sun's 2004 agreement with Microsoft Corp., a 10-year deal under which Microsoft paid $700 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit by Sun and another $900 million to resolve patent issues between the two companies.

The Internet Archive organization plans next week to announce the opening of a new data center to house two petabytes of information for its Wayback Machine, the digital time capsule that stores archived versions of Web pages dating back to 1996. For example, this is what Computerworld's Web site looked like in 1997, what Google looked like in 1998 and what CNN looked like in 2000. The Wayback Machine houses 85 billion Web pages archived for more than a dozen years, which amounts to three petabytes of data, or about 150 times the content of the Library of Congress. Only five years ago, the Wayback Machine contained about 30 billion Web pages. It is expected to continue to grow by 100TB of data per month now that it's live.

KDE is about the community, rather than the product. It is not all about the code: there are many other ways in which people can be part of KDE, and a very simple way is to connect with other people. In an effort to bridge the gap between users and developers, the KDE Community Forums have launched a new initiative to coordinate feature requests. A new "Brainstorm" section has been created in the KDE Community Forums: users are encouraged to post requests there.

Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

The devices we use to access the internet are growing smaller and smaller, with more and more users turning to mobile devices to get their web fix on the fly. Nearly everyone in the browser market is scrambling to get their own mobile offering up to snuff, and Open Source heavyweight Mozilla is no exception.

Everyone is writing "Foo Best Linux Application" lists all full of good Linux apps, so here are my own 7 Best Excellent Linux Apps You May Not Have Been Introduced To Yet. They are presented in no particular order or categorization, they're just good applications I've been using and enjoying, all 100% genuine Free/Open Source software and not crusted with any proprietary baggage.

Thanks to the installation script by Ignacio Valdes and the patch by Kevin Toppenburg for his GUI Configuration tool, I was able to install WorldVista on a Moka5 virtual machine based on PCLinuxOS-2007. I did this for my own interest, and I know there are other demos and virtual appliances available for VISTA, but Moka5 makes it very easy to install and run a pre-configured WorldVista server, so I thought I'd share it, in case anyone else is interested. I also have some links to a pre-configured version of the CPRSChart and GUIConfig front ends that should be able to connect to the server if run on the same machine hosting the Moka5/PCLinuxOS-2007 virtual machine.

Earlier this week Google had published their list of 2009 Summer of Code projects and FFmpeg was among them. Last week we published an interview with the FFmpeg developers where we learned more about their v0.5 release and other topics like OpenCL, Blu-ray, and multi-threading. Since running that interview, where it was found that Blu-ray wasn't actively being worked on due in part to a lack of hardware, a number of readers have stepped up and offered Blu-ray drives and media to help developers, which may result in Blu-ray support coming sooner rather than later.