Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There isn't much mystery to why a little-marketed computer known as the Eee PC has lately seized the top spot on Amazon's laptop best-seller list. The machine, a three-pound ugly duckling made by the Taiwanese company Asus, has a 10-inch screen, a nearly full-size keyboard, and offers what almost everyone wants in a portable computer: It's tiny and, at $390, very cheap. Of course, the Eee PC is missing some other things people tend to like in laptops—an attractive design, a DVD drive, a fully full-size keyboard, and enough processing power to run multiple demanding applications at the same time. But hey, these are tough times, and did I mention you can buy this machine for less than you're planning to blow on New Year's Eve?

As the end of 2008 approaches, people's thoughts naturally turn to 2009, and what it might hold. The dire economic situation means that many will be wondering what the year will bring in terms of employment and their financial situation. This is not the place to ponder such things, nor am I qualified to do so. Instead, I'd like to discuss a matter that is related to these larger questions, but which focusses on issues particularly germane to Linux Journal: will 2009 be a year in which openness thrives, or one in which closed thinking re-asserts itself?

The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determination to monetize the add-on and keep its source code closed results in elaborations that make the basic idea less effective, and its constant pleas for donations make Interclue into nagware. As much as the usefulness of the basic utility, Interclue serves as an object lesson of the difficulties that the decision to go proprietary can take.

When you're talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical's Ubuntu, Novell's openSUSE and Red Hat's Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S. And it is largely thanks to Fedora that Red Hat has become the biggest Linux company with a major role in community Linux.

LXer Feature: 28-Dec-2008

Welcome to the last Weekly Roundup for 2008, but fear not my fellow news hounds for even as we continue to grow in 2009, LXer will be here to keep you up to speed on all things FOSS. At the end of the year its always about the numbers isn't it? This week we have couple of 7's, 15 tips, the new Ext4 and 3 Debian derivatives worthy as gifts to your favorite geek.

I can do many things with the greatest of ease on the Linux desktop. But, as I discovered while doing my community Linux overview, recording a Linux desktop video isn't one of them. Oh, boy, is it ever not one of them. My first problem was that I'd never done screen video recording before on any platform. I'd heard about Windows screen recorders such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio and Blueberry Software's BB FlashBack, but I hadn't heard of an equivalent program for Linux.

On Christmas Eve I suggested what "Jingle Bells" may look like if it were a Linux shell script. Here it is for those who missed out, and some interpretation for those who didn't.

Almost every year end, most blogs - magazines - publications and so called “Linux gurus” makes mostly positive predictions about the future of Linux and it’s market share. Following this tradition, it’s only fair that I too share with you my Linux predictions for 2009.

The Free Software Foundation have announced that they are to start shipping new, bootable, membership cards in January. The cards resemble a credit card and feature a USB connector and memory loaded with the gNewsense Live! Linux distribution and advocacy tools, such as speeches by Richard Stallman and videos about free software. The FSF online announcement page shows a picture of Richard Stallman's card, member number 0. Associate membership of the FSF, which entitles a member to one of these new membership cards, is $120 per year.

One of the big journalistic trends of 2008 was to call every new Internet paradigm open source. Blogging was open source journalism. Social networks were open source crowdsourcing. This was both a compliment and a warning. Even journalists who wouldn’t know a Linux penguin from a Disney one (above) were giving open source its props. But as with e a decade ago (and perhaps i today) it’s the sign of a market top.

Whatever you do, 2009 is looking to be a big year. That no exception when it comes to Linux. Applications and large projects continue to develop and make major releases multiple times per year. And while every year people predict that the next might be “The Year” for Linux adoption, here’s a list of some major products and trends that will play a part in attracting new attention to Linux in 2009.

High bit depth support, non-destructive editing (so called "effect layers") and colour management. Three hot topics in photography editing - that users have been waiting for for a long time now to appear in GIMP. Today Linux & Photography blog features an exclusive interview with Martin Nordholts, one of the core contributors to GIMP. Nordholts speaks about the current state of affairs, explains what is going on deep inside the GIMP (and GEGL) and also lifts a corner of the veil about what is to come.

Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success? is the pace of change important? Does successful QA exist to create process to slow and reject changes, or by accelerating inclusion of fixes improve quality? Is success having complete, up-to-date and detailed specifications for every feature? Is success getting everyone to slavishly obey laborious multi-step processes, before every commit? Alternatively does success come through attracting and empowering developers, who have such fun writing the code that they volunteer their life, allegiance and dreams to improve it?

The Linux kernel does not lack for low-level memory managers. The venerable slab allocator has been the engine behind functions like kmalloc() and kmem_cache_alloc() for many years. More recently, SLOB was added as a pared-down allocator suitable for systems which do not have a whole lot of memory to manage in the first place. Even more recently, SLUB went in as a proposed replacement for slab which, while being designed with very large systems in mind, was meant to be applicable to smaller systems as well. The consensus for the last year or so has been that at least one of these allocators is surplus to requirements and should go. Typically, slab is seen as the odd allocator out, but nagging doubts about SLUB (and some performance regressions in specific situations) have kept slab in the game.

Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008.

MySQL, the lovable little database engine that could - for reasonable values of could - is starting to feel the pain of being an open source project distributed by a large company. With a slower release cycle, community contributions are having a hard time making it into the mainline codebase, and an illicit market for patches and forks is emerging.

KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the user find their data.

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut. CC is one of the default directories; it was already there, alongside big names Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Answers.com, eBay and Wikipedia. The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organization lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

We have just had the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, the day when Doug showed the mouse that everybody knows about in public for the first time as part of the oN-Line System (NLS). It is not so widely known how much more Doug demonstrated that day. He started out with windows, graphics, structured text editing, hypertext, video chat, and much more that became the foundation of all Graphical User Interfaces by way of Alan Kay's Smalltalk at Xerox, and the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.

The white paper definition describes crowdsourcing as a "neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, gives a much better definition and describes crowdsourcing as "the application of Open Source principles applied to fields outside of software." I've been bringing the concept up in more conversations because I've come to believe that it's a very powerful, useful, and cost efficient model that entrepreneurs should know about. However, no matter who I talk to, whether it be a successful businessman or founder of a new tech company, I've had to repeatedly explain what it is. If it isn't already, I predict that crowdsourcing will be one of the new, hot buzzwords in 2009. (We certainly need more, the term "Web 2.0" is beginning to make me puke.)