Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files.

Google's Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Where is a location-based application for the Android platform that gives you information on shopping, travel, gas prices, weather and news, just to name a few. It's a well engineered app that has already existed for other platforms and now has been ported to Android.

Microsoft is trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public License, a free software license, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals, according to Samba project leader Jeremy Allison. Allison told ZDNet UK that through lawsuits such as the one launched against TomTom, Microsoft was attempting to encourage licensing deals which are proscribed under the GPL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first four years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimise the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped. This report is an update to the three-year risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in February 2007.

Both your money and your medical privacy are going to be gone unless a single sentence law is enacted. No less a source than the Congressional Budget Office (page 16 and 17) is saying that the recent Health Information Technology parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will drive the taxpayer into a $17 billion ditch even after 10 years. That's right, the taxpayer will be paying $30 billion to LOSE $17 billion after 10 years with no break-even point even mentioned. Remember that national 'investment' in Health Information Technology is going to catapult us into Health care nirvana in which your data and privacy are secure and the health care system in the United States hums along like a well oiled Internet resulting with all of these great cost reductions and efficiencies? All we really have to do is just spend money on the problem and it will be solved. We need to 'incentivize adoption' of health care technology and all will be well. The law as written will achieve anything but that. A single sentence could change that.

This article describes Puppy Linux, a flexible, fast distribution that's always a favorite among DesktopLinux readers. Author Dave Dibble briefly reviews MiPup2, one of many ready-made Puppy "puplets," and updates us on Puppy's current state and planned new features. As background, "puplets" are custom builds of Puppy that are shared with the Puppy community. Some, like "TeenPup," apparently take hundreds of hours to create. Others, like Muppy, have been years in the making!

One of the intriguing battles I have been watching over the past couple of months is a silent battle between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat. I say silent because it is being played out deep inside the New York Stock Exchange and, unless you're actively watching, you'll have missed the tussle. At the same time it is an fascinating battle that represents many things: the old versus the new, Linux versus Unix and investor sentiment.

The first Nigerian conference on Free and Open Source Software was held this week in Kano, Nigeria. The conference featured local speakers, consultants, network engineers, system administrators and academics, and international guests from KDE for three days at Bayero University of Kano. Over 500 students and professionals attended, filling the hall to capacity.

There are a variety of package managers available for different Linux distributions. Mandriva uses urpmi; Debian and Ubuntu use apt. Fedora and Red Hat use yum, while Gentoo uses portage. Some distributions provide support for more than one package manager as well. This week, we take a look at yum, or Yellowdog Updater Modified. Yum is written in python and has been in use with Fedora and Red Hat for many years. Yum has been proven to work, and despite some criticism as to its speed in comparison to other package mangers, it does the job, even if it is a little bit slower.

Yes, it's apparently another netbook today on OSNews. Netbooks were supposed to become the major foot in the door, but as soon as Microsoft got off its fat bum and started offering Windows XP to netbook OEMs, the popularity among OEMs of Linux has dwindled; when the netbook surge started, Linux was the operating system of choice among OEMs, but now, the Windows version comes first, and the Linux version later - if at all. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin basically tells OEMs: "Yer doing it wrong".

Linux sound software has been the foundation of my music studio since the late 1990s, but as we all know, that software won't produce so much as a peep without the right hardware. Setting up a stable Linux system for audio production can be problematic enough, and the wrong decision about your hardware can render your otherwise powerful system mute and tuneless. This article briefly describes some of the audio production hardware I've acquired and employed here at Studio Dave during the last ten years. I hope that my readers find this information helpful when making their own decisions about their audio hardware purchases.

More than 100 people showed up for Saturday's Rewired State, held at the Guardian's Kings Cross offices (and to meetings in Brighton and Manchester), to prove that they could do a better job than the government of making government information usable by the public.

Originally from Cape Town, Stevan Lockhart now lives in the north west of Scotland in a house that is off the electricity grid. Using a wind generator, some solar panels and free and open source software he and his wife both run their businesses off just 20W of power. Here Stevan explains the software and hardware decisions that made this lifestyle possible.

Version 9.3 of the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from AMD, known as Catalyst or "fglrx", will be the last to support the R300, R400 and R500 series GPUs, used for example on Radeon models 9500 to X1950. In distinction to the Windows drivers, which are also losing support for older graphic chips, AMD plans no further maintenance for a legacy series of the Linux drivers. So AMD staff are advising Linux users who have such Radeon GPUs to change over to the open source drivers "radeon" or "radeonhd".

If you work with open source software, you have less to worry about in the current economic downturn, according to John Todd of Digium — the company behind the Asterisk telephony platform. Todd presented his ideas at SCALE in Los Angeles, arguing that many of the same factors that put jobs and revenue at risk in the proprietary software industry actually benefit open source projects and, by extension, provide job security for developers, implementers, and consultants who work with open source.

LXer Feature: 10-Mar-2009

With the introduction of the EeePC and the Aspire One I was in love.. Originally I just had to have the Asus, but with the great deal Walmart was offering on Black Friday (yeah, I know but I bought the Acer at Wallyworld) I decided to buy an Aspire One as well. Let me tell you about 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' of these two machines.

Like a plus-sized dress on a skinny runway model, Windows just doesn't fit when it's loaded on a netbook. So entrepreneurs are taking a page from the fashion industry playbook, and creating new operating systems that are tailored exclusively to fit the smaller, less powerful and inexpensive netbooks. At least four new operating systems are in the works, all promising to offer a better experience to users struggling with tiny Windows icons on their 10-inch laptops.

The SCO Group has filed an appeal against last years ruling that it did not buy the copyright to Unix from Novell. The company is hoping to overturn the judgement and resume its legal action against IBM and Linux. When SCO started to pursue IBM in court in 2003, Novell said that when it sold its Unix business to SCO in 1995 it retained copyright to the code and merely sold SCO a licence to use it. SCO then sued Novell over that claim.

Mozilla Labs has released an experimental Firefox extension that brings new functionality to blank tab pages. The Mozilla developers aim to use the extension as a prototype for exploring blank tab features that could potentially be included by default in future versions of the browser. The extension, which was released last week, takes advantage of some of the browser's most recent improvements and is designed to be used with the latest Firefox nightly builds. Mozilla design expert Aza Raskin explained the new project in a blog post at the Mozilla Labs web site. The goal is to add some lightweight navigation elements that are useful, unobtrusive, and quick to load.