Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux Mint version 6 Felicia came out on December 15th and I have been running it on my Dell Inspiron 530 Q6600 system for the past week. I ran Hardinfo on the system if you want to see the specifications on the box. It is a quad core with 6 GB of RAM, so I was a little disappointed that the 64 bit version of Linux Mint was not released the same day the 32 bit version came out. Even though they have a 64 bit version of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa available I wanted to try out the latest version. Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and uses GNOME for it’s desktop environment. For those who prefer a different desktop, community editions of Mint 6 featuring KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox should be out soon.

Journalists are often the bearers of bad news; it simply comes with the territory. And with the economy in the tank, there's no shortage of ugly stories to cover. So I'm always pleased when there's a legitimate bit of good news to write about. And counterintuitively enough, three of my columns this year contained good news about employment for techies, despite the downturn.

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

Entrepreneur Dave Rosenberg has a Christmas wish for you. Dave wants to make everyone pay for open source in 2009. Money is the fuel that keeps things going. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. It is reasonable for entrepreneurs to dream of getting more money out of people. But Dave is missing an essential point. In an open source world, business models must be voluntary.

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold. I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Open source software can offer functionality well beyond its price, but it doesn't come without costs. Deborah Moynihan of Progress Software looks at some of the perils of using open source software and offers some solutions that address those problems.

There's no question that the open source community is a passionate one -- and one with significant influence on technology directions and options. We're way past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe to depend on in business. Open source is now a mainstream part of the technology fabric. Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper. Yet it remains connected to its roots around a passionate community working together to solve problems and share the fruits of their labors with others. Any endeavor based in community is bound to spark passionate debate. After all, without contention, how else to determine the best way forward?

Google Maps gives you a quick and easy way to add maps to your Web site, but when you're using Google's API, your ability to display other data is limited. If you have your own data you want to display, or data from sources other than Google, OpenLayers, an open source JavaScript library, can give you more options.

First there was Compiz, a compositing window manager that brought very interesting desktop effects to Linux, and then Beryl came about as a fork of Compiz before it ultimately turned into Compiz Fusion. Today though, on Christmas eve, the world can now meet Compiz++.

Compiz++ is a branch of Compiz that brings several new features to the table and there are huge changes...

A Sun Microsystems executive has provided a glimpse into the company's future plans for open sourcing JavaFX, its recently released technology for building RIAs (rich Internet applications) for the desktop, mobile devices and other platforms. Sun's corporate image is grounded in its embrace of open-source software and some components of JavaFX, including the JavaFX compiler and elements of graphic libraries, are now available under the GPLv2 open-source license, according to the official JavaFX FAQ.

Tux is no mere drone -- he likes having fun every now and then. When it comes to gaming, open source tools and applications have a lot to offer developers, but that's not where it stops. Open source games themselves can be had for little or no cost, and a lot of them offer just as much baddy-blasting entertainment as proprietary titles.

Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors. The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days. Sun Microsystems, which largely steers the OpenSolaris effort and will use the distro as the basis of the next generation of Solaris, wants to be among the greenest of IT vendors. It also wants to find a new niche for Solaris, as Linux has done superbly on netbooks this year.

Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features .

[I found the link to this article on LWN in the thread talking about the new 2.6.28 kernel that Linus just released. Interesting stuff, 48bit addressing and a maximum filesystem size of 1 EB. 1 Exabyte? Wow! - Scott]

In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.

On December 11, the Free Software Foundation announced the filing of a GPL-infringement lawsuit against Cisco. This action represents another step in a long series of license-compliance issues involving Cisco and its subsidiaries. It may look like just another licensing lawsuit, but it represents an interesting step in the evolution of attitudes toward compliance with the GPL. The eventual outcome is fairly predictable, but the process is still worth watching.

People who write good howtos and documentation the finest people there are. Tina Gasperson, Bruce Byfield, and Carla Schroder share some tips on improving your writing skills, and building a body of work to be proud of.

At a time when new and buggy features cloud basic computer functions, it's refreshing to see a new release of a distro like Slackware that stays true to its core philosophy. Slackware has an unfair reputation of being a distro only for experienced users. Granted it doesn't sport many graphical configuration tools, but it balances that with stability and speed.

Last week, the Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project achieved version 11.1 of its community-supported Linux distribution. Because the release includes watershed changes like a new license, new build system, and significant upstream integrations, DesktopLinux collared Community Manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier for perspective about what it all means.

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu's next release. You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop's pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways.

With 2008 coming to an end, heise online UK picks what was full of win, who was waiting for the failboat, and who just made us go meh. So in no particular order, here are the Wins, the Fails and the Mehs of Open Source from 2008.