Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Adobe Air is getting an open source rival with Appcelerator Titanium, a new platform designed to let web developers build installable desktop and mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Googleton Mountain View, California-based Appcelerator on Monday cooked up a public preview release of Titanium for Windows and Mac. The Linux version apparently needs to stay in the oven until January 2009.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric. This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

[Too much cool stuff on this list! - Scott]

GameLayers' Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual world of adventures, challenges, and intrigue, has been picking up traction thanks in part to its robust open source framework. Underpinning the popular online game is Ruby on Rails, a full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications that works with a variety of Web servers and databases.

Last year, when Australia went to the polls, one of the major promises held out by the Labor Party - which ultimately returned to government after 11 years - was the provision of computers to school-children, one for each child in grades 9 to 12. A year has gone by and it has become apparent that the costing of this programme wasn't exactly spot on. The projected support costs and the electricity costs are prohibitive, to the extent that some states are reluctant to join the programme. And as with any delayed initiative, the cost has blown out, some say by as much as two-thirds. The original estimate was that it would cost $A1.2 billion.

The latest version of Fedora, the Linux-based operating system, gives users a peek at what they can expect to see in future Linux distributions from Red Hat and other vendors. Fedora 10 offers a broad security framework and new audit capabilities, and gives Linux enthusiasts a good way to upgrade from Fedora 9. However, those who use the Linux-based OS shouldn't expect any support from Red Hat.

And it seems as if another minor, barely-alive operating system will become encumbered by legal bickering between two small companies. The RISC OS scene, which is already a tangled and complicated mess of companies, version number teasing and incompatible versions, might be torn apart even further because RISCOS Ltd might take legal action trying to prevent RISC OS Open Ltd from releasing a RiscPC compatible ROM from the RISC OS 5 shared source project. Should you feel confused, you needn't worry: so does everyone else.

There is a great deal of activity around Linux filesystems currently. Of the many ongoing efforts, two receive the most attention: ext4, the extension of ext3 expected to keep that filesystem design going for a few more years, and btrfs, which is seen by many as the long-term filesystem of the future. But there is another project out there which is moving quickly and is worth a look: Daniel Phillips's Tux3 filesystem.

KDE4Daily is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry for people who would like to test KDE trunk in the run-up to 4.2, consisting of a Qemu VM image containing a Kubuntu 8.10 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules from KDE trunk (all at r888587, initially), along with an updater system inside the VM itself. After an unusually rocky round of development, it is time to (finally!) announce the release of KDE4Daily 4.2!

Two Oregon educators who founded the K12Linux project seven years ago are glad that they have been able to hand that project over to Fedora, the home they always meant for K12Linux to have. Paul Nelson and Eric Harrison met online when Nelson, a classroom teacher and technology director at a small school in Portland's Riverdale School District, went looking for Linux help. "We were doing everything on the back end with Linux, but I was spending a lot of time keeping the Windows desktops running. I thought how nice it would be to use Linux on the front end too. I posted a notice on the local user group mailing list." Harrison, then a Multnomah County IT Services support tech, befriended Nelson, and the two had an idea: make a specialized Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) distribution that would allow schools to use thin clients running Linux on old, inexpensive hardware.

After two years of intense development, Amarok 2 has become a reality! Some of the highlights that are included in the 2.0 release are a completely redesigned user interface, tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast. There is an overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok. Much of the work has gone into migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework using core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma. Read more about the new release in the release announcement and start Amaroking!

For years now, HP has been slowly edging towards releasing a pre-installed Linux for general users. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that today, December 10th, HP finally took the big plunge.

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day. Having said that, when we get to write about great Linux-based tweaks or downloads, we get pretty excited—and, apparently, so do our readers and visitors linked in from across the web. Today we're looking back at the Linux-related posts that got the most attention in 2008, so read on to see what you might have missed, and what the open-source crowd is down with. Photo by Ypsy.

Well, it may be December, but it is time for the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update, the second tweak of the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform. With the new release today, it's getting some interesting storage enhancements as well as the usual update additions. The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

GNOME's Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime libraries, so people who use your Vala objects don't even have to know they are not written in C.

HP and Novell today jointly announced that HP will pre-load Novell's SUSE LInux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) on its Compaq dc5850 desktop PC for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Additionally, Novell announced it will maintain a repository of educational software for SLED users, including dc5850 buyers. HP's dc-5850 is a small form-factor PC typically available with FreeDOS, or else various versions of Windows. Ordering the machine with Linux pre-installed will not add to the cost of the PC, which HP lists as starting at $520.

The last time we looked in-depth at HDMI support on Linux was last December when talking about HDMI with the ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Since then there has been improvements in a number of drivers for different hardware. In this article we have a brief overview on the status of HDMI support in the Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI Linux drivers.

Just as the world's economies started to tank, Australia's Governments got themselves into an economic bind by promising to supply public school children with laptops. However, a leading systems integrator has issued a blueprint for an affordable blanket laptop roll out using Linux and netbooks.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced the results of its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election. Six new members were elected to the ten-member TAB, originating from companies including Intel, Oracle, and Red Hat, says the LF. The TAB participates in LF events, including its Annual Collaboration Summit, which next year takes place in San Francisco. The TAB will also participate in the first-annual LinuxCon conference, scheduled for next fall.

A startling development is being reported by the BBC in the UK. It seems that the Internet Watch Foundation which looks like a quasi governmental organization, has taken offense with an album cover on Wikipedia and is “blocking” access to it. IWF claims it is an issue of child pornography, Wikipedia is calling it censorship.

Bit by bit, the Microsoft monopoly on office productivity applications is receding -- and one of the most important ways this is happening is through the proliferation of open source productivity suites. The most obvious example is OpenOffice.org, now in a landmark third release, but they're also not the only ones in town anymore.