Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

You got to hand it to Microsoft, they certainly know how to scavenge off dead and dying bodies: "Microsoft Corp. today announced a new initiative, Elevate America, which will provide up to 2 million people over the next three years with the technology training needed to succeed in the 21st-century economy."

By the end of the year Asus will reportedly release an Eee PC with the Google Android operating system. Asus pioneered the market for low cost, scaled-down laptops that offer internet and email functionality, now known as netbooks. Netbooks have been one of the fastest-growing segments in the PC industry.

As of late, file-systems have been a popular topic among Linux developers and users. The EXT4 file-system was recently stabilized and it brings some modest performance improvements and is finding its way into modern distributions. While not yet stabilized, the Btrfs file-system was merged into the Linux 2.6.29 kernel and is poised as the Linux competitor to Sun's famed ZFS file-system. There is also open-source work underway in supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux. On top of all of that, there is also the Tux3 file-system.

KDE 4.1, launched at the end of July 2008, became the first release we could heartily recommend as a replacement for the ageing 3.5, and a solid nine months of updates to 4.1 has created a stable and innovative environment that can only get stronger as 4.2 beds itself into 2009. But KDE is still KDE, and that means that many of its best features are undocumented and undisclosed. Which is why now is the best possible time for a feature crammed full of the best tricks we can find for getting the most out of KDE 4. It doesn't matter if you're a new convert, an experienced user, or a potential switcher, you'll find something in the following pages that will make you feel a micron of pride of what open source can achieve.

Almost two years after Etch, Debian is putting the much-anticipated Lenny release on the proverbial shelves. There are some pretty nice new features in this release. In this article, we’re going to cover installation, basic setup, disk encryption, and try out some of Lenny’s new moves.

The relationship between embedded system developers and the kernel community is known for being rough, at best. Kernel developers complain about low-quality work and a lack of contributions from the embedded side; the embedded developers, when they say anything at all, express frustrations that the kernel development process does not really keep their needs in mind. A current discussion involving developers from the Android project gives some insight into where this disconnect comes from.

Ubuntu's upcoming 9.10 release now has a name: Karmic Koala. However, all of the news wasn't so cute and fuzzy this week in the FOSS blogosphere. One blogger posted a Linux virus how-to, which got quite a bit of attention. Turns out the vulnerability has been known since 2006.

In the last couple of days I've probably learned more than I ever wanted to know about BCDs, MBRs, boot sectors, boot menus, lilo, Wubi, and grub. When I complained that Windows 7 had trashed my grub menu on Thursday, I didn't know what a can of worms I was opening. I got lots of advice, and most of it was constructive. Nobody quite gave me the whole picture, but I've put it together.

This week we re-visit the minimal distribution install, this time with openSUSE 11.1. In the news this past week, Mark Shuttleworth announces details of the 9.10 Ubuntu release, openSUSE board members post a joint statement about the project's future in light of Novell layoffs, Red Hat signs an interoperability agreement with Microsoft, Debian project announces the appointment of a new Secretary, and NetBSD launches a desktop initiative that should bring more users to the popular cross-platform operating system. Also in the news, we introduce VirtualBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop environment for VMware and provide a link to an animated video interview about FreeNAS, a BSD system for building network-attached storage devices. Finally, if you are an accomplished distro tester, but worry that you'll run out of new distributions to try, fear not - last week no fewer than eight new Linux distributions were submitted to DistroWatch. These include some really exotic fares, such as moonOS from Cambodia or Kongoni from South Africa.

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that MIPS Technologies (NASDAQ: MIPS) has become a member of the Foundation. MIPS Technologies is a leading provider of industry-standard architectures, processors and analog IP for digital consumer, home networking, wireless, communications and business applications.

An Indian Web site has confirmed ASUS is developing a version of its Eee PC Netbook to run Google’s Android software. When I tested Asus’ Netbooks last year for my Linux Laptop series I found a lot of uncertainty within the company about distros. The company has not advertised which distro it favors, and the two units that arrived here ran different ones.

Being worked on as part of Mandriva's next Linux distribution update is a technology they are referring to as Speedboot. Speedboot will be officially introduced with Mandriva Linux 2009.1, and compared to the normal boot process, it begins initializing some processes early on while it postpones other tasks until after the graphical display manager has shown. In essence, the user is logging into their Linux desktop even before the system is fully booted. We have some timed results of Mandriva's Speedboot along with videos showing the differences.

I know for a fact that either Novell or Red Hat, or perhaps both, will be announcing next week that they'll be shifting their server virtualization offerings from Xen to XenServer. What I don't know is what, if anything, either one of them may be doing beyond that to further their virtualization partnerships with Microsoft. One or the other, however, is going to make a major move. This has been building for some time. Novell, of course, has long had a partnership with Microsoft

I recently joked that we might want to rename OSNews to CourtNews, and with each passing day that silly joke seems to become less silly. This week, it became clear that Psion Teklogix, the company behind various small computing devices back in the '90s, has started an all-out legal offensive to prohibit other companies from using the term "netbook".

The OpenSUSE project, a group that develops a Linux distribution that then feeds into Novell's SUSE Linux, has been hit recently by the layoffs at Novell. Some Novell developers, who were also contributors to the OpenSUSE project, were laid off by the company. This has caused some other contriburors to apparently ask the OpenSUSE board about the future of the project.

Sun Microsystems has announced that in 2009, there will only be a minor release, instead of a major jump from version 6.5 to 7.0, for its open source NetBeans Java development environment. The developers are following their guidelines to release versions that focus on smaller changes and on API compatibility, as intermediate versions.

Lucene open source software has provided the building blocks for enterprise search technology for a few years. Now, it has a commercial backer. Lucid Imagination hopes that putting itself out there as the business face of Lucene will convince more enterprises to build software upon it -- especially when budgets tighten and open source becomes a more attractive option.

If Google were to use Qt, things would be much simpler and Chrome would have a unified interface under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. But Google isn't satisfied with Qt. Release of the native Linux version of the Google Chrome browser is still planned for June 2009. Unfortunately, more problems than first anticipated keep cropping up. According to recent OSnews, they mainly have to do with the graphical interface.

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, just got a promotion to corporate vice president, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Gutierrez, who has taken an increasingly active role in Microsoft's intellectual-property strategy since moving back from Paris a few years ago, where he had served as Microsoft's associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa (and where I first met him for hot chocolate and coffee), is well-known to the open-source crowd for his involvement in Microsoft's accusations in 2007 that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents.

Version 3.0 of the ACCESS Linux Platform has been unveiled at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. The new version offers a richer user interface and compliance with LiMo.