Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Just as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted over the past few months, Google is moving from managing the world’s information to managing your personal energy data. On Monday night Google tells us it is developing an online tool called “PowerMeter” that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. For now Google is testing the web-based software with Google employees, but the search engine giant is looking to partner with utilities and smart energy device makers and will eventually roll out the tool to consumers.

Earlier this week Monty Widenius, original developer of the MySQL database, announced that he was leaving Sun Microsystems, the current owner of MySQL. Widenius originally announced his intention to leave Sun last year following a dispute with the company over the MySQL 5.1 release. Schalk Neethling of Open Source Release Feed spoke to Widenius and asked him what exactly happened.

The next version of the LiMo Linux-based mobile platform is getting closer to launch, and a number of operators are promising handsets during 2009, the LiMo Foundation said today. All the components that make up Release 2 have been delivered on time by the contributing members, according to the foundation. The new version will provide better multimedia support, location-based services, device management and enhanced security.

One of the distinctive — and perhaps, most successful — aspects of the One Laptop Per Child Program is the level to which individuals have been able to effect change on a global scale. The project's Open Source offerings are, of course, a prime example of this, but so too are the financial offerings that have put the program's product in the hands of some half-million users. The era of individual-based change is coming to an end, however, as an email leaked last week has revealed the end of the program's small-scale giving, known — ironically enough — as "Change the World."

Buried deep inside a recent interview with Linus Torvalds was the revelation that he had moved away from KDE and back to GNOME—which he famously abandoned in 2005. The cause of that switch was the problems he had with KDE 4.0, which seems to be a popular reaction to that release. Various media outlets, Slashdot in particular, elevated Torvalds's switch to the headline of the interview. That led, of course, to some loud complaints from the KDE community, but also a much more thoughtful response from KDE project lead Aaron Seigo. While it is somewhat interesting to know Torvalds's choice for his desktop, there are other, more important issues that stem from the controversy.

At FOSDEM 2009 in Keith Packard's talk on the rebuilt Linux desktop, he shared the progress made in composited 3D, monitor auto-plugging, 2D/3D/media shared objects, kernel mode-setting, and kernel-based 2D drawing. Allowing these problems to be addressed was the Graphics Execution Manager for kernel memory management. The Graphics Execution Manager was used instead of TTM (which we talked about several times before at Phoronix) and it allows for persistent objects, global name, and pageable contents.

Red Hat has announced that it has begun shipping the second rev and the first fully functional version of its Enterprise MRG real-time Linux. The Fedora Project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has also put the alpha of its Fedora 11 development release in the field on time.

MEPIS Founder Warren Woodford wrote to let us know that the third release candidate for SimplyMEPIS 8.0 is now available for download. Woodford notes, "MEPIS 8.0 is in good shape, but I'd prefer to declare it final when Debian Lenny is released."

Birmingham has become the first English city to be completely remapped by its own citizens. Maps of the city are freely editable and available at OpenStreetMap (OSM). The OpenStreetMap project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Birmingham is not the first city to be remapped in this way, but it is the first city in the United Kingdom. Birmingham joins the likes of Paris, Berlin, Canberra and Vienna.

Text editors are wonderful, helpful tools for any computer user; they're not just for gurus and coders. They're essential for editing configuration files; you don't want to use a word processor because these insert all sorts of formatting codes that will mess up your files. They're great for quickly dashing off any kind of document that doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a word processor, and for coders and advanced users they contain a wealth of useful shortcuts and helpful features. Juliet Kemp introduces us to one of the better graphical text editors, Kate.

Subversion is a popular version control system: It keeps a record of changes over the lifetime of a file, allowing you to revert to an earlier version at will. It's particularly useful for code projects, but it can handle, and be useful for, pretty much any type of file (e.g., for tutorials!). Juliet Kemp shows us to how to use this useful version control system.

Boudewijn Rempt has summarised results of development for the next version of Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita 2.0 will contain a host of new features, some of which are unique in the free software world. Below Piotr introduces some of the new features which will be available in this release.

Simulating molecular motions provides researchers with information critical to designing vaccines and working on preventing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But, until recently, researchers needed supercomputers or clusters to run molecular simulations. Now, reports ScienceDaily, a new open source application developed at Stanford University is making it possible to do complex simulations on desktop computers - faster than ever before.

If you've liked the things that the One Laptop Per Child project has brought to notebook design, but didn't fancy spending your hard-earned on a a design straight from the Fisher Price Research Laboratories, take heart: Nicholas Negroponte has announced that the hardware design is to be released under an open-source licence.

Why not have just one version of Linux that everyone can use and enjoy? Wouldn't that make things less confusing and encourage more people to adopt Linux? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds. Multiple distros are "absolutely required," he was quoted as saying.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc unveiled a slimmer version of its Kindle digital book reader on Monday, with more storage and faster page turns, but kept a high price tag that could discourage mass adoption. The new Kindle, still priced at $359 on Amazon's website amazon.com/kindle2, is available for preorder and will ship February 24, the company said. Amazon shares were down about 1 percent at $65.94 in midday trading on Nasdaq.

The development community behind the open source Compiz window manager is undergoing a major reorganization effort that will converge disparate branches of the project and help it overcome its recent lack of direction. Compiz is responsible for bringing rich visual effects such as cube rotation, transparency, shadows, and wobbly windows to the Linux desktop. It includes a powerful compositing engine that leverages hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and the latest features of Xorg. It is shipped with several popular Linux distributions and is extremely popular among Linux enthusiasts.

The netbook market is not just limited to the Eee PC any more, now every major manufacturer has a netbook of some description. The software arena hasn't stood still either with many custom distributions having been created to accommodate these little machines. Intel sponsors the Moblin project which has just released a new alpha, and we take it for a test run. In the news section, the creator of Puppy Linux explains his new project called Woof, Mandriva finalises the structure for their new Assembly, things heat up in BSD land with new releases on the way, the unofficial Fedora FAQ provides updates to version 10, Fedora causes a stir after disabling the popular 'kill X' feature, and a new online Slackware package finder is made public. Also in this issue are links to two interviews - the first with a KDE developer and the second with the creator of Xfce.

In case you needed extra evidence that Microsoft worries about the Linux threat, here's more: Microsoft is advertising for a Director of Open Source Strategy, and the job is aimed at combating Linux on the desktop, not on servers.

One of the largest mobile operators in the world, Telefonica, joined wireless Linux foundation LiMo on Monday and committed with five other major operators to sell phones using its software this year. Vodafone, Orange, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, Korea's SK Telecom, and the top U.S. operator Verizon Wireless will also introduce phones using LiMo software in 2009, the operators said in a joint statement ahead of Mobile World Congress trade show next week in Barcelona.