Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Moving towards the 2.0 release with almost monthly beta releases, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release candidate. So today we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, this beta is an important step towards a final release.

KDE's Konqueror file manager and Web browser is a powerhouse loaded with useful features. However, sometimes it takes a bit of digging to unearth treasures and to figure out how to make it do what you want. Carla Schroder offers up tips on creating view profiles that stick, and how to open it exactly to the profile that you want.

James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out. Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.

Today I would like to announce the appointment of Tracy Anne Barlow aka tracyanne to Contributing Editor. Tracy has been a force of fact and opinion in the LXer forums for some time now. Her contributions to the forums quite literally speak for themselves. LXer is lucky to have her. Please join me in welcoming Tracy to the LXer Team.

Steve Jobs is taking a five and a half month medical leave of absence from his role as CEO of Apple, saying his health issues "are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in mid 2004. Since then there has been much speculation about his health, largely due to a significant loss of weight that gave him a somewhat haggard appearance.

[I have a feeling its going to turn into more than just five or six months. - Scott]

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework."

If you've been hacking, coding, or just generally IT-ing for more than ten minutes, you've likely run into a stereotype or two about geeks — and there's always a grain of truth, however tiny, behind a stereotype. At least that seems to be the prevailing wisdom at Germany's Potsdam University, where the IT faculty are gearing up to turn their masters students into master suitors.

Open Source in the public sector seemed to be all the rage in 2008, with government agencies all over Europe — not to mention agencies of the EU itself — adopting, and in many cases, mandating Open Source software and standards. Of course, Europe was not the only continent cozying up with a copy of the source code — governments in Africa, Asia, North & South America, and all over the South Pacific were exploring and implementing Open Source in 2008. Now, one of those governments has revealed the savings-side of OSS, and the numbers they're tossing around are pretty nice.

Dangerous is probably not a description you would apply to the average programmer, let alone yourself. However, the Microsoft, Symantec and even the US Department of Homeland Security are worried that you could unwittingly be just that and intend to prove it.

Imeem's android application offers an easy and clear-sounding way to listen to music on your G1. While it doesn't quite duplicate all the functions of the Web version of Imeem, it does serve up plenty of music without costing a penny.

A little bit in late to release this article, but important to let know KDE community about our involvement to spread KDE to Italian people. Last October, three members of KDE Italia gave talks in three different Italian cities. Daniele Costarella in Salerno, Salvatore Brigaglia in Sassari and Diego Rondini in Castelfranco Veneto (TV).

Paul Ferrill reports that Linux-powered "instant-on" environments are the new hot technology. ASUS and DeviceVM led the way with Splashtop, and now the venerable BIOS vendor Phoenix has released Hyperspace, which has some significant differences.

As part of a proposed reorganization following its bankruptcy filing, SCO plans a public auction of its mobile business and its Unix OpenServer business, the company said on Monday. Through the auction, SCO plans to secure additional operating funds in the two lines of business, believing that the auction will maximize the value of an asset sale and ensure ongoing development of the businesses. Several investment groups have expressed interest in acquiring the assets via public auction, SCO said.

What would happen if a Linux user switched to Windows. How about if a Windows enthusiast tried Linux? The results were surprising to both, and they illustrate just what needs to happen in order for Linux to finally break into the mainstream PC market.

“Free software” or “open source”? It's a perennial question that has provoked a thousand flame wars. Normally, the factions supporting each label and its associated theoretical baggage manage to work alongside each other for the collective good with only a minimal amount of friction. But occasionally, the sparks begin to fly, and tempers rise. I think we're in for another bout of this particular fever.

Holidays are an exercise in tradition. One of the more charming holiday traditions around LWN is to look at the predictions made at the beginning of the year and measure them against reality. There is, after all, great value in things which make us laugh. This year's predictions were featured in the January 3, 2008 edition. As might be expected, some of them were better than others.

Featured in this issue is an interview with Paul Sherman, lead developer of the lightweight derivative of Slackware - Absolute Linux. In the news, Debian announces updated "Lenny" live images and the openSUSE community releases unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CDs. Fedora chooses a name for the upcoming release 11, while in BSD land Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and FreeBSD benefit from sharing technology. In other news, Gentoo's Portage package management system gains support for Git repositories and we also include links to two external interviews: the first with PC/OS lead developer Roberto J. Dohnert and the second being a podcast with Gentoo founder and now Funtoo developer, Daniel Robbins. Finally, we would like to thank Russ Wenner for all his hard work throughout 2008 in creating the DistroWatch Weekly podcast and remind our readers of this great way to get your DWW fix.

Every now and then, some blogger working for a big website will write a story about how company Abc should make radical move Xyz in order to better, eh, well, that's usually left in the dark. These are generally more akin to said bloggers hoping for radical move Xyz rather than there being a well-argumented reasoning. Radical moves in the technology business don't happen very often, but when they do, there's generally a good reason for them.

Seeking to stave off final defeat, SCO has brought a (fourth) new reorganization plan to bankruptcy court. The company has proposed an asset sale to raise funds for paying off the rest of its debts and implementing a new business plan.

By many of the accounts we've seen, the star of last week's Consumer Electronics Show was Palm's new Pre smartphone, a Linux-based offering with all the features we've come to expect from post-iPhone devices and a few innovations of it's own. Indeed, iPhone appears in reviews of the Pre perhaps more often than Palm, with terms including iPhone killer" and "iPhone-like" popping out of paragraphs like coins from a slot machine. Among the iPhone-like attributes are the ubiquitous touch-screen display, along with 3G service, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, on-board camera (reviews differ on whether it is a 2.0 or 3.2 megapixel offering), and third-party applications, while tossing additional specs, including a G1-like slide-out QWERTY keyboard, to the mix.