Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The world and their dog seems to be talking about Windows 7 at the moment. Ironically, in part that's because it's proving almost impossible to download the beta that has just been released: you can't help feeling that Microsoft has let this happen on purpose just to create a little demand. But while everyone is looking forward, I want to look back, at Windows Vista – more specifically, to the FSF's BadVista campaign.

The Debian project has voted to allow the use of binary blobs in the upcoming release of Debian 5, codenamed Lenny, says a news story. The decision is said to have followed a contentious debate over the issue, with open-source purists arguing against the move.

On January 5, Doc Searls asked What would you use Exchange for? A good question and based on the number of comments, it is generating a lot of discussion. As someone currently embedded in a primarily Windows environment, I want to know where the enterprise management tools for the Linux desktop are?

We are preparing to release Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal" later this month, which is our largest and most significant update to date. Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 has quite a few changes internally as well as a number of new features and added tests. While there are over 200 changes making up this release codenamed Tydal, in this article we are sharing some of the most significant work in this forthcoming release.

It seems that much drama roils behind the OpenOffice scenes, with some saying it's a dying mess thanks to Sun's mismanagement. Then there is Go-OO, which could be a sneaky attempt to implant nasty Microsoft technologies into an important FOSS software suite. Bruce Byfield heroically attempts to sort out the whole mess and figure out what's really going on.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is now accepting 60-second video entries for its "I'm Linux" contest, which spoofs recent Apple and Microsoft commercials. The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo to participate in the LF's Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009, says the nonprofit group.

The New York Times has published an interview story on Mark Shuttleworth, apparently made during Canonical's Ubuntu Developer Summit last month at Google's Mountain View headquarters. Ashlee Vance, story author, appears to view Ubuntu -- despite many successes -- as the flashy but flawed plaything of a quixotic billionaire.

Bluefish, long-favored among DesktopLinux editors, has come out tops in a "shoot-out" between seven different text editing software packages for Linux. Evaluated in the context of HTML authoring, Bluefish is praised for its broad multi-language support, built-in reference material, and ease of use.

Search giant Google releases test version of Chrome 2.0 browser for Windows but says Linux and Mac users will have to wait until later this year for native versions for those platforms.

LXer Feature: 12-Jan-2009

Sorry for being a day late on posting this. Some new things going on with the kernel like Btrfs put in the mainline and SJVN's review of Linux 2.6.28's five best features. Someone decided to try Linux for a week as their new year Linux resolution and 14 file managers for Linux as well.

I was in a rush when I posted the second addendum, hence, I knew I left out graphics that might have been useful. My intention is to post a few screen shots and to describe my methods and experiences using the update notifier solely as an unprivileged user. In addition, I learned an easier way to activate the update notifier upon startup.

Red Hat is following the Second Life path and is set to host an online conference for users and partners of its JBoss Java-based middleware products. The JBoss Virtual Experience is a web-based conference through which JBoss executives and engineers will give the usual keynote speeches and host sessions just as they would at a regular trade show, according to Red Hat. The virtual conference, for which people can register now, also will have booth exhibits from JBoss, Red Hat and other event sponsors.

They’re either hapless pests or the very people capable of overthrowing Windows. Take your pick. It feels pretty clear to me that the open process produces better stuff,” says Mark Shuttleworth, whose team at Canonical is leading the Ubuntu project. In December, hundreds of these controversial software developers gathered for one week at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. They came from all over the world, sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails, unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.

What the open source community needs is a more streamlined way to bring everyone together to collaborate and ensure interoperability, says Gopi Ganapathy, president and CEO of Essentia and the new Community Development Chair of the Open Solutions Alliance.

The Btrfs and Squashfs file systems have been merged into the Linux kernel main development branch and, barring any problems, should appear in the 2.6.29 version of the kernel, currently in development. The two new file systems are good examples of where the Linux kernel developers see the future of Linux; running on both smaller and larger systems.

Showing signs that it's working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.

Crowdsourcing and telecommuting are conspiring to reinvent the traditional notion of a job. No longer is the one-employer model the only game in town. Some companies have found that work done by freelancers may be of better quality than what they were used to getting from their in-house employees.

An increasing number of hardware vendors are adopting practices that benefit the open-source and Linux communities from AMD releasing documentation and code to Creative Labs open-sourcing their X-Fi sound driver. One of the companies holding back on better embracing Linux has been Broadcom with their WiFi adapters being ill supported. However, open-source developers have stepped up to the plate and have improved the situation on their own.

That's the killer lesson of Dave Winer's new apporach to noise-filtered tweeting. "Friends" and "followers" aren't what matter. If you want substance, you need useful inputs. Not volume. Not style. Not popularity. Those have their places, just not in your face when you're looking for useful and interesting stuff.

GParted is an excellent GNOME program for editing partitions, changing file-systems, and performing related disk tasks. However, GParted is not exactly the ideal program for new Linux users to familiarize themselves with if all they want to do is format a USB drive or external storage device. Fortunately, a new GNOME utility has come about that supersedes GFloppy and is designed to be a simple yet powerful disk formatting utility. In this article we are taking an introductory look at GNOME Format.