Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Users of the Symbian mobile phone operating system, meeting in London this week, hope that making the software freely available will help it regain momentum in the battle with new rivals like Apple and Google. The two-day conference is the first since Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, announced in June it would buy out its partners in UK-based Symbian for $410 million.

The quest for easy wireless client management on Linux continues; Eric Geier takes us on a tour of three Linux network management tools for managing roaming, profiles, and encryption keys.

Puppy Linux makes it easy to remaster its distribution, which probably explains the sheer number of Puppy Linux variants, called puplets, in the wild. Some of these puplets differ from the original only in offering different software bundles or use different window managers, while others target specific hardware platforms (for example, Pupeee). Minisys Linux, or Muppy, is an interesting puplet in the form of a modular Linux distro based on a Puppy Linux and Slackware 12 mix.

The GIMP -- the GNU Image Manipulation Program -- is one of the flagships of free software. On October 1 the project released version 2.6, with many new and improved features. Most of the user-visible features are just polish; the real changes are lurking under the hood. How you install the GIMP 2.6 depends on your distribution. Check your package manager to see if it's already available in a repository. If not, you can download it and build it from source using the usual ./configure && make && sudo make install routine.

Battered by competition and slowing demand, Sun Microsystems swung to a big loss in its fiscal first quarter, dragging the server and software maker's results below Wall Street's forecast. Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown.

As more and more consumers download smartphone applications, it's become increasingly vital for developers, phone makers and wireless carriers to have a deeper understanding of how customers interact with them. That's where a company like Flurry comes in. The San Francisco-based startup has developed software that gives demographic information about mobile application consumers.

It is good practice to use a different password for each Web site you need to log in to. Good passwords tend to be long and contain a wide selection of characters. That can make remembering all your passwords difficult. But you can make things easier on yourself by storing passwords for various Web sites in an encrypted file on your computer. I'll take a look at a four programs that give you easy access to your passwords when you need them and protect the password file itself against compromise.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote that a mobile edition of Firefox was expected within weeks. Well, now there is an alpha version of Fennec. We decided to give the little fox a spin to see what exactly the Firefox team had been up to over the past few months.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) in the mobile space face increasing pressure to build business models around open source, but need to weigh risks in adopting a suitable strategy, says analyst firm Ovum.

This weekend the xf86-video-intel 2.4.98 driver was released with hopes of releasing the Intel 2.5.0 driver on Monday. This driver is arriving a bit late compared to its original target of last month, but it's now available. This open-source Intel X.Org driver update features GEM integration (on supported systems), kernel mode-setting (on supported systems), improved EXA 2D performance, and quite a number of bug-fixes.

Engine Yard, a software developer of cloud deployment and open source tools for Ruby on Rails applications, last week released an open source framework for building fast, high-performance Ruby applications. Called"Merb," the programming tool is similar to Ruby on Rails. Merb is an MVC framework.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India's largest political party, with around 20 million Ordinary Members and about 4 million Active Members. In June, BJP announced its goal to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years, and free and open source software (FOSS) will play an essential role in this project.

Motorola is reportedly working to create its first Android-based smartphone. The first phone based on Google's open mobile operating system -- T-Mobile's G1 -- will show up Oct. 22, and Motorola will apparently be joining the party at an undisclosed later date. Still, a fashionably late entrance could be just fine.

The Linux Foundation - the non-profit consortium that gives Linus Torvalds his paycheck and facilitates the growth of Linux and Linux standards - has announced the first beta of the Linux Standard Base 4.0. There are many Linux variants, and they use different kernel releases and software libraries, depending on the technical preferences of the people putting together the distros. Variety may be the spice of life, but it can cause compatibility issues if it is taken too far, and the LSB effort has established many years ago to provide a consistent set of specifications that allow the many distros to remain compatible despite their individual choices and, using LSB tools, to test operating system and application code to ensure that they adhere to the specs.

If you were born before 1975, you may have a collection of records that you want to convert to digital format. Some open source software and a cable are all you need to convert your prized vinyl to something portable. If all you want to do is create MP3 files from you LP tracks, the only software you'll need is Audacity. If you want to convert vinyl to CD, you'll need cdrdao and cdrecord as well. All are readily available in most distributions' package repositories or from the projects' sites.

Only ten days after the release of Linux 2.6.27, the SimplyMEPIS project has decided to work the new kernel into its next release. The project today used the kernel in both 32- and 64-bit versions of the third beta release of SimplyMEPIS 8.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Want to get rid of the evil caps lock key without mutilating your keyboard? Want to give those silly Windows keys useful jobs, or put all those extra multi-media keys to work? Want to become a powerhouse keyboarding commando? With Linux you can do all of these things.

Microsoft is now spending $300 million to counter Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. Does Linux need its own ad campaign? It has been fascinating to see Microsoft roll out its (can you believe it!!) $300 million ad campaign, the one that counters the now famous and effective “I’m a Mac” ads. With those ads, the Apple folks have done a great job of defining a narrative for Microsoft and, in the parlance of advertising, affecting their brand image. The top dog at Microsoft for managing the brand image of Windows said “[Apple has] made a caricature out of the PC.” Given the stakes in the marketplace, Microsoft had little choice but to invest a ton of resources and get their own message out into the public realm.

Ever wondered why your new computer feels sluggish -- or afraid you'll blow your overclocked processor to smithereens? The Inquisitor testing platform wraps the best of open source benchmarking tools in special scripts to help you test and diagnose your hardware. It's simple to use for desktop users, and if you are a computer reseller or vendor, you can also use it to stress-test thousands of computers simultaneously before shipping them off. Inquisitor, originally developed by ALT Linux and released under GNU GPL in mid-2007, is a set of shell scripts that wrap around popular open source tools such as Bonnie++, IOzone, UnixBench, and BYTEmark.

In my last article on this topic, I gave a detailed description how I activated the update-notifier process on a non-privileged user's desktop. I fully expected to see updates notices appear on that desktop as I had on the older 6.06 version. After an extended period no update icon appeared, I became suspicious. I ran some tests that indicated, indeed, no updates were needed. Hence, I was given a false sense of confidence, when the reality was I ran the wrong tests. I later learned that while I had seen the update-notifier running as a process once, it was not active on the unprivileged user's desktop upon a fresh startup. Therefore, my efforts were ineffective.