Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors. The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days. Sun Microsystems, which largely steers the OpenSolaris effort and will use the distro as the basis of the next generation of Solaris, wants to be among the greenest of IT vendors. It also wants to find a new niche for Solaris, as Linux has done superbly on netbooks this year.

Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features .

[I found the link to this article on LWN in the thread talking about the new 2.6.28 kernel that Linus just released. Interesting stuff, 48bit addressing and a maximum filesystem size of 1 EB. 1 Exabyte? Wow! - Scott]

In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.

On December 11, the Free Software Foundation announced the filing of a GPL-infringement lawsuit against Cisco. This action represents another step in a long series of license-compliance issues involving Cisco and its subsidiaries. It may look like just another licensing lawsuit, but it represents an interesting step in the evolution of attitudes toward compliance with the GPL. The eventual outcome is fairly predictable, but the process is still worth watching.

People who write good howtos and documentation the finest people there are. Tina Gasperson, Bruce Byfield, and Carla Schroder share some tips on improving your writing skills, and building a body of work to be proud of.

At a time when new and buggy features cloud basic computer functions, it's refreshing to see a new release of a distro like Slackware that stays true to its core philosophy. Slackware has an unfair reputation of being a distro only for experienced users. Granted it doesn't sport many graphical configuration tools, but it balances that with stability and speed.

Last week, the Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project achieved version 11.1 of its community-supported Linux distribution. Because the release includes watershed changes like a new license, new build system, and significant upstream integrations, DesktopLinux collared Community Manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier for perspective about what it all means.

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu's next release. You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop's pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways.

With 2008 coming to an end, heise online UK picks what was full of win, who was waiting for the failboat, and who just made us go meh. So in no particular order, here are the Wins, the Fails and the Mehs of Open Source from 2008.

Microsoft came clean and admitted its SQL Server database software is vulnerable to code injection attacks. It's not a new flaw but the same bug in the database software that emerged around the time of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday update earlier this month. In an advisory, Redmond's security gnomes confirmed that code has been produced that exploits a security bug affecting Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Windows Internal Database, in certain configurations.

Any .1 release of a Linux distribution is generally meant to fix bugs which were present in the .0 release, not to introduce new features. In this respect, OpenSUSE 11.1 differs sharply from other distributions. And the news is not all good either. Novell acolytes please note, this is NOT a review, just some sundry observations. The cancerous Mono has spread its tentacles further into the GNOME Desktop environment which is present on the GNOME live CD, to the extent that removing mono-core results in the removal of Evolution as well, the default mail program.

OLPC Learning Club DC member Mike Cariaso popped up on my Google Talk one night last week to tell me he had arrived at the Elaine & Nicholas Negropnte School in Reaksmy, Cambodia. This is the school featured in the May 2007 60 Minutes report on OLPC, and where Nicholas Negroponte first tried the one laptop per child idea. Mike is volunteering at the school over the next several months.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

Microsoft has begun to realign its legal department, allowing it to work in collaboration with its engineers so that product teams can have more flexibility with open-source software. The company is evangelizing—internally—that more interoperability can be good for the bottom line. Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, discussed with SD Times his company's evolution to a pragmatic viewpoint toward open source, and explained why the company is offering its support to some open-source projects that it feels advances its business and technology goals.

There's no way around it: the longer you run a Windows installation, the slower and less responsive it gets. On my year-old dual-boot laptop, I wait longer and longer for Windows to boot, and longer and longer for programs to do what I ask. Meanwhile, my Ubuntu Linux installation, on exactly the same hardware, installed almost as long ago, is as snappy as the day I set it up—faster, in fact, as I've tweaked it and geeked it.

If you should ever need to clean up your computer, use this clean up utility for very low price (for free)..

[Sorry but I just had to share this one, almost spewed coffee all over my computer.. - Scott]

While commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has not grown enough to justify the ridiculous valuations that Wall Street put on the company when it went public a decade ago, the company is more or less on track to break $1bn in sales in the next couple years. In the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended November 30, which had the global economic meltdown smack dab in the middle of it, Red Hat reported software subscription sales of $135.5m, up 17 per cent, with training and services sales of $29.9m, up 52.1 per cent. Overall sales rose by 22.1 per cent to $165.3m, and despite larger operating costs compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2008, net income rose by 18.7 per cent to $25.1m.

Microsoft just can't quit you, Windows XP. The final shipment date of Microsoft's aged, yet distinctively non-Vista operating system has been extended yet again. System builders can now obtain Windows XP until May 30, 2009. Windows XP was originally scheduled for OEM extinction on January 31, 2009. That deadline was given once, twice, three times the delay to mid-2010, provided the Windows XP licenses were for netbooks and low-cost PCs that can't handle Windows Vista - or perhaps more importantly, can and do support Linux.

Linux Mint says its "purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." With hundreds of Linux distributions vying for our attention, what sets Linux Mint apart? Paul Ferrill learns that it does indeed have some worthy features not commonly found in other distributions.

In a move designed to bolster VoIP quality, an open source telephony platform reportedly is now supporting a Web-based development group’s low-delay audio codec. Officials at FreeSWITCH say their platform supports Xiph.Org’s so-called “Constrained Energy Lapped Transform,” or “CELT” codec, a technology used for low-delay speech and audio communication.