Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For some, Ubuntu 8.10 was something of a disappointment. Not because it is bad, which it is not, but because is feels more like slightly refreshed Ubuntu 8.04 rather than a new release. For one, Ubuntu’s promised desktop interface overhaul is still not in evidence and that was promised two releases ago. And then there is the fact that apart from a few minor tweaks it looks every but the same as ubuntu 8.04. Which is not good considering the ongoing talk from founder Mark Shuttleworth of how the Linux desktop must be as appealing as Mac OS X. Right now it feels as if Ubuntu is making no ground on that goal.

Symbian, the UK-based maker of the world's most popular smartphone operating system, is going through big changes. As well as being taken over by Nokia, the company is preparing to convert its closed code into open source. At the Symbian Smartphone Show in London in October, Symbian's research chief David Wood told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK that the Symbian Foundation will be established in the first half of next year, with the first version of the Foundation software available in March or April 2009. He also discussed the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years holds for smartphone technology.

This blog is momentarily interrupted to bring you a snippet of recently received email. "...observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a conference with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you.."

[Go get em' Ken! - Scott]

The Internet giant announced an open source project to dramatically boost the power of Web applications. Native Client lets Web apps run with PC power. Rumors have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but this week the company revealed an open source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.

Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables open source innovation and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux, today unveiled the Linux Defenders program, which is designed to make prior art more readily accessible to patent and trademark office examiners, and increase the quality of granted patents and reduce the number of poor quality patents.

The Pulitzer Prize Board is finally recognizing the obvious: if newsprint's highest journalism award wants to stay relevant it had better welcome the Web. The Pulitzer board announced Monday that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.

[Not FOSS related but of interest to online only publications like LXer. - Scott]

On Saturday 29th of November 2008 LinuxDay was held for the 10th time already in Dornbirn, Austria. Organised by the LUG Vorarlberg in cooperation with HTL Dornbirn, the well-received event is a platform for open source projects to answer questions and show off their latest and greatest versions to a broad public, but also for the students at the HTL Dornbirn to show what they achieved and created by using software libre. KDE was there to show off KDE 4.

Imagine that I proposed to you the following argument. I have (let's pretend) added up all the fuel consumed in the process of getting WidgetCo's widgets from the factory to consumers. There's all the gas burned by the trucks that bring the widgets from the factory to the retail store. And then there's the gas each consumer burns driving to and from the store for widgets. And having added up the costs of all this carbon, I discover that WidgetCo is paying only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the fuel consumed in the process of getting widgets from the factory to the homes of customers. Now suppose I claim that this is evidence of some form of outrageous unfairness—WidgetCo is somehow forcing you to subsidize their shipping costs! (The widgets, by the way, are free.)

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and value investment firm, Southeastern Asset Management, Inc., today announced that they have entered into an agreement to add two new independent members to Sun's Board of Directors. Southeastern is Sun's largest shareholder and currently holds approximately 162 million shares, or 22 percent, of Sun's common stock. Under the terms of the agreement, Sun will add two new independent directors to its Board. The appointments, to be approved by both companies, will occur as soon as reasonably practicable.

LXer Feature: 09-Dec-2008

A point by point response to an article on Hackingalert.com entitled "What Are The Issues With Open Source Linux?" that hit our newswire yesterday.

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore. Of course, modern hard drives have come a long way and are amazingly reliable, but if you work with computers long enough, you're bound to have one fail on you.

I was moaning recently about the appalling sloppiness when it comes to viruses et al.: they are practically all for Windows, and yet nobody mentions this fact. Here are two more egregious examples.

[All USB drives for the entire U.S. Armed Services has been banned in trying to stop the agent.btz virus? Wow! - Scott]

Just in time for the end-of-year shopping season, Google Inc. is offering an unlocked Android phone targeted at developers but available to anyone. While the phone might be attractive to consumers and developers in the U.S., its price in other countries is putting off even developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 can be used on any compatible network, unlike the G1, the first Android phone on the market, which works only on T-Mobile's networks in the U.S. and the U.K. Developers can load their own applications onto the phone for testing. Previously, developers had to buy the G1 and subscribe to T-Mobile plans if they wanted to test their applications on a phone before adding their software to the public Android Market.

This week's feature story takes a first look at VectorLinux 6.0 beta 2. Following up on last week's feature story about the impact of the global financial crisis on Linux distributions, Mandriva CEO Hervé Yahi responds to the community regarding the recent dismissals at the Paris-based distribution while Novell posts mixed sales results for SUSE Linux. In other news, Phoronix publishes the results of benchmark tests comparing the performance of the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.11 with the previous version, 2008.05, Ars Technica names Foresight Linux and openSUSE as its distributions of the year, and DragonFly BSD gets a closer look. Finally, we get progress updates on Linux Mint 6 and a preview release of Fedora-based Omega 10 Desktop.

Encryption is standard in a lot of applications these days, such as email, Web sites, VPNs, and wireless networking. There is a lot of snake oil and ineffective technology that lies in wait for the unwary; Paul Rubens gives a clear and understandable explanation of the power and benefits of Public Key Encryption (PKE), and why it revolutionized securing communications over untrusted networks.

Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you can also grab or delete messages by matching regular expressions against message headers.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week. Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers. Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

Suppose you need to chart some demographical or geographical data. Using OpenOffice.org's chart module you can present the data as a bar, pie, or even exploded donut chart. What you can't do, though, is to create a map chart that shows data distribution by continent, country, or region. To do this, you need the EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (EOMCP) extension. Unlike many other OpenOffice.org extensions, EOMCP is not free, but the price is right (it costs 9.90 EUR or about 12 USD), and there is a free trial version available.

LXer Feature: 07-Dec-2008

Ok so first some numbers, Tech Republic has a nice list of 10 mistakes new Linux administrators should look out for. Steve Emms gives a review of 6 Lean Linux Desktop Environments of which I had only heard of two before. I also came across Cynthia Harvey's big list of 40 Open Source Tools to help you protect your privacy online that has working links to each of their SourceForge webpages, very cool.

Back in October Ryan Gordon surprised the Linux community by releasing a Linux game demo of Prey two-years after the game began shipping on Windows. He was contracted to port the Prey server to Linux but this was the first time we were seeing any client. A month later an updated Prey demo for Linux was released. This afternoon Ryan has now released the binaries that allow the retail game to be used on Linux.