Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Thanks to a Ubuntu Developer named "Teapot", the newest version of Ubuntu (8.10) is now optimized for the XO laptop. Teapot designed this release to be reliable and consistent with many modifications.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just click your way to a custom distro? After all, most of the packages you will need are sitting on a well-connected web server somewhere, so it makes sense to build ISO images and repositories directly on that server. And since that server has a HTTP interface, why not make the distro building software into a web application? This is the principle behind http://www.instalinux.com, created by Chris Slater. It's based on the SystemDesigner CGI scripts from the Linux Common Operating Environment project, originally developed as a tool for internal use at HP, and now released under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client is very popular among Linux users, but it has poor visual integration with the Linux platform. Fortunately, Thunderbird is finally getting some Tango love and its own Linux theme. Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark published a blog entry this week that provides an early preview of some recent theming work that will significantly improve the look and feel of Thunderbird on Linux. Magnus Melin has started working on a Thunderbird gnomestripe theme which uses icons from the user's default theme in the menus. Michael Monreal also came up with a cool userChrome.css hack that applies Tango icons to the main user interface.

An image viewer (also known as image browser) is a desktop application that can quickly display or handle stored graphical images in different graphics file formats. It can render images according to properties of the display such as display resolution, color depth, and color profile. Other image viewers have advanced features like editing and web publishing. Some Linux users may not care much on whatever image viewer they are using. But to those who are rather picky, they can always get and install other image viewers with different features to suit their needs.

I recently promised you a strategy for a long-term exploration and transition to Linux and Open Source. This plan is for home use; organizational Linux is another issue. You also can follow this strategy to get some idea of how well a netbook will work before shelling out big bucks. You can decide whether Open Source applications work for you without installing Linux. Why? Most come in Mac and PC-compatible versions as well. Start by downloading and trying out the big ticket items, Open Office, Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail client, on your PC, replacements for your must-use for-fee applications. Wikipedia.org has a good list of addition software.

If one was to believe IBM, the days of the Microsoft desktop are numbered, soon to be cut short by a combination of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, IBM's Lotus range of office applications and a virtual desktop from Virtual Bridges. The trouble is IBM's solution is nothing new and addresses none of the issues associated with moving away from Microsoft.

Keith Curtis spent years as a Microsoft programmer. Then he quit and became deeply enthusiastic about source development. This is his story..."A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."

After trying Ubuntu 8.10 for two days on my Macbook, which proved to be a success, I now take Fedora 10 for a spin. Read on to see how my two days experience was with this Linux distro.

I read a longish post from Linux Canuck, “How Windows Users are Changing Linux and What We Should Do About It,” which attempts to sum up a lot of the issues that have been discussed at length here. The gist of the post is that, as former Windows users wander over to explore Linux, they bring their own Windows prejudices and expectations with them, and that the accommodating Linux community tries to make them feel “at home.” Canuck wonders — is the Linux community in danger of being too accommodating — to the point that it attempts to be more Windows-like and loses its own identity?

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom “languages” and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. In Sydney for the annual Open Source Developers Conference, Wall delivered a keynore on “The once and future of Perl” and gave a few rare insights to what the future of Perl programming might look like.

The Symbian Foundation will make Symbian as an open-source operating system in 2010 and will put out its first distribution of software for developers in the first half of next year. The foundation is the successor to the Symbian consortium that has administered the OS since 1998. It is being formed after Nokia agreed to buy the remaining part of Symbian, a deal that closed on Tuesday.

The recession is taking its toll at Google, forcing the company to cut back on its famous "20 percent" projects, which allow employees to work part of the time on non-core interests. Is it a sign of the high-flying company coming down to Earth?

First the Linux Hater’s blog ended, and now there’s a claim that the Linux Hater’s Redux has gone to the great kernel panic in the sky. Now a mysteriously named person called “Oiaohm” is trying to re-incarnate some of the hate in a new “battle ground” but his sights aren’t set on Linux alone.

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn't. But it's not as black-and-white as it seems, since closed binary-only blobs have been allowed in the kernel for years now in violation of the GPL. Bruce Byfield examines the complexities of this issue.

Squid Graph is a Perl script that takes your Squid proxy server access.log file and generates a Web page showing you statistics about your proxy accesses and transfers, including the number of cache hits and the percentage of requests that were served by the cache alone. With Squid Graph you can see how well tweaks to your Squid configuration are working.

Now that you've seen all the big names and launches of 2008, it's time to give a nod to the apps that didn't get the attention they should have this past year. If you're sick of hearing about Firefox and the iPhone and Gmail and Chrome, you're in the right place. Let's take a look at the least hyped software that launched or saw great improvements in 2008, and give 'em the love they deserve.

Om Malik calls this "dave winer's best post of the year". I can't recall a better one, but ranking isn't what matters here. What matters is perspective and experience, and Dave has plenty of both. What he says is, "We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology."

Red Hat may not be spending much when it comes to the company holiday party this year, but it certainly is no Scrooge. Rather than splurge on a swanky party for its employees, the Linux distributor will give money and food to charity.

Becoming an accomplished sailor isn’t easy, but a group of European sailing enthusiasts have just made the sport a little more accessible for beginners. The ASV Roboat is a solar-powered, Linux-brained sailboat that can sail anywhere and navigate pre-set race courses with no human intervention.

Virtualized computing environments can take advantage of built-in virtualization support in modern dual-core processors, but when it comes to 3-D acceleration in virtual machines, almost all fall flat on their faces. VMGL is a little-known application written as part of Google's Summer of Code 2006 program that lets OpenGL apps running inside a virtual machine take advantage of the graphics hardware acceleration on the host. It has limitations, but if you want 3-D in VMs, VMGL is your best bet.