Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today. For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself? This article takes a look at the time when the computer equipment we now take for granted was invented and what it looked like back then.

[Not really FOSS related but nostalgia kicked in and I just couldn't stop myself from posting it. - Scott]

When users want the latest in free and open source software (FOSS), they are likely to think first of sites like freshmeat, or perhaps Softpedia or GnomeFiles. However, as the FOSS community has divided into specialized communities, sites for new releases have proliferated, to the point where it is difficult to keep track of them all. Since 2007, openDesktop.org has provided a portal for many of these specialized sites. Under the slogan "Let's build the desktop of the future," openDesktop.org provides a quick overview of new software that is independent of desktop or distribution.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

The Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF), along with several partners, has received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to propose very high speed Internet extensions, on the order of 10 Gbps, to connect the academic, research, health and non-governmental organization (NGO) communities in African countries to the rest of the world. Such connections would provide African universities and medical centers connectivity equivalent to the best available to comparable institutions in the United States.

For some in the world of free software, libraries are things that you call, rather than visit. But the places where books are stored – especially those that make them freely available to the public – are important repositories of the world's knowledge, of relevance to all. So coders too should care about them alongside the other kind, and should be concerned that there is a threat to their ability to provide ready access to knowledge they have created themselves. The good news is that open source can save them.

Pardus is the first Linux distribution specifically targeted at Turkish GNU/Linux users. In December, 2005, a group of software developers, sponsored by the Turkish National Research Institute for Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an affiliate of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜB?TAK) got together to create and release the first stable version, Pardus 1.0. Since then the project hast made several releases, expanded its user-base, and steadily became popular with Linux users all over the world. Pardus is known for its simplified and fast boot process, its customized YALI installer and the PiSi package manager.

Fedora generally lives on the bleeding-edge of free software packages -- especially when it comes to the Linux kernel and X.Org -- and with yesterday's release of Fedora 10 Cambridge this is no different. Fedora 9 was the first of the major distributions to integrate any level of kernel mode-setting support (A Preview of Kernel-based Mode-Setting) and this support has been well-extended in this latest Red Hat release.

As I was standing in the shower this morning, ruminating over the firings of several Verizon employees for snooping into President-Elect Obama’s phone records, I began to think about privacy and what it means and what it will evolve to mean in the coming days and years. After all I was in one of the most private places a person can be right?

The inaugural Desktop Summit, uniting the flagship conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy, will be held in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain the week of July 3-11, 2009. The conference will be hosted by Cabildo, the local government of Gran Canaria. The GNOME and KDE communities will use this co-located event to intensify momentum and increase collaboration between the projects. It gives a unique opportunity for key figures to collaborate and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

When I was a reporter a few years ago, I began covering the fast rise of Linux to dominance on the Top500 Supercomputer list. Since the list comes out every six months, I would end up getting a response like, “Is it that time of year again already?” to which I would respond, yes. My previous editor’s exasperation aside, I thought it was incredibly significant to see Linux with as much if not more dominance as Microsoft in a market. The fact that it’s the high end of high-performance computing (HPC) only increases the significance, in my opinion, since it is generally a harbinger of things to come in more mainstream enterprise IT. So, is it that time of year again? You bet.

If you are into email like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were in the movie You've Got Mail, you probably want to be warned as soon as any message enters your mailbox. If you use Gmail, you can try one of several Gmail-specific applications that let you know when new messages arrive.

Linux distributions come and go by the dozens almost every day, and most of them live and die an unknown, irrelevant life, mostly because no, changing three icons and adding the suffix '-nix' to any random word doesn't make it different from Ubuntu. Anyway, sometimes, a new distribution is started that brings something new to the table. One such "distribution" is Glendix, which aims to combine the Linux kernel with the userpsace tools from Plan 9. Distribution is probably not the right term for this project.

To hear Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin tell it, the operating system war is over and Linux has won. “Linux represents the ultimate flight to safety in troubled times,” he said while offering some predictions for 2009. “People want a platform they trust, that’s low cost, that allows them to consolidate infrastructure, and that’s Linux.

Give a gift of a netbook this year; I will be. These ultra-light computing devices are versatile, affordable and appealing. But which one to buy? Should you pay more for a laptop? What are the pros and cons between different models? Never fear, here's how to work your way through the morass and buy with confidence!

Just in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC 1, we’ve finished the new and improved license for openSUSE 11.1. The days of agreeing to a click-through EULA for openSUSE are over!

Dear free software developers: Before we American nerds sit down to our turkey and mashed potatoes today, know that your creations are at the top of the list of things we're most thankful for. Whether you're an indie hacker putting out the occasional script or an employee at a giant internet company building out a webapp with millions of users or a voluntary coder contributing to an open source project, we salute you this Thanksgiving in gratitude for all the things your work enables us to do every day. Short of covering you in candied yam kisses and cranberry sauce hugs, please accept our hearty thanks for your work. We like you. We really, really like you.

[I give Thanks to absolutely everyone who has contributed to the FOSS movement, ever. Happy Thanksgiving from LXer Everyone! - Scott]

NFS-GANESHA is an NFS version 2-4 server that runs in the user address space instead of as part of the operating system kernel. Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) lets you run a filesystem in the user address space instead of as part of the Linux kernel, but the FUSE support in the Linux kernel from many Linux distributions does not allow you to export FUSE through NFS. NFS-GANESHA lets you expose FUSE through NFS without patching your kernel.

On successive days, Harald Welte and David Woodhouse gave different views of the relationship between embedded companies and the free software communities whose code the companies are increasingly using. Their outlooks were not contradictory, but instead complementary; each came at the topic from a different direction. Welte looked mostly at what companies, particularly chip vendors could do better, while Woodhouse looked at what things the community could do to improve.

Apple's attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal counsel, O'Melveny & Myers, managed to get an open-source project called the iPodhash pulled from Bluwiki, a free Web site used to create Wiki pages, saying the project is illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Adobe's long-awaited release of a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux won the company praise and even a little advocacy in the Linux blogosphere last week. Writers touted the speed and robustness of the new Flash and told people to stop pirating Photoshop -- and use GIMP instead.