Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This has been a big year for patent law in the technology industry. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Supreme Court's Quanta v. LG decision. Now the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has handed down a landmark ruling in the case of In Re Bilski. The case dealt with the validity of patents on business methods, and a number of public interest organizations had filed amicus briefs. I offer my take on the decision in a story for Ars Technica. In a nutshell, the Federal Circuit rejected the patent application at issue in the case and signaled a newfound skepticism of "business method" patents.

Have you tried the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL, and OpenSUSE/SLED? Were they not quite right for your needs? The major distros are not the only game in town. Find out the good, the bad, and the ugly about three of the best-known alternatives to the "big" user distros.

Halloween came and went last week, and we have yet to hear from anyone who wore a Tux costume. Sigh -- looks like we'll have to wait another year. Generating much more excitement than the spooky Linuxy possibilities, it seems, was the grand landing of Intrepid Ibex, which caused a veritable flurry of reviews, comparisons and general Ubuntu-related discussion.

Ubuntu fans rejoice, the latest release is upon us in the form of version 8.10, Intrepid Ibex. But can't you just run a software update in Hardy Heron? I'll tell you what's different down to the package level between an upgraded Hardy installation and a fresh Intrepid installation so you can evaluate for yourself.

Ever wondered what takes your Linux box so long to boot up? You can see for certain with the Bootchart package. Bootchart logs the entire startup process and produces a clean, graphical representation of its results suitable for everything from troubleshooting to good old-fashioned bragging rights. Bootchart is a common utility, so check your distribution's package management system first to see if it is available. If not, the Bootchart download page provides links to the official packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE, and Mandriva. You can also download source code in an RPM or tarball from bootchart.org. The package contains installation and uninstallation scripts and compilation instructions.

BOSTON, Mass — November 3, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation announced today that Motorola and Google are joining the GNOME advisory board and sponsoring the GNOME Foundation.

It's time to start fixing telecom, even as we're moving past it. If ideas are weather systems, that's the squall I'll bring to the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London tomorrow and Wednesday. This is my first time at one (it's the fifth in their series), and I'm looking forward to it. Here's the agenda. I like what they're thinking (here's the Telco 2.0 Manifesto) the way they think it (such as this on "two-sided markets"), and where we might run with it. By "we" I mean the Linux, open source and free software communities. Some of which live inside telcos and cablecos.

The news that Wikipedia was in the process of switching away from Red Hat and Fedora—and to Ubuntu—has stirred up some Fedora folks. The relatively short, 13 month support cycle for Fedora releases was fingered as a major part of the problem in a gigantic thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. Some would like to see Fedora be supported for longer, so that it could be used in production environments, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fedora has set out to do. The idea of supporting Fedora beyond the standard "two releases plus one month", which should generally yield 13 months, is not new. It was, after all, the idea behind the Fedora Legacy project. Unfortunately, Fedora Legacy ceased operations at the end of 2006, largely due to a lack of interested package maintainers. So, calls for a "long term support" (LTS) version of Fedora are met with a fair amount of skepticism.

News from the weekend: Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project announced the version 4.4 of the free OpenBSD operating system, including a new song.

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a slew of articles about Ubuntu and Canonical, Linus learns to take personally, our own Sander Marechal reports on T-DOSE 2008, PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world and Carla Schroder asks if Linux does enough for small business.

My former colleague, Joe Wilcox, observes that he doesn't think it's a big deal that Microsoft handed out laptops to bloggers, analysts and reviewers loaded with the Windows 7 alpha. He adds that "All week, I have watched for someone to raise a fuss and hoped that no one would." Wilcox then added that, last time around when Microsoft did this with Vista, that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols "joined the chorus of critics calling the laptops bribes," while he had defended Microsoft's practice.

South African Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has enough cash to pump into his software company, Canonical, saying he is being careful with his pennies but is willing to continue supporting a good investment. Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004 to develop free software for companies and private users around the world.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers as well as for packaging the SUSE kernel at Novell. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works.

On October 25, 2008, the Linux Hater's Blog reached the "eof", or end of file. But if you've been hassled endlessly by Linux lovers and are sick to death of Linux this and Linux that, fear not - the Linux Hater's Redux is born, with plenty of eye-opening news on problems with Linux.

Since today is Halloween, I thought that an article discussing some of the scary things in the FOSS world would be a nice touch. Now obviously I don't celebrate Halloween myself, but I know a lot of people who do, so this article is right in keeping with the holiday. So the question boils down to this. What are the scariest things in Open Source? In a sort of tongue in cheek way, the scariest thing to Linux and FOSS users is proprietary software. Or at least that's what you'd think given the response from most of them. I for one am in that camp, as the more I've learned about proprietary software, the less I've found it desirable to use.

Linux has been making inroads into PC sales lately because it runs so well on lightweight netbooks with limited RAM and processing power. Windows 7, though, appears to run well on lightweight hardware as well, which could mean that it's Microsoft's Linux killer. At the recent PDC, where Windows 7 was unveiled, Windows and Windows Live senior vice president Steve Sinofsky claimed that Windows 7 used less than half of the 1 GB of RAM on his Lenovo S10 netbook. Making the new operating system lightweight has clearly been Microsoft's goal. In addition to light RAM use, Windows also strips out a variety of applications, including Windows Mail, among others.

I tested OpenSolaris earlier this year shortly after the developers announced the project's first official release. Although I was impressed with the ease of installation and several other aspects of the user experience, I also pointed out several areas where there was room for improvement. In order to compete with Linux on the desktop, I argued, OpenSolaris has to make its innovative features more accessible to regular end users. One particularly impressive enhancement that helps achieve that goal is the new ZFS snapshot visualization functionality that will be included in the next major release of OpenSolaris.

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications. According to Schuster, this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year."

If there is one operating system that has a special place in my heart, it's QNX. This microkernel operating system served as my main desktop operating system for months and months back in the day, during the short-lived QNX Desktop scene - which died out due to a lack of interest from QNX' parent company, QNX Software Systems. The money is in the embedded and high reliability markets, and that's where QSS - understandably - focused its efforts. QNX was sort-of open sourced in September 2007, and today the company has announced the release of QNX 6.4, the first major release since 6.3 in 2004.

A groundbreaking training tool for the global energy industry which uses virtual worlds to simulate potential disasters is attracting significant interest within days of its launch. The technology has been developed by Second Places, which specializes in creating presences in online virtual worlds for corporate clients.