Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There's never a dull moment for those of us lucky enough to be part of the technology industry, and we here at LinuxInsider are just as prone as the next tech enthusiasts to get caught up in the excitement of new innovations and ideas. Take cloud computing. It's a concept that has been grabbing an increasing portion of the digital ink on our pages and elsewhere.

CEO Rusty Harris revealed MontaVista's role developing the quick-booting, ARM-based processor subsystem expected to ship this year in select Dell laptop models. The "Latitude ON" feature aims to give enterprise laptop users instant boot-up and access to select applications, with multi-day battery lifetimes.

If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

Like DD-WRT and OpenWRT, Tomato is an excellent Linux-based replacement for your stock WRT54G wireless router family firmware. Unlike DD-WRT and OpenWRT, it presents a well-organized interface that appeals to both novices and advanced users.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

Maintaining filesystems can be a real administration burden. Over time you might start getting multiple copies of the same file, soft links that point to files that no longer exist, temporary files that have been hanging around longer than they should, and binaries that have been installed and not had their debugging information stripped out. fslint can help you find these troublesome files so you can clean up your filesystem. Packages for fslint are available in Ubuntu Hardy universe and in the Fedora 9 repositories. There are currently no packages for openSUSE. I built it from source using version 2.28 of fslint on a 32-bit Fedora 9 machine. fslint is written in Python and uses GTK+2 and libglade2, so you'll need these and the Python bindings for them installed first.

Red Hat on Thursday introduced what it called the first fully integrated, Linux-based, high-performance-computing platform, claiming to undercut a similar Windows-based system recently introduced by Microsoft. The Red Hat HPC Solution is an update of a product of the same name that was introduced in November 2007. That product had more limited options for hardware and support, and was not available outside the United States. The new version is the first to be available directly through the Red Hat Network and to be backed by Red Hat's own international customer-support services.

In the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" release our flagship Linux benchmarking software was brought to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. With Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal", to be officially released later this year, we are now extending our test support to include Apple's Mac OS X operating system. In Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 that was released this morning there is full support for Mac OS X within this open-source benchmarking framework and there are about three dozen tests that will run "out of the box" in this environment. We believe this is now the most comprehensive benchmarking platform for Mac OS X and it allows real-world test results to be compared from Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.

The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET is due to hit its second release today, with many .NET 3.5 features and a few notable exceptions. Mono 2.0 will be announced today a year and a half later than expected but - thanks to that delay - it features an open-source version of C# 3.0 and Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Mono lets you build and run .NET-style desktop and server applications on Linux, OS X and Solaris in addition to Windows.

Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer was in Oslo and visited Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was quick to hail Microsoft's move. Stoltenberg claimed that Microsoft's selection of Norway signaled major recognition of Norway's search technology expertise. He called it "a fantastic thing," and said Microsoft's commitment to Norway would also stimulate and strengthen local competence.

LXer Feature: 05-Oct-2008

Here are the most prominent stories that hit the LXer Newswire this past week all gathered together for your reading pleasure. Gentoo looks to restructure, a look at who really is contributing to Linux development, is gOS better that Ubuntu? And last but not least we celebrate the birthday of the Linux Kernel as it turns 17.

Norwegian members of the Technical Committee of that country's International Standards Organisation (ISO) body Standard Norge have resigned their posts to protest the approval of Microsoft's OOXML document formats proposal in defiance of the majority recommendation. In all, 13 of the committee's 23 members have resigned, a majority of the membership. In Standard Norge deliberations regarding OOXML earlier this year, only two members – Microsoft and Statoil – voted for approval, while the remaining 21 voted against it. Defying the overwhelming vote, the officials of Standard Norge went ahead and approved OOXML anyway, and transmitted that "decision" to ISO.

When your laptop battery is about to give up the ghost, you are probably thinking of the typical three alternatives. The most obvious, of course, is "wow, what a great justification for buying a new laptop". With laptop prices falling and no such luck with battery prices, this almost makes sense. But, most of us will probably just bite the bullet and buy a new battery. The third alternative would be to replace the cells in the battery you already have. This article is about the third alternative. If you are not fairly skilled in working on electronics, this is not necessarily a good alternative. But, it is possible. Personally, I was inspired to do this the first time because the small (3-cell) battery for my ASUS laptop was very ill and I couldn't find a replacement.

Recently I had to write an article on Linux green computing. During the writing of that article I was sent on yet another quest to get some form of hibernate and or suspend working on a Linux laptop. This quest had me digging through nearly every configuration file and every package I could find in an attempt to get an off-brand laptop (Everex Zonbook) running Mandriva Spring 2008 to either suspend or hibernate. I was surprised at what I discovered and the results I came up with.

Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT, was the subject of Linus Benedict Torvalds post to comp.os.minix on October 5, 1991 -- seventeen years ago today. it began,

Search giant Google has finally launched a repository of its software for Linux users. The repository will house the latest Linux versions of its software and make it easier for Linux users to keep up to date.

John Lilly became chief executive of Mozilla in January, moving up from his role as chief operating officer. He's been with the company that created the open source Firefox browser since 2005, the year Firefox 1.5 was released. Before Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the Web. Now Microsoft's share is down and Mozilla's share is 20 percent.

"Lawyers in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit against Microsoft want a federal judge to force the company to use Windows Update to notify potential class members of the suit, according to court documents." This is the opening paragraph in an article in ComputerWorld. A number of people, including myself think this is a bad idea.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has never been shy about voicing his opinions on any given issue. At an interview conducted during a recent Churchill Club event in California, Ballmer chose to weigh in on Apple and the iPhone, and even gave the company some friendly advice.