Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Here are videos from presentations in technical conferences. They should be useful for people lacking time or money to attend these conferences. In agreement with the speakers, these videos are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. These videos are encoded with the Theora open and royalty-free video codec, and with the open and patent-free Vorbis audio codec. More and more players are available. See Theora.org for details.

LXer Feature: 10-Aug-2008

The Roundup this week should really be called the LinuxWorld 2008 Roundup for how many articles are related to it but we have plenty of other things of note. Like, Five things Linus Torvalds has learned about managing software projects, How to remove Mono (M$) from Ubuntu Hardy Heron, The death of a filesystem, A trip down memory lane with some photos of the infamous CalderaLinux disks and packaging and to end things on a lighter note I finish things up with 10 Linux T-shirt that will make you smile.

At Akademy 2008 in Belgium, Qt developers Simon Hausmann and Andreas Aardal Hanssen announced dramatic improvements in the web browser engine in Qt and the canvas that is used by, for example, the Plasma desktop shell. Video support, animations and transitions, optimisations to speed up painting and animations, and new graphical effects open up nearly endless new possibilities for developers to present their user interfaces with.

Akademy 2008, the annual KDE desktop summit, officially kicked off on Saturday, 9th July in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium, with a schedule packed full of talks, discussions, and development.

Since major disasters like hurricanes don't happen every day -- hopefully -- it's sometimes difficult to train emergency responders and sharpen their skills for when the worst really does strike. Lockheed Martin's new training software system can simulate various types of calamities ranging from wildfires to nuclear explosions. Garage-door-sized television monitors showed a sexy, virtual cable-news anchor reading a breaking news alert about the effects of Hurricane Nerissa that had crashed ashore east of Norfolk about 10 hours earlier. "Removal of traffic congestion is especially challenging," the news anchor said.

Kristen Carlson Accardi is a Linux kernel developer for Intel's Open Source Technology Group. She is the maintainer for the PCIE hot-plug driver, the SHPC hot-plug driver, and the PCI hot-plug subsystem in the Linux kernel. She is currently working on SATA drivers, including implementing power management features. Kristen is the benevolent dictator for the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference. We interviewed her about LPC, why so many Linux developers live near Portland, Oregon, and life as a kernel developer.

Novell-developer Michael Meeks finds strong words for Sun's management of the free office suite in an interview - Pushes for own OOo flavor and talks about KDE/GNOME-unification Although his official position at Novell nowadays describes him as "Desktop Architect" Michael Meeks main focus is on improving OpenOffice.org. A task which is not made easier by a severe lack of openness at Sun as he puts it. In an interview at the recent GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC) in Istanbul he talked with Andreas Proschofsky about future developments around the free office suite, the current need for Go-oo - an improved OOo flavor - and about breaking down barriers between KDE and GNOME.

A tech vendor-backed company that buys up patents in an effort to protect the Linux community from intellectual property litigation will soon launch a Web site to help inventors file defensive publications -- documents that make details of an invention public, preventing others from later making patent claims on it. "The more we can mobilize this community, the fewer patents that will actually be granted," said Keith Bergelt, who recently became CEO of the Open Invention Network. "Whatever happens in the patent reform world in the next [U.S.] administration is great, but we have to act now to stop the granting of patents that threaten Linux and open-source in general."

Here is the collection of photos taken by Scott Dowdle during the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo 2008.

Microsoft, makers of most of the computer software in the world, tried to kill it with words, and Intel, maker of most computer chips, tried to kill it with dirty tricks. Of course, they don't admit to being attempted murderers. And when I introduce you to Intel's lovely spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, you'll realise how far their denials go. But the truth is the two mightiest high-tech companies in the world looked on Negroponte's philanthropic scheme and decided it had to die. Yet, 3½ years later, the laptop is clinging on to life.

Embedded designer Paul Thomas is showcasing a tiny, open-sourced computer at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week. Would-be “Linuxstamp” enthusiasts can obtain pre-built boards for the hefty sum of $120 directly from Thomas, or they can download the design for free and build it themselves. The Linuxstamp is an extremely simple hardware design, consisting of six integrated circuits (processor, flash, RAM, serial-to-USB, ethernet PHY, and power conversion) plus a bunch of passives.

There are time when I want to let my geekiness out and I want the world to know about it. I decided to share with you my favorite collection of Linux t-shirts that you also might like. Please share you ideas for healthy geeking in the comments.

[I thought that with all the talk about Linux T-Shirts that this was an appropriate article to post. - Scott]

People in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the UK, will be offered the company's new IdeaPad netbooks with either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS, but users in Australia won't have that option. Australian and US computer buyers will only be offered Windows XP on Lenovo's IdeaPad S10, according to Lenovo.

My father was one of those old school guys when it came to adopting computer technology. He managed to build and run a successful company, and retire in 1998, without ever actually having a computer in his office. It was just never an absolute necessity for him to do his job. During the early years of the Internet, it took him a while to get his mind around the business model. Back in the go-go dot-com days, he would look at the IPOs and say to me, “Am I missing something, or are these guys selling one dollar bills for 80 cents? How is that a sustainable business?”

Both StarOffice 9 and OpenOffice.org 3 will offer an office suite of tools compatible with Microsoft Office. Both are based on the same code base, and both will be native on the Mac, no longer requiring X11. Sun's Louis Suarez-Potts explained the key differences to TMO and what the customer should know before selecting one or the other.

At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group spoke about the potential for enterprise adoption of Ubuntu and the impact that community-driven Linux distributions will have on the market. Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors. Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell, according to Lyman.

IBM has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software, which includes Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony, to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. The repackaging makes the middleware easier and cheaper to install on Linux PCs and free desktops from Microsoft software, IBM said.

Over the years I have made my share of cluster mistakes. Each problem presented an opportunity to learn something new, become a little smarter, get some scar tissue as it were. I had just such an opportunity this week as I as teaching Intermediate Beowulf: An Introduction to Benchmarking and Tuning as part of the ARC HPC Training at Georgetown University. I’ll get back to my teaching experience in minute, but first I wanted to talk about HPC education.

The network file system (NFS) protocol is getting its biggest overhaul in more than a decade, and the results could be profound for end users (see The Future of NFS Arrives). Version 4.1 of NFS, developed by a team of veterans from various storage interests, promises to unlock new performance and security capabilities, particularly for enterprise data centers. NFS was originally designed to solve the problem of remote access to home directories and supporting diskless workstations and servers over local area networks. With the advent of cheaper high-performance computing in the form of Linux compute clusters, multi-core processors and blades, the demands for higher performance file access have risen sharply. It's no wonder that a protocol designed for 1984 speeds would be unable to cope.

I have some screenshots from an old Caldera OpenLinux Lite CD that a member still had in his possession to show you. They disprove certain allegations SCO has made regarding Linux, I think, in the IBM litigation. For example, SCO claimed that it never released anything under the GPL. And it tried to allege that some headers and other features were their property and that Linux infringes them. I will show you differently.