Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"Stop copying 2001 Windows. That's not where the usability action is," Sutor said during his afternoon keynote....Sutor said he believed the many open source licenses, as well as the many software standards bodies, that exist today, would eventually dwindle to only a few. As it is now, five or six open source licenses cover more than 90% of the available software today. On the standards front, IBM planned to work hard toward reform over the next 10 years, believing only five or six bodies are enough to approve technology standards. “We've got to get rid of this,” Sutor said of the current labyrinth of standards and the bodies that approve them.

The latest release of Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux version 4.0has a lot to bark about. Installed directly on a hard drive, it lacks some of the bells and whistles found in more popular Linux desktop versions. But run it from a USB drive in RAM, and Puppy growls impressively. The ability to carry an entire operating system on a flash drive and run it with all my files and settings intact is a powerful lure.

A fast, fast-booting, implementation of GNOME aimed at netbooks and older hardware has emerged, and shows "a lot of promise." LXDE has already stacked up a heap of distribution partners. The LXDE project has released its lightweight Linux desktop for general use. Built into the latest gOS 3 Gadget distro, LXDE is touted as being fast, fast-booting, compatible with old computers, and designed so that "every component can be used without LXDE," say the developers.

Three weeks ago, LWN looked at the renewed interest in dynamic tracing, with an emphasis on SystemTap. Tracing is a perennial presence on end-user wishlists; it remains a handy tool for companies like Sun Microsystems, which wish to show that their offerings (Solaris, for example) are superior to Linux. It is not surprising that there is a lot of interest in tracing implementations for Linux; the main surprise is that, after all this time, Linux still does not have a top-quality answer to DTrace - though, arguably, Linux had a working tracing mechanism long before DTrace made its appearance.

In 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems in mathematics that were very influential to 20th century mathematics. Subsequently, variants of this device has been used to draw attention to additional challenges in mathematics and in other disciplines. While I am no certainly no Hilbert, I use the device here to draw attention to a number of problems—perhaps not as intractable as the Riemann hypothesis—facing the intervention of technology on learning (still in draft form):

Computer engineer Alan Dechert didn't like what he saw during the controversial vote tallying in Florida in 2000's presidential election. That was when he decided that there had to be a better way for U.S. citizens to safely and accurately cast their ballots. More than seven years later, Dechert is here at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, publicly displaying the open-source e-voting system he helped develop that fixes some of the problems that he and other critics found in the nation's voting systems almost a decade ago.

IBM hopes adding its software to distributions of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Suse Linux will help consumers transition to become"Microsoft-free." Specifically, IBM is working to ensure its Open Collaboration Client Solution, including Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Sametime, operate with the three Linux distributions. Canonical confirmed during the show that it will distribute Lotus Symphony through its own Web services before the end of the month. Red Hat and Novell are expected to follow suit.

When RipCode decided to build a video transcoding device three years ago, it used MontaVista Linux Professional Edition, a platform designed for developers who want all the benefits of an open source development environment. Dallas, Texas-based RipCode, a privately held startup entity founded in 2005, not only was operating on a six-month deadline to develop and deliver its RipCode V4 video transcoding device, but also was focusing on securing funding. By leveraging MontaVista Software's Linux technology, RipCode was able to bring RipCode V4 -- designed to process the highest volume of Internet-based video formats available in a single rack-unit chassis -- to market much sooner than it otherwise would have been able to.

An oft-asked question in networking classes is "why can't we just put everyone on the same subnet and stop worrying about routing?" In this continuing series, networking expert Charlie Schluting explains in detail the finer points of subnets, netmasks, and IPv6 addressing.

Network services are one of the fastest growing areas in modern software. However, while network services have much of the convenience of free software, only a minority are available under a free license. In fact, it was only last November that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released the GNU Affero General Public License for network services. Under these conditions, last week's announcement of the formation of autonom.us, a new activist group "to focus on issues of software freedom in network services," seems overdue. The group's immediate plans are still evolving, but currently, its main goal -- so far as it has one yet -- seems to be as a policy discussion and advocacy group.

Xandros has announced a new version of Freespire, to be based on Debian's forthcoming Lenny release, expected this fall. Xandros says it plans to "consolidate" its various offerings on Debian, following its acquisition of Linspire. Xandros acquired Linspire last month. Freespire is a free version of Linspire, and was previously based on Ubuntu. Following the release of a Lenny-based Freespire distribution, Xandros plans to bring out Xandros Desktop Professional 5, which will also be built on "the same open source code base," with added proprietary bits for "enterprise customers," the company says.

The slow adoption of Vista is giving IBM and Linux distributors an opportunity to convince enterprises that there are good desktop software alternatives to Windows. IBM, Canonical, Novell and Red Hat will work with hardware makers to market custom-designed PCs preloaded with Linux and Lotus word processing and collaboration software.

You can capture video of all of the amazing things happening on your desktop with one of Linux's many screencasting applications. These programs are perfect for creating demonstrations for blogs and tutorials, and for illustrating projects with more than just still images. Many different programs are available, and they all provide a different set of features, options, and output formats. When choosing, consider the degree of control you want to have over your video resolution and whether the video is intended to work on non-Linux operating systems.

There's something about the concept of competition that gets big thinkers to put their ideas out there in the open -- regardless of how audacious those ideas are. It worked with Charles Lindbergh decades ago, and it's still working today. Organizations like the X Prize Foundation and Innocentive are offering large prizes to anyone who can be the first to accomplish extreme goals.

IBM Tuesday marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source by introducing new software, upgrades to existing platforms and an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing. The company said its HPC Open Source Software Stack, which includes IBM’s Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit, was its first ever contribution of open source code for supercomputing.

As Linux-based operating systems continue to proliferate in the mobile communications marketplace, are there too many choices of open-source platforms? The answer is no, according to the participants in a panel discussion here today at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Having a choice in mobile operating systems can encourage innovation. "It is not the Wild West," said Bill Weinberg, an industry analyst who moderated the "Unifying Mobile Linux Platforms" panel. "We are not dealing with wholesale fragmentation. The marketplace is jelling."

Red Hat Inc. and project contributors have released alpha code for Fedora 10, the next version of the community-sponsored, free and open-source Linux distribution. Fedora 10 will include enhancements to the audio, security and wireless-connection features of the operating system. Red Hat explained new features of the Fedora 10 alpha release in a blog entry Tuesday. The test release can also be downloaded at the Fedora site. .

Beagle and Tracker are projects that allow you to index your files so you can quickly search filesystems. Both projects started out with the intention of being used with the GNOME desktop, but have recently made a push to be desktop-independent and work with KDE and other desktop environments. Over two days, we'll compare their usability and performance. Both projects are not only standalone tools, but often incorporated in other utilities. If you are interested in which applications use them, you can read the lists for Beagle and Tracker. Depending on how your distribution packages Beagle support, you might find that an extension for Firefox is available so that Beagle can index every Web page you view.

LXer Feature: 06-Aug-2008

More news, notes and a well deserved rant from LinuxWorld 08', the .org Pavillion booths, installfest and proof of my actual physical presence at the show. :-)

Open source software topped the list of business "risk factors" outlined in Microsoft's annual 10-K report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, published last week. The emphasis seems a little surprising. For instance, global open source Linux use currently trails at 0.82 percent, while Microsoft Windows dominates the operating system market at 91 percent, according to stats from Net Applications' Market Share.