Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure project has long been working toward improved 3D graphics support in free operating systems. It is a crucial part of the desktop Linux experience, but, thus far, DRI development has been done in a relatively isolated manner. Development process changes which have the potential to make life better for Linux users are in the works, but, sometimes, that's not the only thing that matters. The DRI project makes its home at freedesktop.org. Among other things, the project maintains a set of git repositories representing various views of the current state of DRI development (and the direct rendering manager (DRM) work in particular). This much is not unusual; most Linux kernel subsystems have their own repository at this point. The DRM repository is different, though, in that it is not based on any Linux kernel tree; it is, instead, an entirely separate line of development.

This is the ninth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part IX, we are going to talk about the menu.

I have been talking about Ubuntu for a number of articles now and how easy it is to use. In this article I will look at the next two upcoming versions and investigate what they have to offer. Ubuntu, unlike other Operating Systems which could be mentioned, strive for a predictable release schedule. They have only missed it once in eight releases and then only by two months. A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months in April and October. The naming convention is associated with the year and the month that it is released. 8.04 was released in 2008 in the 4th month, April. The previous release was 7.10 in October 2007.

With KVM Virtualisation now under their banner, Red Hat is ready to take on the other company that owns virtualisation as well as operating system technology, Microsoft. Last week, for US$107 million, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, owners of the KVM Virtualisation product. The coupling of the Linux producer with virtualisation software positions Red Hat to move into the lead as a supplier of an enterprise level virtualisation solution.

I got an e-mail this morning, tickling me to look into the idea that VMWare is violating the GPL. This idea has been around for some time and Big Money Matt has covered it beautifully. (Matt Asay’s writing is first-rate and his sources top-notch. If he ever decided to become a full-time reporter I’d hire him in a New York minute.)

Sometimes a consortium can play a smaller supportive role that is really powerful. Helping people and organizations to pull together in the same direction can accomplish amazing things. It’s very gratifying. The Linux Foundation, in concert with several well-known industry names (hint: they start with letters like I and G), has hired a key contributor to the Linux kernel development community, the system administrator for kernel.org. It’s an important position. kernel.org is crucial to the Linux kernel’s collaborative development environment. It is the actual physical space — in cyberspace — where kernel developers get their work done. Without it, nothing happens.

Pardus has been around for quite a while, but never got much attention, perhaps because its developers focus on giving people from Turkey a distribution in their native language. But Pardus is a multi-language distribution, so it can be used by many people without a Turkish background. You can install Pardus in Catalan, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portugese and of course Turkish.

Michael Anti is an engineer and journalist whose work has appeared in theNew York Times, Huaxia Times, 21st Century World Herald, Washington Post, Southern Metropolis Daily andFar and Wide Journal. He has been a researcher, a columnist, a reporter, a war correspondent in Baghdad (in 2003) and more—and achieved notoriety in 2005 when Microsoft deleted his blog.

KDE 4 is barely eight months old, and already it has three options for a main menu. Until now, users have either used the default Kickoff, which makes for awkward navigation of the menu tree, or reverted to the familiar but unwieldy classic menu. Now, with the first full release of Lancelot, users have another option that overcomes the shortcomings of both other alternatives and gives KDE 4 a thoroughly modern menu. According to comments on the project Web page by main developer Ivan ?uki?, Lancelot started life as a SuperKaramba applet for organizing desktop icons. Its name is a homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- as evidenced by the default grail icon -- as well as a pun on "launch-a-lot."

Welcome back! Charlie Schluting, in this edition of Networking 101, will give you the IP knowledge required to understand routing issues. Most everything on the Internet uses IP, and unlike Ethernet, knowing this protocol is pivotal to understanding how networking works with regards to the big picture. In upcoming articles, Networking 101 will explore TCP and UDP, routing theories, and then delve into the specific routing protocols. It's going to be a wild ride.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user. Boxee has bigger goals in mind, but you can take an early look at it now by applying for the invitation-only testing program.

Windows may be king of data centers, but Linux has a foothold in nearly every courtyard and is sure to make further inroads in the year ahead. According to the Data Center Decisions 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 91% of data centers run Microsoft Windows, but a large percentage also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (48%) or Novell SUSE (21%, multiple versions) in their data centers. Nonetheless, Linux use remains limited in scope, with two-thirds of respondents running Linux on 25% or less of their servers, with application servers the most common pairing. Tech Target

One of the greatest and most destructive beliefs in the open source community is that "Because I'm not a programmer, I can't participate in an open source project." Let me be the first to tell you that if you believe that, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Why? Well let me explain.

The ecosystem that Microsoft (MSFT) has built up around its Windows operating system is showing signs of strain. In one of several recent moves by partners that sell or support the company's software, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world's No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, say three sources close to the company. HP acknowledges the first effort. The company formed the "customer experience" group nine months ago and put at its helm Susie Wee, a former director in the company's research labs. Her team is developing touchscreen technology and other software that allows users to circumvent Microsoft's operating system to watch movies or view photos more easily than they can with Vista.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Geographic Information Society of South Africa (GISSA) will host the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from September 29 to October 3. The annual conference is expected to attract more than 500 software programmers, government officials, business people and technology experts.

Asia is in the middle of a mass adoption wave of open source technology, and the floodgates of innovation will open following this wave in two to three years, according to open source vendors. Following recent remarks made by MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Asia's lack of contribution back to the open source community, fellow industry spokespeople were decidedly more optimistic about the region's role to play in the open source ecosystem.

Being connected to the Internet means exposure to what the outside world has to offer -- including the undesirable elements. Every time you connect to the Internet, you're exposed to threats that can compromise your network's security. Although network security solutions have evolved in recent years, so have network attack techniques. To prevent ever-evolving attacks from compromising your network, you must preemptively block malicious traffic before it enters your network. Free, open source programs, such as Snort, can do the job, but setting up a full intrusion detection system (IDS) sensor, especially in an enterprise network, takes time and isn't very user-friendly. StillSecure's Strata Guard Free can be your front line of defense to face outside threats without as much hard work.

Microsoft and Novell Thursday released a virtualization bundle that represents the pair’s first fully supported joint product since their historic interoperability partnership was forged in 2006. The two have configured and optimized Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The product is the first to include technology developed by both vendors at the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just over a year ago in Cambridge, Mass.

In some respects, the market for Web-based applications resembles a crowded, noisy and confused bazaar. It's difficult to get a good wide-angle view of all available options. Those there to sell wares often have a hard time finding and securing the best place to set up shop.

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use. The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical's work on usability and to contribute to other free and open source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.