Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

KDE, GNOME, and Xfce are without doubt the most well-known desktop environments for Linux at the moment. They are utilized by majority of Linux Distributions simply because they are very much stable and usable. But did you know that there are other capable Free and Open-source desktop environments that you probably haven’t heard of?

Earlier this week, we ran a story on GoboLinux, and the distribution's effort to replace the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard with a more pleasant, human-readable, and logical design. A lot of people liked the idea of modernising/replacing the FHS, but just as many people were against doing so. Valid arguments were presented both ways, but in this article, I would like to focus on a common sentiment that came forward in that discussion: normal users shouldn't see the FHS, and advanced users are smart enough to figure out how the FHS works.

Are there enough Linux experts to go around? Here’s an interesting article in ComputerWorld from this week: “Linux unchained.” Author Mary Pratt investigates the claim that Linux growth is outstripping the supply of actual Linux-proficient techs.

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court.

A sliding share price and gloomy forecasts have prompted speculation that Sun Microsystems might be a tempting takeover target for acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu or another tech giant. A sale would be momentous, involving billions of dollars and spelling the demise of one of Silicon Valley's most venerable companies. But no one has confirmed any talks.

The Linux-Embedded discussion list has been abuzz the last two days over a flash filesystem designed to support binary code execution (sometimes called XIP, or "execute-in-place"). When combined with forthcoming "Phase Change Memory" products, the "Advanced XiP Filesystem" (AXFS) could radically change the way Linux is embedded on consumer devices.

The TALPA malware scanning API was covered here in December, 2007. Several months later, TALPA is back - in the form of a patch set posted by a Red Hat employee. The resulting discussion has certainly not been what the TALPA developers would have hoped for; it is, instead, a good example of how a potentially useful idea can be set back by poor execution and presentation to the kernel community.

Since its inception, we've tried to make collections of tips, pointers to free tutorials, and advice on the best applications a regular part of the editorial content here at OStatic. These have included screenshot-driven guided tours to how to use top tier OSS applications, pointers to free tutorials on everything from AJAX to OpenOffice, and guidance on finding free open source webinars on topics such as MySQL and Ubuntu. We're in the process of putting up a dedicated repository for all of these, but in the meantime, here are 12 of our most popular educational roundup posts.

Unlike a lot of open-source supporters, I don't turn red with anger at the very thought of Novell working with Microsoft. Like it or not, getting Linux and Windows to work better together makes good, hard business sense. What I do find annoying is that Novell is continuing to feed Microsoft's FUD machine about Linux. In an e-mail interview with Ian Bruce, Novell's public relations director, Bruce wrote me that customers wanted the Novell/Microsoft package, in part, because it "provides IP (intellectual property) peace of mind for organizations operating in mixed source environments." It does? Since when?

The Master view in Impress is the equivalent of page styles in Writer. It's the view where you can set elements of design that appear throughout your presentation, such as the slide background and foreground colors, any reoccurring elements, and the fonts. By creating the master slides you need before you add content, you can automate your work and free yourself to focus on content.

It's been literally impossible to escape the news that Intel demonstrated its next generation Classmate design at IDF in San Francisco this week. And I have to admit the machine seems quite impressive and apparently Intel has also done some pretty neat things in terms of overlaying a simplified UI over the vanilla Windows XP installation. But let's take it step-by-step, shall we?

Sun Microsystems is setting out to create an open source, royalty-free video codec. Given the considerable head start of well-known, royalty-free video codecs like Dirac and Theora, you might ask why the world needs another. The answer, according to Sun, is the process the company will use to develop it -- starting with a full-on, careful examination of the patent situation. I spoke with Gerard Fernando and Rob Glidden about the project, which was unveiled in April. Fernando is a senior staff engineer at Sun, and Glidden is the company's global alliance manager for TV and media.

One of the nation's largest electronic voting systems has a software flaw that can cause it to drop ballots, its manufacturer has revealed. Premier Election Solutions -- a subsidiary of Diebold -- says its machines that operate in 34 states are affected by the glitch. The problem, it is believed, has been present in the program for the past decade.

Organizations have many ways to connect, collaborate, and keep in touch with co-workers, team members, and colleagues -- which can lead to multiple logins and user accounts, services spread across the Web, or services that are simply not accessible to all team members on various types of devices. Kablink (formerly ICECore) recognizes that centralization and accessibility are major components to successful project collaboration, and its latest offering is worth a project leader's second look.

Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton is fond of saying, "If you want the kernel team to do something, make us look bad." Perhaps somewhat in that spirit, a blog called "Linux Photography" has carefully outlined where Linux falls short today as a world-class environment for serious, production-oriented professional photographers.

Ulteo Application System is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Kubuntu and designed to work with the Ulteo Online Desktop service to provide you with an automatic offsite backup and file synchronization between live CD instances. It attempts to require as little user configuration and maintenance as possible, and provides several unique features that set it apart from being "just another distribution." On my test machine, a Sempron 2800 with 512MB of memory, Ulteo took almost three minutes to boot from the live CD -- quite a bit longer than most live CDs take on this system. Ulteo made up for this, however, when copying files during the installation -- that took a mere five minutes. There was little user intervention required during the installation besides selection of a username and password and my location, although I chose to partition my disk manually instead of allowing the installer to do it.

The Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal help to the free and open-source software community, has released a detailed document that describes how users and vendors can ensure they are in compliance with the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL). Initially, GPL compliance was enforced through informal means, such as bulletin board discussions, but as Linux's profile grew in ensuing years, enforcement efforts became more organised and ultimately entered the courts, the report notes. Last year, Skype was found guilty of violating the GPL by a Munich, Germany regional court.

Developers of Android, the Linux mobile platform spearheaded by Google Inc., are asking security experts for input. The latest software development kit for Android was released earlier this week and plans are for the 1.0 version of the operating system to be shipped on mobile phones later this year. Security is a priority. "As you may expect, building and maintaining a secure mobile platform is a difficult task," wrote the Android Security Team.

Internet monitoring company, Pingdom, has plotted the popularity of the various Linux distributions by geography on the basis of how often their names are used in Google searches. Rigorous it may not be, but this 'distribution of distributions' is certainly fascinating.

Remember the good old days? Like back in 1999 when you could, as a friend of mine put it,"make a hundred thousand dollars a year for being able to spell Java." Those were the days, back when programmers driving Porsches had become a cliché. Now, more than a decade after the dot-com boom began, tech people once again find themselves earning less money despite bringing significantly more value to their employers.