Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the arguments I often hear from people who are trying to use linux for the first time is that they are not sure if they can switch back to their original choice of OS (usually windows), if they are not satisfied with their experience with linux. These are usually the people who are not as tech savy or previously had bad experience while trying to install linux which resulted in destroying their windows installation. With each iteration of windows OS Microsoft has made it less friendlier for linux to be installed along with windows.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's U.K. director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

Wide take-up of the new version would further boost the market share of the browser which is currently used by about 15% of net users. With the release, Firefox developer Mozilla is attempting to set a record for the most downloads over 24 hours. "It's a global effort to make history," said Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla.

"I regularly run and post various benchmarks comparing POHMELFS, NFS, XFS and Ext4, [the] main goal of POHMELFS at this stage is to be essentially as fast as [the] underlying local filesystem. And it is..." explained Evgeniy Polyakov, suggesting that the POHMELFS networking filesystem performs 10% to 300% faster than NFS, depending on the file operation. In particular, he noted that it still suffers from random reads, an area that he's currently focused on fixing.

As free software projects balloon in size, many struggle to create and maintain a sense of community. One of the projects that has been most successful in its community-building efforts is the content management system Joomla! In the last couple of years, its Joomla!Days have been held around the world. A particular case in point is this past weekend's Vancouver Joomla!Day, whose organization and use of social networking to expand the scope of the event make it a case study in modern community-building.

Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable. When you mix a virtual machine with real software you get a virtual appliance. Some complete Linux distributions as well as specialized apps are available as virtual appliances. Thanks to the ease in packaging one, there's no shortage of virtual appliances around, if you know where to look.

Linux-based guitar effects processors haven't exactly been flourishing recently. Until recently, the guitar FX processors page at linux-sound.org listed twelve projects, of which the most recent maintenance date is 2006. Clearly, not a flourishing domain for Linux audio developers. Not that Linux lacks realtime effects processing capabilities: Pd can be pressed into any audio service imaginable, the JACK Rack can be configured for LADSPA-based effects, but they are not organized and optimized specifically for guitarists. However, a thirteenth entry has joined the collection at linux-sound.org, and this entry is most definitely organized, optimized, and intended for guitarists.

And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP. Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.

The Fedora Project is the free community release from enterprise Linux giant Red Hat. It's a testing ground really for a lot of new ideas which usually end up in the company's commercial Red Hat Enterprise products. I've used Fedora in the past on and off but for some reason it's never quite stuck with me. I've often found it buggy and a little too unstable due to it's experimental nature.

SiteBar is a Web browser bookmark synchronization solution. One feature that sets SiteBar apart from many others is the ability to set up your own bookmark server, which keeps the whole system under your control. You can also use SiteBar through a third-party server that offers membership levels ranging from a free, ad-supported "basic" level up to an "admin" level that costs 9.99 Euros (about $15.50) per month. While SiteBar is useful for individuals, it is even more useful for corporate or other groups because it allows you to have many trees of bookmarks and have a project group collectively modify bookmarks for their project. (NOTE: Other bookmark synchronization solutions have been covered recently on linux.com.)

Phone makers who adopt Google's Android platform may see a 20 percent drop in manufacturing costs just from saving on software costs, according to Android's co-founder. Andy Rubin, who is also Google's director of mobile platforms, told the press Monday that software costs represent about 20 percent of a phone's manufacturing costs, so a manufacturer would theoretically save on that by adopting the free and open source Android platform.

Don't you find it irritating when a Web page you bookmarked or favorited returns a 404 error on a subsequent visit? Or when a Web site is temporarily down? Firefox extensions Resurrect Pages and 404: Page is Not Found? Now it will be! can help in such scenarios. While Resurrect Pages relies on several popular page cache sites, 404: Page is Not Found uses the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive to serve the dead pages. To install each extension, click the shiny green Add to Firefox button on its homepage. After the customary browser restart, you'll find the extension available from the right-click context menu.

Microsoft has made another move in its open source gambit by becoming a sponsor of the Open Source Census The move follows Microsoft's partnership with the Eclipse Foundation, where Microsoft pledged to support Eclipse open-source projects at the EclipseCon conference in March. Now Microsoft joins the Open Source Census effort as a sponsor.

The life of South African Mark Shuttleworth has been a kind of geek dream: found and sell Internet company for $500+ million in mid-20s; spend $20 million to become the second space tourist; and create a GNU/Linux distribution with a cool name that has become the most popular on the desktop. Here, he talks to Glyn Moody about Ubuntu's new focus on the server side, why Ubuntu could switch from GNOME to KDE, and what happens to Ubuntu and its commercial arm, Canonical, if Shuttleworth were to fall out of a spaceship.

Wind River will enter the virtualization software market, focusing on networking, consumer electronics, and industrial automation, it said. The company will in August begin beta-testing a hypervisor and tools aimed at letting customers flexibly deploy Linux, VxWorks, and other RTOSes symmetrically or asymmetrically on one or multiple physical processor cores.

The Eclipse Foundation's annual code blitz - this year under the name Ganymede - kicks off at the end of this month with 24 Eclipse projects co-ordinating their new releases. Now in its third year, this annual big push keeps getting bigger. Ganymede is Eclipse's largest co-ordinate release of updated projects to-date, beating last year's update by three.

Linux will be a top OS in MIDs (mobile Internet devices), suggests a report from Forward Concepts. The report, aimed at quantifying MID-related opportunities for chip makers, identifies TI and Qualcomm as well-positioned in an emergent market expected to reach 40 million unit shipments globally within four years. Intel coined the term "MID" in April of 2007, when it launched the MID concept at its Beijing Developer's Conference. At the time, it projected a global market of 180 million units annually in the sector by 2010.

We’re done. Firefox 3 is going to be launched very soon. In anticipation of this long-awaited event, the folks in the Mozilla community have been writing extensively about the new and improved features you’ll see in the browser. The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice them until you realize that using Firefox is just somehow easier and better. The range of improved features is similar — whole back-end systems have been rebuilt from scratch, while other features have been tweaked slightly or redesigned in small ways.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a item entitled “Maybe we should charge for Linux” in an established GNU/Linux site like Linux Today, and from the managing editor no less! Well I just couldn’t let it pass without comment. The author of that piece (Brian Proffitt) asked us to “put the pitchfork and torches away”. Well don’t worry Mr Proffitt, I’m not a fan of pitchforks. I did read your piece in full before writing this so what follows is — I hope — a measured response.

Firefox has risen from humble beginnings -- it was assembled from the scraps left over when Netscape was left for dead -- to become a real thorn in the side of Microsoft. Now, as it prepares to go live with its third version, the open source project's leadership promises more innovation.