Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux distributions can be a pain. Users have to go through the whole process of installation, configuration, and updates, and, often, all they really want to do is to run a single application. The vendors of that application, meanwhile, feel the need to support as many distributions as possible, even though the actual system running underneath their code is nearly irrelevant. Wouldn't it be nice if users could simply get their desired application as an "appliance" which comes with all the necessary component parts nicely hidden inside?

Helping develop and foster up and coming talent in the open source software field, the Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, has announced the newly created Fedora Scholarship programme. The programme recognises college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. The inaugural scholarship recipient for 2008 is Ricky Zhou who will attend Carnegie Mellon University this fall.

When it comes to Linux there are 3 kinds of people, those who never heard of it, those who are afraid of it, and those who hate it and spread falsities about it. I don’t really care about the first, they probably aren’t really technologically literate anyways, as long as they have E-mail they are content. While the second group is the result of the actions of the third. Let’s hit two birds with one stone shall we?

Software supplier Red Hat is racking up growth figures that much of techdom might envy. Sales rose 32%, to $157 million, in the quarter ended May 31, and profits climbed a respectable 7%. So why is Wall Street so bearish on the stock? A day after Red Hat reported results, Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded the shares, citing few opportunities for growth. Three other investment banks had lowered their Red Hat ratings in the previous nine months, and the company's shares, which on Aug. 15 dipped 22¢, to 22.75, have been parked between 21 and 23 for a year. "There's a concern that our growth rate will slow," Red Hat Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst says. "We've been in that funk the last couple of years."

Last week, we told you that Taiwan-based HTC, one of the largest mobile device makers in the world, was readying the first smart phone to use Google’s Android operating system. Well, on Monday the Federal Communications Commission approved the device for use in the United States. The F.C.C. posted certification documentation on its Web site. The documents confirm is the name of the new phone: Dream. Most important, though: with the smartphone’s certification behind it, it is possible for T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier, to go ahead with plans to debut the phone next month and begin selling it ahead of the Christmas shopping season.

GoboLinux is a distribution which sports a different file system structure than 'ordinary' Linux distributions. In order to remain compatible with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, symbolic links are used to map the GoboLinux tree to standard UNIX directories. A post in the GoboLinux forums suggested that it might be better to turn the concept around: retain the FHS, and then use symbolic links to map the GoboLinux tree on top of it. This sparked some interesting discussion.

In the name of defining jargon, Forbes this week tries a complete rewrite of open source history. This is accomplished by someone named Dan Woods, who calls his company Evolved Media. (He might want to rename it Unevolved Medium.) Woods does this by ignoring Eric Raymond’s ground-breaking The Cathedral and the Bazaar, making Richard Stallman the father of something he frankly detests.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation. This move reflects the growing relevance of Canonical in the Linux ecosystem and indicates that the company has achieved a level of growth that empowers it to contribute additional resources back to the Linux community.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released documents today suggesting that the first Android phone will hit the U.S. market in November. The documents show that the FCC has approved the sale of HTC's Dream phone. It is widely rumored that the device will be the first to run Google Inc.'s Linux-based Android software.

One of the advantages, touted by the Open Source community is that you can read the source code and make changes to it if you need to. Now to be honest, how many of us even bother to look at the source code? Come on, fess up. Yes, that is about what I thought. To the five percent of you that do read the code (or tweak it), bravo, but, while most of us do not live in C (or C++ or insert your favorite language here), we do have to configure, tweak, twist, bend and occasional bully the code into working correctly and in a useful manner, whether that is playing nice with our libraries or other application. So, the Open can also mean transparent. And this is a good thing.

Cluster computing has played a pivotal role in the way research is conducted in educational environments. Because the amount of available money and hardware varies between university researchers, often it's necessary to find a clustering solution that can work well on a small scale, but also can be expanded into a large computing cluster. To maximize grants, researchers typically ask for an open source solution to meet their needs. Despite the lack of certain desirable features, Rocks clusters are among the best open source solution for building a computing cluster.

When I was a kid, I used to make crude little animated cartoons in my notebooks using the flipbook technique. Walt Disney had nothing to worry about. I was awful even by the 3rd grade standards of White Pine elementary. Today, I could be great, because almost all top animation and special effects artists are Linux users.

The other day I was talking with a bunch of other tech heads about the ongoing Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share war and why, from a stats point of view, that Mac and Linux were still trailing far behind Windows. “It all revolves around killer apps,” pipes up one of the tech heads. “The problem with both Apple and Linux is that neither OS has a compelling killer app driving the user base.” The conversation then went off on to discuss apps such as Photoshop and AutoCAD and how with Windows you have a single unified platform that’ll run almost any professional grade package that you can think of, while with Mac and Linux your choices are restricted. Bull.

While there is never any shortage of hope in the world of technology, perhaps the largest gusher in the last 20 years came from two words: open source, a term that is too large for one column (too big for most books, in fact). This week JargonSpy takes a trip back in time to understand how many of the hopes and dreams for open source ended up creating a world just like the one we always had. To reduce the scope of our discussion to a digestible size, we must add a qualifier, so this week we are going to look at "commercial open source."

[Lookout, major lapse in research ahead. - Scott]

Last month we started a tutorial series covering tips and tricks to help you make the transition from Microsoft (MS) Office to OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.4 easier. We discovered how to add more templates and clip art to OOo, include grammar checking, and replicate the convenient Split Window feature of MS Office. This part of the series will take you through the process of importing the custom dictionary of MS Office, setting OOo to always save in the MS Office format, and using MS Office. Ready, set, go!

Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids' Linux. It's available preinstalled on PCs and laptops from Dell Inc. and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn't been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing. Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu's parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn't just targeting data center servers, although that's on its list.

Buckling under the weight of the Internet radio royalty hike that SoundExchange pushed through last July, Pandora may pull its own plug soon. Despite being one of the most popular Internet radio services, the company still isn't making money, and its founder, Tim Westergren, says it can't last beyond its first payment of the higher royalties.

The explosion of low-cost, ultra-portable laptops that started to appear in computer stores is a dream come true for many technology enthusiasts and free software developers who are keen to offer solutions for the new computer class. In this week's issue we take a first look at Mandriva Flash 2008.1, one of the first distributions with official support for the ASUS Eee PC. Does it really work "out of the box" as claimed? Read on to find out. In the news section, Slackware introduces KDE 4.1 into the development tree, Fedora hints at a major problem with its update infrastructure, and Linux Mint suffers from a crippling attack on its web site. Also in this week's issue, links to two excellent interviews with Ubuntu's Scott Remnant and gOS's David Liu. Finally, after a short break, we have resumed adding new distributions to the DistroWatch database - one of the new ones introduced last week is FaunOS, an interesting Arch Linux-based desktop distribution optimised for USB Flash drives.

Three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were ordered by a federal court judge to cancel their scheduled presentation at DEFCON about vulnerabilities in Boston's transit fare payment system, violating their First Amendment right to discuss their important research. EFF represents Zack Anderson, RJ Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) sued the students and MIT in United States District Court in Massachusetts, claiming that the students violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by delivering information to conference attendees that could be used to defraud the MBTA of transit fares.

NimbleX, a Slackware-based distribution, advertises itself as "the new wave of Linux." However, what is appealing in NimbleX -- its speed and small footprint and the resulting selection of alternative software choices -- will likely strike veteran GNU/Linux users as being very old school. By contrast, its limitations -- too little attention to such aspects as the installer, packaging, and security -- seem all too modern, being reminiscent of other distros intent on commercialization or emulating Windows, even though NimbleX is a community distribution and largely a labor of love for Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu.