Showing headlines posted by the_doctor

It's the fourth month of an odd-numbered year. You know what that means, right? You got it, the .04 release of a non-Long Term Support (LTS) Ubuntu. This time around, it's 15.04--Vivid Vervet. Unlike the last release, 14.10, this particular iteration of Canonical's platform is mired in a bit of controversy. In particular, I'm talking about the switch to systemd.

Of all the RAID levels that consumers are likely to use on their home systems, RAID 5 is one of the more exotic choices. While RAID 0 and 1 are pretty straightforward, RAID 5 is a little more complex.

In September 2014, rumors were flying that Apache OpenOffice was floundering and might soon merge with OpenOffice. The rumors were denied, but revived in March 2015 when Jonathan Corbett used development activity statistics to show that OpenOffice was seriously short of developers, and had corporate support only from IBM. Now, OpenOffice's most recent report to the Apache Foundation appears to reinforce these previous reports, and then some.

Most studio's don't give their proprietary IP away for free, not least Disney - the owner of the Pixar CG studio that bought us 'Toy Story' and 'Finding Nemo' but the studio has moved to make the RenderMan 3D rendering software, which previously sold for $495 USD, free from today for non-commercial use, available to download in 64 bit versions for PC, Mac and Linux.

Microsoft and Android operating system vendor Cyanogen are partnering to integrate Microsoft apps and services with Cyanogen.

For years, the classical desktop has been the main interface for interacting with computers. Consisting of a menu, a panel, and an area to display widgets and open windows, its main virtue was originally its easy access to applications and files. It remains popular today, featured in at least five of the seven major Linux desktop environments. Increasingly, though, it is becoming inefficient -- a trend that is not helped helped by experimental designs that decrease access to resources rather than increasing it.

Ask any casual Linux enthusiast whether Linux is easy to use and they'll tell you once installed, it's very simple to navigate. The problem with the Linux desktop in 2015 isn't how easy the desktop environment(s) are to work with, but whether the applications provided are easy enough for the average user at a workstation.

Did you know that even when browsing in Incognito Mode (regardless of browser), some websites can still collect data from you? Cookies, metadata... if a website really wants your information, they'll go to all means to get it. Thankfully, browsers like Firefox are doing everything they can to ensure users can experience as much privacy as possible while browsing.

Anyone who has used a desktop environment can be up and running in KDE in a matter of minutes. However, KDE has a way of hiding more advanced features, and some of them can take months or even years to discover.

If you're a user of the Chromebook, there is one issue that you know you will someday have to face--running out of space. Internal storage on Chromebooks is very similar to that of smartphone, in that it is very limited. For those that are diligent about keeping their systems clean, this isn't a problem. If, however, you are one of those that tends to forget about keeping track of your local storage space, you might find yourself out of space and having to finally go through and delete.

It's been a very long time coming, but GNOME has finally hit its stride--in a big way. Since the release of GNOME 3, people have declared that this particular Linux desktop is dead. Those naysayers can now put their hatred aside and enjoy the hard work that the developers have put into making GNOME 3.16 the single most polished iteration of this open-source desktop to date... and quite possibly any Linux desktop.

The sound of a dying hard drive can be terrifying. It means a headache, downtime, and replacement costs in the best case. In the worst case, it means sending the drive to a data rescue lab. Using a redundant array of independent disks with mirroring (RAID 1), you can make a drive failure less of a nightmare.

Solomon Hykes, CTO and chief architect of Docker, joins Randal and Gareth this week to talk about Docker's 2nd birthday and the vast ecosystem it has developed during the time. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.

Microsoft is going to crash and burn trying to get Windows Phone 10 on other hardware.

On it's own, Ubuntu is a solid desktop Linux experience. It offers ample application choices and it's easy to use. But one area I would like to see greater focus is mirroring one desktop to another. That is, being able to find the same documents and other files I use on both desktop machines. In this article I'll explore options I've found useful in creating a unified Ubuntu Experience.

Google has been increasingly pushing its Google Now virtual assistant and its "cards" convention across its different services and apps. The last one to get card-y was YouTube, where the cards will replace the older popups that relay additional information about videos. Now Google is teasing the next product to get a Google Now makeover, one that is probably long overdue anyway. The beta channel of its Chrome operating system has just gotten a new "Chrome Launcher 2.0", and the most outstanding feature is the presence of Google Now.

Windows is dead. Haven’t you heard? Yeah, right, we don’t believe that for a parsec (although we wouldn’t mind if Modern got swallowed alive by a Sarlacc to be slowly digested alive for a thousand years.) Still, for those who are living in their post-PC fantasy, the OS of choice for computing won’t be based on Windows.

What I see across the Linux landscape, however, often takes me by surprise. While Microsoft and Apple continue to push the idea of the user interface forward, a good amount of the Linux community seems bent on holding us in a perpetual state of "90s computing."

Linux-based operating systems are a staple in my computing life. With that said, as much as I love the kernel and associated distributions, my true love is the GNOME 3 desktop environment. While version 3 has historically been a rather polarizing desktop, its subsequent point releases have greatly improved its reputation.

For serious PC builders, speed is the name of the game. Too often, storage becomes a bottleneck that holds back even the beefiest CPU. Even with the advent of SSDs, leveraging a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) can drastically reduce boot and loading times. RAID 0 is the easiest way to get more speed out of two or more drives, and lets you use a pretty cool acronym to boot.