Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The biggest change to Opera's browser in 17 years has debuted, with code for Opera Next released today for Windows and Mac. Opera Software today announced the beta availability of a completely re-engineered version of its browser that rips out the old plumbing in favour of Chromium, the open-source code that's the basis for Google's Chrome, and the WebKit layout engine, used in Apple's Safari and in Chrome*.

Raspbian is the Debian Linux distribution optimized for the ARMv7 Raspberry Pi. Older versions of Raspbian are based upon Debian Linux 6.0 on the Linux 3.1 kernel and GCC 4.4.5. However, the latest Debian Linux 7.0 on the latest Raspbian package-set has the Linux 3.6.11 armv6l kernel and GC 4.6.

Linux continues to grow not just because of any one vendor or particular use case, but because Linux is applicable to so many different use cases. Two such very different use-cases were on display this past week, with new releases of Pupply Linux and Backbox Linux

Perhaps you’ve considered migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? There are a host of good reasons for such a move. The most obvious one that comes to mind is to save on license fees, but don’t be fooled. For the migration process to be a success and the full benefits to be reaped, you must invest in the changeover itself. Don’t believe that because you want to save money long term you should skimp short-term. A look at the City of Freiburg’s attempted migration reveals the dangers of treating the new software as a drop-in replacement.

Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged...

Wandboard.org announced a quad-core version of its Linux- and Android-ready Freescale i.MX 6-based open source boardset. The Wandboard Quad moves up to four Cortex-A9 cores at the same 1GHz speed, provides a more powerful Vivante GC355 GPU, doubles DDR3 RAM to 2GB, and adds a SATA port.

Being benchmarked today at Phoronix is a comparison of eight different BSD and Linux operating systems. The contenders for this performance roundabout include PC-BSD 9.1, DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1, Ubuntu 13.04, Linux Mint 15 RC, CentOS 6.4, Fedora 18, Mageia 3, and openSUSE 12.3. Which of these operating systems are the fastest and slowest for a variety of different workloads?

Catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to posts. In this edition: CMIS 1.1 approved, Spring 4.0 milestone, new R, jEdit 5.1 previewed, Hadoop for Windows, AMQP for Azure, CoFluent 5.0, and VNC over GIF.

Raspberry Pi users have another operation system option, after the folks behind Fedora Linux changed their recipe and issued a “remix” of the OS for the tiny computer. Pidora 18, as the release is known, is not the very first of its kind, as two previous versions are available but weren't optimised for the ARMv6 architecture. Pidora 18 has undergone that optimisation and is therefore ready to run on the Pi.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) specification (14 properties) has been accepted and published as a part of Schema.org, the collaboration between major search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex (press release).

Digia launched a technology preview of Boot to Qt, a commercial offering that provides "a fully-integrated solution for the creation of slick user interfaces on embedded devices." The current version of Boot to Qt is built on top of an Android kernel base layer, and includes support for the Nexus 7, BeagleBoard-xM, SABRE Lite, and x86 hardware.

ProjectLibre is an open source project management solution ready to give Microsoft Project a run for their money.

Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.

Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.

Bitdefender Clueful is designed to warn Android users about apps that put their privacy at risk. Available free of charge, the app checks whether any of a user's installed programs are known to transmit smartphone numbers to advertising networks or cause push-message spam. Clueful establishes this by querying one of BitDefender's servers; it doesn't analyse the apps on the smartphone.

AMD has taken the brunt of the slowdown of x86 PCs and the rise of ARM-based mobile devices, according to IC Insights, which estimates the chipmaker fell 21 percent to fourth place in 2012 global microprocessor sales. Intel dropped 1 percent in the rankings while Samsung’s and Apple’s Samsung-built processors combined for the greatest growth, with their ARM processor sales rising 78 percent, says the research firm.

Microsoft has finally done the Skype for Linux 4.2 update, which rolls in a bunch of bug-fixes but still doesn't put the Linux Skype client on par with OS X or Windows.

Some forks do better than others. In the case of the Madriva fork known as Mageia, it's doing quite well, this week releasing its third major update in less than three years.

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. Or, what if, like Jake Epping in Stephen King's 11/22/63, you could make changes and script the past without fear, play around with some new Drupal modules, and quickly reset everything just by leaving and then walking back down the stairs of the pantry again?

Jolla Ltd. opened pre-order voucher sales for the first smartphone to run its Sailfish OS, an open source distribution based on the Linux MeeGo project. The dual-core, 4.5-inch Jolla phone features a gesture UI, Android app compatibility, and interchangeable “Other Half” back covers that switch user profiles.