Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Alan Levy, with Plextek Consulting, has published an interesting whitepaper that examines various issues associated with embedding Android in applications other than the typical smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. In the nine-page whitepaper, “Using Android in your embedded product,” Levy provides a brief overview of Android and its origins, and then proceeds to evaluate its pros and cons relative to applications in the general embedded market.

IBM announced today that its entire array of cloud software and services will be based on the open cloud architecture, allowing end-users and customers to buy various equipment from contributing members of the OpenStack software group without having to face tie-in with one particular vendor.

In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!

Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu's Unity user interface. Assuming you've managed to get past last year’s privacy fiasco, either by being comfortable with Canonical sending your search queries to Amazon and others or disabling the feature, this latest beta - code-named Raring Ringtail - is shaping up to be a high-water mark for Unity fans.

Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.

Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in the still experimental Btrfs will be one of the major new features of Linux 3.9, expected to arrive in late April. This has become apparent because Linus Torvalds has now issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.9 which, as usual, closes the Linux development cycle's "merge window", the phase during which the developers integrate the majority of changes for the next version. This time, the merge window, which started with the release of Linux 3.8, only lasted thirteen instead of the usual fourteen days.

When I think back, I can't remember my first involvement in the Koha community. I remember talking to Chris Cormack on Instant Messenger nearly everyday before ever really communicating with the community has a whole. I remember trying to find a job working with Koha when it was time for me to move on from my first job, but I still don't remember really being involved in the community. I read a great post by Siobhan Mckeown about participating in the WordPress community and I highly recommend reading it, but I thought maybe I should do a Koha variation for those who want to get involved. My own personal story started with a mentor, Chris, and lead to becoming Documentation Manager and a Koha trainer. But we all have different paths and different stories, so I asked the community to answer a few questions to help me produce a well rounded post for you (following Siobhan's model).

LXer Feature: 03-Mar-2013

It was quite the eventful week in Linux news. Linus goes off on (UEFI) Secure Boot option in the kernel, LG acquires webOS from HP, how the “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy program works and SCALE 11x kicks "trades" and takes "shows", Enjoy!

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and certainly I am not. Honest. But one of the problems with working on a show like Southern California Linux Expo and this year’s SCALE 11X leaves me little time to do anything but the wood-chopping and water-carrying that goes with being the publicity chair for the show. Let me be clear: This is not a complaint, but rather an explanation about why you’re not going to get a comprehensive report about the event. Others are doing that for me, and it was as great as they say it is; possibly moreso.

The not-for-profit Wandboard community project has begun shipping its compact, low-power, board-level embedded computer. Based on 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 processors, Wandboard comes in single- and dual-core versions (priced at $79 and $99) and runs community-supported embedded Linux and Android operating systems.

The Ubuntu OS on smartphones and tablets has been grabbing headlines and gaining support quickly since the plans were formally unveiled at the beginning of 2013. ZDNet met the man behind Ubuntu to see what he had to say about the project.

RunRev, the company behind the multi-platform, HyperCard-like development environment LiveCode, reached its goal for its Kickstarter campaign: the fairly ambitious target of £350,000 was met about 60 hours before the campaign was due to end. In fact, although the total amount only approached the target in the last five days, donations then went far beyond the original goal, finally reaching almost £500,000 (about €570,000), allowing LiveCode to be released under the GPLv3 open source licence. RunRev plans to use the additional money to implement more project goals.

With Zopfli, Google has introduced a new, C-based compression library as open source software. Named after a Swiss pastry, its algorithm is said to produce results that are 3 to 8 per cent more compact when compressing web content than the popular zlib library at maximum compression level. These results have been documented by Google. Like zlib, Zopfli is an implementation of the Deflate algorithm that is also used in the zip file format and in PNG files, but it appears to result in smaller output files.

Have you ever considered becoming a cartographer? It's not as hard as you might think. I've been trying out OruxMaps, a map viewer for Android that functions two ways. One mode is online with the usual suspects like Google maps, OpenStreetMap, and so on; the second and more intriguing method is offline with maps you've created yourself. Creating your own maps, while not hard, is a project.

Google has open sourced a new compression algorithm called Zopfli that it says is a slower-but-stronger data squasher than the likes of zlib. The product of Googler Lode Vandevenne's 20 per cent time, the day a week Google allows its staff to work on side projects, Zopfli is said to reduce files to sizes 3.7–8.3 per cent smaller than its rivals (PDF). The catch is that it takes one hundred times longer to do so.

If you find yourself spending more time on graphics these days, you're not alone. We're all taking more pictures, creating graphics for visual appeal in online properties and more. For real graphics muscle, it's essential to get familiar with GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. OStatic has covered GIMP on a number of occasions, and the active community that drives the application forward continues to deliver improved versions. In this post, you'll find our latest, updated collection of free resources for getting started with GIMP and becoming an advanced user.

It used to be a bit of an art to strip down Red Hat or CentOS down to the absolute minimum needed for a server install. I’ve ranted at length about how the default install for servers included a full blown Gnome desktop, including games. Thankfully, CentOS 6 has a special iso download, which I feel is built specially for me, called the Minimal install. After installing this image a few times, I’m convinced that every Linux install should be a minimal install.

PhUSE, a non-profit community with the goal of furthering advances in clinical information technology, has opened a repository for open source software and is inviting contributors to submit code and documentation. The goal of the initiative is to create a collection of standard processes and tools to gather and analyse data from clinical trials. The repository will be used by researchers from the fields of medicine, from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as academics and government regulators. The repository is hosted at Google Code and is accepting contributions through the PhUSE Wiki.

After almost exactly a year of development, SpringSource has released Spring for Hadoop 1.0 with the goal of making the development of Hadoop applications easier for users of the distributed application framework. VMware engineer Costin Leau said in the release announcement that the company has often seen developers use the out-of-the-box tools that come with Hadoop in ways that lead to a "poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stitched together." Spring for Hadoop aims to change this by applying the Template API design pattern from Spring to Hadoop.

Jeff Griffiths, the product manager for Mozilla's Add-on SDK, known as Jetpack, has announced that, from Firefox version 21 (which will include SDK 1.14), the SDK will synchronise releases of the SDK with releases of the browser.