Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Here in the Linux community, most of us enjoy high-level debates about strategies and trends just as much as the next technology enthusiast does. At the end of the day, however, it seems safe to say that what we tend to relish most of all is a good ol' nuts-and-bolts discussion of the tools and tricks of the trade.

Maps touch our lives daily. Whether you are trying to find a nearby point of interest or directions to a faraway land, maps help us find our way. In recent years, maps have moved from paper into the digital world of cartography and open source contributors have been in the trenches gathering data for the masses.

People want access to content. And creative commons allowed me to give them access to my content. One man decides to publish his own book—but there's no road map, no previous information to help him navigate how to do it! How will he sell a copy to people he doesn't already know?

The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, "Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs".

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: Linux Mint gets its own control centre, IPFire gets an ARM port, an open source game development kit and an open source adventure game engine, Tails 0.17 and identifying document authors with open source software.

The first beta release for Firefox 20 on the desktop introduces per-window Private Browsing, a new user interface for downloads and better handling of crashed plugins. The Android version also gets per-tab Private Browsing and has its system requirements lowered to a minimum of 384MB of RAM and QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels).

As a parent of three (children aged: 10, 7, and 5), I'm eager to share with my kids the values that attracted me to open source and the hacker ethos: sharing and building great things together, taking control of your environment, and embracing technology as a means of expression, rather than as media to be consumed. In other words: How can grown-up hackers ensure that we're growing the next generation of open source hackers?

penGamma is the developer of the first open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its products help companies explore flexible open source alternatives to conventional and costly risk analytics tools. The OpenGamma Platform is a unified system for front office and risk calculations for financial services firms.

After months of me promising Steam would be coming to Linux, the public beta is finally here. The early verdict: it's pretty great! The installer is a simple pre-packaged .deb file for Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case), and the user portion of the install looks very much like Windows or Macintosh. In my limited testing, I've found the Steam beta to be at least as stable as Desura. I also was impressed with the large number of my Steam games that have Linux versions ready to download and play.

Red Hat's Secure Boot support is a case of the company wanting to "deep-throat Microsoft", according to a forthright posting from Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel developer mailing list. Torvald's comments were made in response to plans by a Red Hat developer to extend Linux support for Secure Boot. The comments have given rise to an ongoing discussion, during which several prominent kernel developers have shared their thoughts on Secure Boot support in Linux.

HP is selling its webOS-related assets to South Korean electronics manufacturer LG. The two companies have issued a press release. LG is not, though, planning to use webOS in smartphones or tablets; its interest in the operating system is apparently for use in internet-enabled smart TVs. LG has now purchased the source code, associated documentation, developers and engineers working on webOS and all webOS web sites. LG is not purchasing the patents related to webOS but it will receive licences for all of HP's webOS-related patents, including those patents acquired by HP when it acquired Palm.

With René Obermann of Deutsche Telekom and Cesar Alierta of Telefónica, two major European mobile network operators are backing the new smartphone operating system that is based on HTML5 and JavaScript. US carrier Sprint, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom and Norway's Telenor are also on board. The biggest Latin American mobile network provider, America Movil, and China Unicom round out the impressive total of 18 supporters. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacz summarised what makes Firefox OS so interesting for these carriers: competition in the areas of operating systems and app stores can only be good for a smartphone market that has been controlled by Android and iOS. Kovacz described the Apple and Google duopoly as: "a broken model that must be changed."

I received an interesting message from Angela Kahealani with a challenge: "Here's what I'd like to see in Work the Shell: a full-blown shell script template. It should comply with all standards applicable to CLI programs. It should handle logging, piped input, arguments, traps, tempfiles, configuration files and so on." That's an interesting idea, and it fits neatly into something I've been talking about in the last few columns too: the difference between writing something quick and streamlined and writing bulletproof scripts. So let's jump in!

Six weeks have passed since Canonical's splashy debut of Ubuntu for phones, but for many here in the Linux blogosphere, the memory is still crystal-clear. It came as some surprise, then, to see follow-up news announced so soon afterward. The news this time? None other than Ubuntu for tablets.

For the first time, both hiring mangers (850) and Linux professionals (2,600) were surveyed in the 2013 Linux Jobs Survey & Report, which forecasts and provides a comprehensive view of the Linux career landscape, including business needs and personal incentives. The report also includes insights into why employers are seeking Linux talent now and what the top incentives are for Linux professionals.

Bill Richardson, a software engineer for Google, has detailed how to boot a conventional Linux distribution on the company's new Chromebook Pixel. Google released the Chromebook Pixel last week – the device costs £1,049, has a 13" touchscreen with a resolution of 2560×1700 pixels, a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB (64GB for the LTE version) of internal SSD storage. Where previous Chromebooks only supported booting Google's ChromeOS directly, the Pixel has an added option to support a third-party bootloader which enables it to be relatively easily modified to boot stock Linux desktop distributions.

The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one. SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.

Mozilla has been a pioneer and advocate for the Web for nearly 15 years. We are dedicated to promoting open standards and creating new Web experiences that allow innovation and creativity to flourish. We created choice and competition in the desktop browser market when we launched Firefox and we are becoming the same catalyst for change in mobile with Firefox OS, enabling developers, operators and consumers to blaze their own path.

The not-for-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser has announced handsets based on its operating system for mobile phones. In a press conference ahead of Mobile World Congress, Mozilla said that 18 operators including Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, were signed up. The mobiles will go head to head with established software from Apple and Google's Android division. Mozilla described the Firefox OS as an "open alternative". Firefox phones are likely to be sold first in the developing world and Eastern Europe and will be at the cheaper end of the smartphone market, according to Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla.

The PowerPC architecture update for the Linux 3.9 kernel is made up mostly of bug-fixes and minor updates, but there are a few highlights. Most of the major work revolves around the yet-to-be-released POWER8 hardware.