Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As promised, Canonical has released the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, complete with full source code and installation images for supported devices. The company warns, however, that this early, alpha-quality release is strictly for developers and enthusiasts only. "While a huge amount of Engineering and Design work has been put into ensuring that the foundations for our user experience vision are in place, we want to stress that the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview is currently work in progress," Canonical's David Planella wrote in the official announcement on Thursday. "It is not intended to replace production devices or the tablet or handset you use every day."

The Foundation has announced the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) initiative. With industrial uses of software which expect support and maintenance of the software stack from ten to fifty years, there has long been a desire to address this need. With the new LTS initiative, led by CA Technologies, IBM, EclipseSource and SAP AG, the Foundation will provide the facilities and processes needed to create signed deployable updates for older versions of Eclipse. This should, in turn, enable a new ecosystem of companies and enterprises to share fixes and releases. The initiative will be open to all organisations with an interest in extending the productive life of Eclipse technologies.

Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform's sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of "administrator friendliness". Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. To illustrate, I want to go over the single most common "why doesn't it work" issue I encounter among junior admins: cloning CentOS virtual machines (VMs).

There's no denying that Linux has had a lot of great moments since the turn of the millennium, and Linux Girl has done her best to highlight each and every one of them -- at least over the past six or so of those years. Recently, however, the question was the subject of a new poll that prompted vigorous debate.

Open Source for America (OSFA) announced today the opening of its nomination period for the annual OSFA awards. Each year, the organization recognizes individuals, projects, and deployments that support its mission to encourage free and open source software adoption in the U.S. government.

Oracle is not letting go of its Java patent infringement beef against Google despite its sound drubbing last spring when U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that programming APIs were not subject to copyright protection. Last week, Oracle took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

SCALE 11X attendees have gained an added bonus to the schedule for the three-day event in Los Angeles starting on Friday..

Ubuntu spaceman Mark Shuttleworth is embracing the full horror of tablets and smartphones, calculating they’ll do little harm to his Linux distro’s PC business. Shuttleworth yesterday announced a fondleslab-friendly Ubuntu interface for tabs ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The first tabs running the UI will be the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 - the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview for the kit will be available from tomorrow, 21 February.

Red Hat to Contribute Red Hat Storage Hadoop Plug-in to Apache Hadoop Community

This series is proving a lot more popular than I'd figured. Who would have thought so many people enjoy noodling around with Web servers? By popular demand, "Web Served" now enters the bonus round with two things I didn't think I was going to be able to get to: MediaWiki in this piece, and Etherpad Lite in the next.

It bothers many of us everytime we hear about yet another non-obvious, overreaching, and abusive patent—particularly a software patent that is getting in the way of innovation and creativity. Additionally, there is an overwhelming sense of frustration when a regular citizen can't do much to change the current, sad state of affairs.

Dell has announced a higher resolution screen version of its Sputnik laptop, an Intel i7 Ultrabook supplied with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and aimed at developers, that it will be making it available outside the US and Canada. The screen on the new Sputnik 2 is 1920x1080, a far higher and more developer-friendly resolution than the Sputnik 1's 1366x768 display.

Rumors are not exactly an uncommon phenomenon here in the Linux community, but every once in a while one comes along that is so compelling, such a deliciously tantalizing prospect, that bloggers just can't leave it alone, no matter how far-fetched it may be. Case in point? Oh, it's a juicy one: "Microsoft is having a 'meaningful look' at a full Linux port of Office ... .

There is more to a hard drive than its size. While the amount of disk space is all you see marketed about a hard drive on a sales page, there is actually an extensive amount of coding that goes into making a hard drive capable of handling your applications and data in the first place. Most Linux distributions currently default to using the ext4 file system, but the future for many of them lies with the B-tree file system, better known as Btrfs.

Canonical is planning to release the "Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu for phones" on Thursday 21 February. This release will allow developers to put images of the phone-optimised Ubuntu onto the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. The images are billed as "early previews" to allow developers to create applications for the phone operating system and, rather than being a snapshot of development, will be supplemented by daily updates.

Gaming on Linux has long been a hit and miss exercise in frustration. Some users tried to get WINE working well enough to run Windows games on Linux, while others built Linux native games. As of last week, Linux users won't need to struggle nearly as much to get great games. Valve announced the official debut of Steam for Linux. With Steam for LInux, users will now gain access to a large library of titles including Counter-Strike, Half-Life and Team-Fortress 2 that will run on Linux.

GitHub , the Git-centric project hosting and collaboration company, has announced the open sourcing of Boxen, its management and automation tool used within the company for managing Mac systems. The project, which was originally named "The Setup", was designed to allow developers to go from a new laptop to a system ready to hack the GitHub.com source within thirty minutes with a single command. They then ditched "The Setup" and wrote Boxen to replace it, so that any company could use it.

An update on events and happenings at SCALE 11x coming next weekend in Los Angeles.

LXer Feature: 17-Feb-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

The future of open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the open science community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style "sprint" event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23 and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (March 11-15).