Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as "SOA," but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source's demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being "faux-open source" with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code). Thankfully, "open source" has outlived the hype to provide real value to the industry and to customers.

With all the drama and pathos that plays out each and every day here in the Linux blogosphere, the temptation to equate the stories of today with classic tales from the world of literature can sometimes be overwhelming. Take the world of Linux desktops, for example. For years the users lived happily under the reign of GNOME 2; suddenly, Unity and GNOME 3 appeared on the horizon.

Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn't be more different. If there's a lesson to be drawn from this, it's "go the whole hog or not at all". At first sight it looks pretty straightforward – a licence for Microsoft Office Professional 2010 costs just under €400. Add that up over 10,000 workplaces (as is the case in Munich's city administration) and it comes to more than €4 million. For open source alternatives OpenOffice and LibreOffice, by contrast, licensing costs are zero, so you've saved at least €4 million. In view of the state of public finances, you'd think that would be the end of the discussion..

If you are a Linux user, or a webmaster managing your own website (which is probably hosted on a Linux server), you will surely come across a situation when you try to upload a file or modify a document and receive the error “You do not have the permissions to upload file to the folder“. And after some googling, the solution is often as easy as setting the file permission to “775? or “777?. So what exactly does “777? mean? And why must it be ’7?, and not ’8? or ’9??

H. Peter Anvin has been involved with Linux for more than 20 years, and is currently one of the x86 architecture maintainers. During his work on Linux, one of his areas of interest has been the generation and use of random numbers, and his talk at LinuxCon Europe 2012 was designed to address a lot of misunderstandings that he has encountered regarding random numbers. The topic is complex, and so, for the benefit of experts in the area, he noted that "I will be making some simplifications". (In addition, your editor has attempted to fill out some details that Peter mentioned only briefly, and so may have added some "simplifications" of his own.)

Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step.

Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you're wanting to play Valve's Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma. "If you want to get some of the now finally available games for Linux, KDE Plasma should be your primary choice to enjoy the game. I have also heard of users switching to KDE Plasma because we still provide non OpenGL based setups," Martin explains in his Fallback mode in KDE Plasma Workspaces blog post.

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction. How can you keep all of this straight and figure out what could be happening? Enter the Feynman diagram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram). American physicist Richard Feynman developed Feynman diagrams in 1948. They represent complex quantum particle interactions through a set of very simple diagrams, made up of straight lines, wavy lines and curly lines. This works really well if you happen to be using a chalk board or white board. But, these media are not very useful when sharing your ideas across the Internet. Additionally, most word-processing software is unable to draw these diagrams for your articles, papers and documents. So what can you do? Use the JaxoDraw software package (http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net).

Splashtop, which is especially well-known to many people for its history of letting users run a lightweight version of Linux alongside other operating systems, has a new spin on streaming with Slashtop Streamer for Linux. Splashtop Streamer is an audio-video streaming server, enabling remote access to a computer from an Android device (tablet/phone) or an iOS device (iPad/iPhone/iPod). You can connect within a Local Area Network or through a cross-network or Internet connection. You can use Splashtop Streamer for Linux in conjunction with Splashtop 2 to connect to a remote computer running Ubuntu to use Linux applications and access their data.

Well half a year has passed since Linux Girl last wrote about the invasion of the tiny, Linux-powered PCs, and she's delighted to report that the trend has shown no sign of slowing down. No indeed! "Tiny $57 PC is like the Raspberry Pi, but faster and fully open" is one headline that recently appeared, for example. "Meet the PengPod, a 'true Linux' tablet starting at $120" is yet another.

Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple's Passbook application.

In preparation for the imminent release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.2-Randaberg, final validation testing was done on a variety of Linux operating systems in Amazon's EC2 compute cloud. Many of the official Linux images were benchmarked from the c1.xlarge High-CPU Extra Large Instance, including Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

The developers of MongoDB at 10gen have announced that they are making MongoDB's APIs report failed writes by default. The previous default behaviour of the open source NoSQL database had been to return from API calls as soon as possible, without reporting errors, because the design of MongoDB was predicated on the API working with an HTTP-based web server and a pattern was developed of checking for write errors for an entire page being loaded.

FocusWriter uses an intriguing concept that makes you wonder why other word-processing tools do not offer the same hide-away tools panels to eliminate distractions. It offers a set of writing tools with the ease and speed of unencumbered text editors. Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It has no option to resize or minimize.

Dear Esther, a unique first person adventure game powered by Valve's Source Engine, will soon be released as a native Linux client. Currently the company is seeking out testers to try out the Linux port.

A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.

For Ubuntu users, Splashtop Streamer offers a supercharged, high-performance alternative to Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and other remote desktop software. Due to its efficient protocol, algorithms and optimizations, Splashtop has been shown in performance benchmarks to deliver up to 15x higher video frame rates and up to 10x lower latency times than its competition. Splashtop sessions are secured with SSL and 256-bit AES encryption, allowing it to serve as a secure pipe between devices, in some cases allowing users to eliminate their need for separate VPN solutions.

New details have been shared with Phoronix about the back-story that led to the work on the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM graphics driver that will be introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel. For months there has been an independently-developed Tegra DRM driver that is finally being merged during the next kernel cycle (3.8). In September it was then shared at XDC2012 that NVIDIA would be opening up some Tegra documentation and then days ago I wrote that NVIDIA was contributing to this open-source driver. This week they even dropped some Tegra 2D acceleration code that works with this open-source Linux graphics driver.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsToday (November 27, 2012) is the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Tomorrow, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts. On Thursday there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.

I became aware of the Arduino Project from occasional media reports and a presentation at Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. I was impressed with what the Arduino community was doing, but at that time, I saw no personal use for it. It took a grandson who is heavily involved in a high-school competitive robotics program to change things for me. During a 2011 Thanksgiving family gathering, he asked me some questions about robotics-related electronics, and I told him to google Arduino. He did. Arduino ended up on his Christmas list, and Santa delivered.