Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This news is a few days tardy, but the videos from the 2012 Red Hat Summit are now available...

Mozilla will be announcing Monday that they will be basically stripping away their resources towards the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client. In a private email sent to Mozilla employees today, Mozilla shared that on Monday they will be announcing their plans to restructure Thunderbird. Mozilla Thunderbird isn't being killed, but they will basically be making it more community-based with Mozilla employees being re-tasked to other projects.

If you've gone the custom ROM route, ROM Manager Premium is a fabulous product that automates and streamlines maintenance. It is ideal for those who don't eat, sleep and breathe code, and file naming conventions -- or don't choose to be around the command line.

Since I want to get this out of my system: here's a set of proposals to fix (okay, replace) the current failing patent system. No lengthy diatribe or introduction, just a raw list. Let me begin by saying that I, by no means, am claiming this set of proposals is perfect, watertight, coherent, legally feasible, or workable. It's just a number of of things that I, as a layman, think will benefit society and progress.

Whether or not you are going on a vacation this summer, it is always good to take a break. And if you are using Linux, what is better than playing video games under the sun? (Except going out, of course.) So, in continuation with Travis’ work, let me present you five more games to distract yourself during the summer. From action to reflection, and through racing, these games are assured to bring you the fun that you deserve. And to add to the cocktail, all of them are completely free!

Since last year when spotting a major Linux kernel power regression and subsequently finding the cause of the power problem that affected a large number of mobile Linux users, plus other regressions, it's been fun to look at the Linux power performance situation. How though is the latest Ubuntu Linux code performing when it comes to power efficiency? Here are some early tests of Ubuntu 12.10.

Frank Reininghaus, the new maintainer of KDE's Dolphin file manager has put out a call for contributors to the project. The original creator of Dolphin, Peter Penz, stepped down from leadership of the project last month and Reininghaus sees involving new developers with the project as one of his most important tasks.

The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun. Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it's been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.

Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli has announced a plan that aims to get the project included in the FSF's list of free software distributions. To that end, Zacchiroli wants to set up a team within Debian that is actively working to resolve the remaining issues which prevent Debian's inclusion in the list.

Malware targeting Google's open source Android mobile operating system continues to rise – according to a new report, hundreds of thousands of devices have already been infected via applications from the official Google Play store. Security specialist Trend Micro says that, in the past quarter, the number of malicious apps doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 in a single month – a big increase from the 5,000 malicious apps it identified from January to March of this year.

Well it's been a few years since Linux Girl has had the pleasure of writing about dating in the Linux world -- always one of her favorite topics! -- but recently the topic came up again, albeit with a slight twist. Specifically, in a recent article over at Datamation, is wasn't so much human-to-human matchmaking being discussed as it was pairing of the human-to-desktop kind.

Charles H Schulz has announced the opening of voting to select a new name for the Mandriva community distribution that will emerge from the current work on creating a new Mandriva foundation. Mandriva is currently in the process of reorganising, and part of the plan involves handing the development of the distribution to the community.

Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one's keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

Will Schroeder is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a company that builds open source scientific software that also depends on open source. He suggested that open source is the most effective way to get things done through agile, collaborative innovation. Traditionally science was open, critically reviewed and widely available. Results were shared and new innovations could build on previous discoveries. It is now largely closed and largely protected by patents.

The presentations and videos from Red Hat's in-house conference provide information on current and forthcoming products from the open source specialist, including version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

When it comes to operating systems for the TI OMAP4 PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES, Ubuntu Linux is usually the winner for several reasons. However, with last month's release of Fedora 17 for ARM, how is the Red Hat sponsored distribution running on these ARM development boards? Here's an overview of my experiences when running the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases on the ARM Cortex A9 development hardware along with Arch Linux. There are also benchmarks comparing the ARM Linux performance.

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention. That lesson proved true with this youngster of an app.

Linux 3.5 is now capable of the "FireWire Target Disk Mode", which is a familiar Mac feature. Btrfs logs data errors, allowing unreliable storage media to be detected. Checksums have been implemented to ensure that Ext4 metadata is consistent

LXer Feature: 02-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXWR of the weeks big stories for your reading pleasure. Sorry its a day late. Enjoy!

If you are disgruntled by the new interfaces provided by recent distribution releases, namely GNOME 3 and Unity, you might want to take a look at Cinnamon. With its traditional feel and extreme theme-ability, Cinnamon is a desktop interface bound to spice up anyone's computer. The general feel is that of GNOME 2, or perhaps XFCE, but its polished look and downloadable themes make it truly exciting to behold.