Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The most commonly used command in Ubuntu is “apt-get“. You can use it to install software, updatethe repository and upgrade the software. Without a doubt, “Apt-get” is a pretty handy tool and is very useful and good for what it supposed to do, but “good” can always be enhanced into “better” and this can be easily achieved with “apt-fast”.

Mathbuntu brings a nice batch of math and science software, textbooks, and other goodies to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Let's try it out and see if it makes us smarter.

With new major releases of Ubuntu and Fedora out the door in the past quarter, the developers at these and other community distributions are now hard at work on future versions of their respective Linux-based operating systems. Smaller, more specialised distributions have also been publishing new versions at a rapid pace.

Qualcomm has taken the unusual step of restructuring its organization in order to better protect its patent portfolio. There are other reasons for the move as well, the company said Thursday, including the ability to more quickly deliver products to customers. However, it emphasized the patent protection element in particular.

E-books are currently quite a hot topic in the publishing world. Heck, for the past few months, it's been quite a hot topic here as well! Thankfully, digital publication doesn't have to mean proprietary formats and DRM-laden files.

Red Hat is ramping up for the next generation data center by supporting Google’s Open Compute project, software-def ined networking advancements such as OpenvSwitch and OpenFlow and making steady advancements in the operating system, virtualization, storage and networking, company executives said at the summit this week.

Google has been shouting the praises of its newly patched Chrome on the second day of its I/O developer conference, and is claiming that Chrome is undoubtedly the world's most popular browser. "According to all the metrics and everything we see out there, Chrome most is the most popular browser," said Sundar Pichai, VP of Chrome applications, during his opening keynote presentation.

There are many topics that tend to come up in a recurring manner around water coolers throughout the Linux blogosphere, and not just the great "Year of" debate, either. No indeed, another shining example more than a little familiar to most of us who spend any time here is the much-abused command line -- specifically, whether it's outlived its usefulness in this era of the GUI.

Twitter has announced that its Iago load generator is now available as open source. Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter, says that the micro-blogging company created Iago because existing open source and commercial load generators couldn't provide all of the capabilities it required.

Just as the internet was becoming reality for most of us, Mark Shuttleworth sold his first technology venture - the second largest provider of digital certification, Thawte - to VeriSign for $575m. It was 1999 and he was 26 years old. Next, Shuttleworth paid the Russians $20m to become the first African in space - he flew aboard a Soyuz to visit the International Space Station (ISS). He also founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation.

It has been 66 days since Intel formally introduced their Ivy Bridge processors as the 2012 successor to Sandy Bridge. My views on Intel Ivy Bridge (specifically the Core i7 3770K model) back on launch-day were very positive in terms of the Linux compatibility, CPU performance, and the HD 4000 graphics capabilities. Since then I've conducted dozens of additional tests looking at the Core i7 Ivy Bridge on Linux in different areas from comparative benchmarks to Microsoft Windows, trying to run BSD operating systems on the latest hardware, looking at the virtualization performance, compiler tuning, etc. Here is a recap of this additional Ivy Bridge testing that has happened over the past two months of near constant benchmarking.

Google launched its Nexus 7 tablet on Wednesday at its Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco. The tablet, which is made by Asus, has an 1,280 by 800 display. It has an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core CPU with that processor's associated 12-core GPU. The Nexus tablet 7 has a front-facing camera and supports WiFi, Bluetooth and near-field communications.

Two years ago, I got into a conversation with another professional about the desktop. I opined that very shortly, the desktop would be our cell phone and there would be no need to put file servers at everyone's desk. This was partially driven by the announcement that morning, at LinuxCon, by Qualcomm, that they were going to put dual-core 1 GHz processors in their next generation cell phones. This professional pooh-poohed the idea as completely unworkable.

7-Zip and p7Zip belong to a family of file compression utilities that are among the best available for Linux/Unix. So you would think that the development communities would offer to Linux users what is available in similar compression apps on the Windows and Mac platforms. Think again!

Open webOS logo Despite having shelved its webOS hardware months ago, HP continues to work towards finalising the open source version of its Open webOS mobile operating system by September. As part of this effort, HP has now cooperated with WebOS Internals developers to release further webOS 3.0.5 sources for the TouchPad as a "Community Edition" under the Apache 2.0 Licence. The final component required to compile an open source version of webOS was the Luna system manager (luna-sysmgr), which is now available to download as a 9MB source code archive.

This is the third profile in our 30-week series that features a different Linux kernel developer each week. Last week we featured Thomas Gleixner, after beginning the series with Linus Torvalds. The profiles we publish throughout the rest of 2012 will help illustrate how these developers do their work, providing important insight on how to work with them and what makes them tick.

Working with Linux doesn't mean your work is restricted to command-line tools. True, most experienced Linux administrators use command-line tools for convenience and more efficient administration. However, the GNOME project provides some excellent tools for managing a Linux server using a graphical user interface (GUI). Using your Microsoft Windows background experience, you might find that these tools make the transition less dramatic.

Red Hat is making large splashes on the Linux Planet. This week, the company kicks off its Red Hat Summit event on the heels of a busy week of releases and earnings. Not to be outdone, Ubuntu Linux has weighed in on the UEFI Secure Boot issue with a solution of its own.

The month of June has not been kind to Microsoft hardware partners. Last week, Redmond revealed that it's getting into the Windows tablet game with the introduction of the Surface, meaning it will compete for sales with its own allies. It followed that up with news about Windows Phone 8.

Brackets was written using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The open source code editor has been deliberately kept "simple yet productive", but can easily be extended.