Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

However great the strides made by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and Mint in recent years, it seems fair to say that Linux has not yet enjoyed any sweeping successes on the desktop the way it has on the mobile side with Android. That, however, may be changing. Thanks once again to none other than Google, Linux is now appearing with increasing frequency in the PC lineups of hardware makers.

The media player can now make use of the Nepomuk semantic framework to find music and its metadata anywhere on the system. Other enhancements include statistical sync with Last.fm and the return of audio CD playback for some users.

LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2013

I need to apologize to all our readers. I have not been keeping up on the LXWR as of late and I am sorry. I could give many excuses but they would be just that, excuses. The roundup is going to get a lot better in the weeks ahead. It has yet to reach it's full potential and I know it.

On January 18th, KDE released the third release candidate (RC3) for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

Since last week when writing about the LLVM/Clang compiler being ported to GNU Hurd, readers have asked via the forums, email, etc about the state of this open-source kernel backed by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Hurd and its Mach micro-kernel continue to be developed, just not at a rapid pace like the Linux kernel.

Adam Gowniak is indefatigable: last weekend, Oracle released an emergency patch for the 0day hole in Java, and the security researcher has already found the next loophole. In a posting on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the expert has only revealed that the flawed MBeanInstantiator method inspired him to search for further holes. Brian Krebs had previously mentioned a new exploit that can't be neutralised with Oracle's patch; whether this concerns the same vulnerability remains unclear.

Mozilla has released Firefox 18.0.1, a first update to Firefox 18, which was released ten days ago. According to the release notes, and the lack of any additional entries on the security advisories page, the release is a stability update addressing three issues.

The dust is finally beginning to settle here in the Linux blogosphere following all the recent brouhaha emanating out of CES. The tents have been packed up, the jugglers have gone home, and bloggers can finally hear themselves think down at the blogosphere's Broken Windows Lounge once again. Spirits are lifting across the land, in other words, and a few choice headlines have done nothing but help.

US Representative Zoe Lofgren has proposed an amendment to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Lofgren also presented her amendment on Reddit. The amendment is called "Aaron's Law" by Lofgren and is being put forward as a response to the death of Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who killed himself while facing thirteen felony counts of computer and wire fraud after he attempted to liberate millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive.

A hole exists in primary and secondary education that open math can fill. Visual mathematics, spatial or visual reasoning, or the application of mathematics to nature is seldom included in math curriculums or public schools. This gives me math angst because spatial thinking in particular is crucial to many jobs from builders and London cabbies to astrophysists and should be more prevalent in print and online than it is, especially in our digital age. This severe lack of spatial thinking in math curriculums and public schools is detrimental to our children's futures. Both parents and policymakers have gone to dizzying lengths to improve math scores and rank. Math curriculums, video games, and tutoring centers abound. Too frequently art, music, recess, and physical education have been cut in favor of improving math scores and a school's rank. And yet despite various promises to improve math proficiency, test scores or ranking have left many children without a love of math, a level of enthusiasm for math, or much beyond basic computational math skills.

Fedora 18, Spherical Cow, is here. Finally. The Fedora Project has never been one for precision roadmaps, but previously it has managed to stay pretty close to its official May and October release schedule. Spherical Cow, however, proved to be a difficult beast - it is nearly three months late. The numerous delays can be chalked up to the new version of the Anaconda installer that ships with Fedora 18. The delays due to the revamped installer are understandable. Installers are one place you really don't want bugs.

GitHub, the code sharing site based around Linus Torvald's distributed version control system Git, has announced that the service now has over three million registered users. The commercial service, which was founded in 2008, reached the one million user milestone in September 2011 and, less than a year later, in August 2012, the company reported reaching two million users. That GitHub has reached this third milestone in under half a year shows both its, and Git's, rapidly rising popularity with developers.

I recently blogged about making open source software, and the high level steps for how to think about the process. We started with the need for software to seed the discussion, the need for clear motivation as to why to publish as open source software, and then the structural requirements to build a community (license choice, collaboration platform or forge, and governance considerations).

If you’re a digital artist or designer, you’ve no doubt heard of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), often referred to as the preeminent open-source alternative to Photoshop. But did you know that you can extend GIMP’s features dramatically with a plugin called G’MIC?

It's hard to believe that we're only a couple of years into the OpenStack story. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface.

We’ve already brought you a lengthy interview and expansive rundown on the new additions of Crusader Kings 2?s Republic DLC expansion. But in the wake of its release, there’s some CK2 news housekeeping to be done. The big news is the addition of a Linux version, but instead I think we’ll kick off with the patch notes. They contain the sentence “Constantine de Hauteville is no longer female,” which is just too good to pass up.

According to a 2012 survey of embedded engineers by both VDC Research and UBM Electronics, the use of Linux in embedded projects is increasing at a fast rate. UBM reported that some 35 percent of embedded developers are working on Linux projects and that number increases to 48 percent when Android is included. This is not a surprise to us. Increasingly, we have been working with companies big and small who are replacing proprietary embedded OS with Linux in our training and events programs, as well as membership. Among the reasons companies elect to use embedded Linux in their projects are the availability of the source code, the strength of the Linux community, the lower costs, and the availability of Linux developer talent (even though there is a lot of competition for good developers).

Open source has long had a strong corporate element to it, perhaps starting in earnest when IBM pledged to spend $1bn on Linux back in 2000. Despite the benefits of corporate funding of open-source software - more money, more source code written - some question whether open source has become too corporate. For those who worry about the commercialisation of open source, I'd like to introduce you to Pedro Algarvio, contributor to the SaltStack project.

Xvidcap is a small tool to capture whatever goes on within the borders of an X-Windows display. It lets you capture what you do either as individual frames or as an MPEG video. Recording your computing activity keystroke by keystroke is not a need every computer user has. However, this is an ideal tool if you need to make a visual record of the steps you take to complete a computing task.