Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux fans hope that the interface changes in Windows 8 will drive more users to Linux. But the open source operating system is facing interface challenges of its own. Part of the problem is that — after so much controversy within the Linux community — there are so many interfaces to chose from. But the new version of Fedora — a desktop focused version of Red Hat’s distribution of Linux — is offering users an easier way to choose between the many flavors of Linux GUI.

After multiple delays, Fedora 18 , aka the Spherical Cow is finally set to arrive on January 15th. Originally set for a November 2012 release, Fedora 18 has been hit with multiple delays related to the massive overhaul of the Anaconda installer. The revised Anaconda is the most obvious and impressive user-facing innovation in Fedora 18, providing a modern interface and tools to get up and running with the Spherical Cow.

I know this might sound like an odd question. It first came up in a conversation I had with Gary Hamel, the eminent business thinker and one of the first people to recognize the importance of distributed co-creation and that it will change management in the 21st century. We were discussing how the power of participation could replace traditional management for purposes of coordination and what it's limits might be. We ended up using the analogy of building a jetliner as our best example of where tight coordination is required. This question has been nagging on my mind ever since.

The twelfth annual Samba eXPerience (SambaXP) conference will take place in Göttingen, Germany from 14 to 17 May under the auspices of the services company SerNet. The program of the international developer and user conference will feature Samba 4 as its main theme and on the second conference day, the developers will also celebrate the release at the official Samba 4 release party. The latest version of the open source file sharing and directory server was released in December.

Fresh off his trip to North Korea -- and right behind Apple CEO Tim Cook's trip to China -- Google chairman Eric Schmidt joined a panel discussion at the "Geek Park" conference in Beijing. Schmidt reportedly reminded the developers in attendance that despite Apple's popularity in China -- the iPhone 5 sold more than 2 million units in one weekend -- Android is still the top dog in the Middle Kingdom.

The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything combines a step-by-step approach to learning how to use this epic graphic image-manipulation program with a handy reference manual supplemented with very useful appendices. Whether you are a GIMP beginner or a veteran user, this book will save you hours of trial and error when editing graphics files.

Well, CES has come and gone for another year, and not a moment too soon! One more new phone announcement, and Linux Girl's head would have surely exploded. There's no doubt it was a mad, mad week -- so wild, in fact, that a curious event occurring outside CES could have escaped the notice of more than a few observers.

'Appropriate action taken as necessary' against Windows RT hack Microsoft is suddenly serious about tackling RT Jailbreak, a slick tool that unlocks Surface tablets using a hack publicised just days earlier.…

China-based electronics factory Foxconn is best known for being a top manufacturer for Apple’s hardware. It is also associated with other top global brands like Sony, Nokia and Panasonic, producing millions of mobile phones, tablets and computers. The company, which employs over a million workers in China, has been embroiled in controversy for several years, not least due to Apple’s alleged initial tolerance of human rights abuses of their workers.

Not exactly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think - Scott

With its patch update next Tuesday, Oracle plans to close a total of 86 holes in its software. 18 vulnerabilities were discovered in the free MySQL relational database alone; two of these can be exploited without authentication

Chinese electronics firm ZTE is ramping up its efforts in support of the Mozilla Foundation's open source Firefox OS for mobile phones, and if all goes well, it could deliver a device targeting European customers as early as this year. In an interview at the CES 2013 conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, Cheng Lixin, CEO of ZTE's US business unit, told Bloomberg that the company was already working with a European carrier to develop a Firefox OS device.

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: A linuxy gun, Steam fun, Fuduntu, Slax, Samsung source and rekonq.

I was proudly wearing one of my Salt Stack shirts the other day when my daughter asked me, "What is Salt Stack?" I began by explaining the problem it solved. If you have multiple servers and want to do things to those servers, you would need to log in to each one and do those things one at a time on each one. They could be fairly simple tasks like restarting them or checking how long they have been running. Or, you might want to do more complicated things like installing software and then configuring that software based upon your own specific criteria. You also might want to add users and configure permissions for them.

The One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPCA) has announced the next generation of its Linux-based XO laptop and a new XO Tablet design at CES in Las Vegas. According to a report on The Verge, chip manufacturer Marvell demonstrated the XO 4.0 Touch laptop at the conference but did not show the XO Tablet which is being developed by Sakar International.

Linux Mint 14 contains some well-needed facelifts. For example, the Mint Display Manager used for the login screen is refreshingly improved. MDM now supports legacy GDM 2 themes with some 30 installed by default and about 2,000 more available for download. Even better, the format is so easy to apply for making themes that you can quickly add your own personalization to make your login screen look your way.

Where would we be without Facebook as we forge into 2013? If Skype is the grande dame of app-based telephony, Facebook is the head honcho of social networking. Facebook Messenger lets you social network fast with its app-based interface. It's proprietary, which we don't love, and it has a few kinks -- but they're likely to be ironed out in due course.

Recent moves by VMware have caused "uncertainty in the Vert.x community", as the company has staked its claim on the project. When Vert.x, the asynchronous framework for Java and other JVM based languages, was launched in May 2012, Tim Fox, a VMware employee and project lead, described the project as "a community project sponsored by VMware".

Turns out maps matter. That's always been the case for me. I'm a map freak. I own hundreds of paper maps in various specialties, plus many atlases, books on geography, geology and other geo-obsessions. But I'm no longer an edge case, because maps are proving to be essential on smartphones, which today approaches a billion or more people. Digital maps on phones are now among the core portfolio of smartphone apps, alongside voice, text, calendar and contacts. What could be more mobile about a phone than a map to help the user look things up and get around?

Programming languages are living phenomena: They're born, the lucky ones that don't die in infancy live sometimes long, fruitful lives, and then inevitably enter a period of decline. Unlike real life, the decline can last many, many years as the presence of large legacy codebases means practiced hands must tend the code for decades. The more popular the language once was, the longer this period of decline will be.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.9 has landed with some cloudy love from Microsoft. The latest version of the Linux distro, released Tuesday, introduces drivers for Microsoft’s closed-source Hyper-V hypervisor rival to VMware’s vSphere. The inclusion of Microsoft’s drivers means improved interoperability and manageability for RHEL 5.9 when running as a guest on top of Windows Servers using Hyper-V.