Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux software giant Red Hat has become the latest US technology behemoth to talk up the huge potential in the Chinese market, revealing plans to expand its footprint there as it attempts to come good on ambitious growth plans. CEO Jim Whitehurst told China Daily that he would be putting a greater focus on the People’s Republic, where next generation cloud projects are cropping up all over the place. "The open-source Linux system is the hero behind the scene. Most of the stock exchange market systems are based on the Linux system," he said.

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.

Developer Alex Gavrishev's free, widget-oriented app lets you assign home screens specifically to be used in the car, and it lets you create large, easy-to-punch buttons for six shortcuts per screen. The buttons render well at tablet-strength high resolutions, unlike other car apps I've tried.

A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.

With the introduction of virtualization, physical hosts have been freed from the bounds of single-instance operating systems. We efficiently multiplex our hosts with multiple operating systems as virtual machines (VMs). But, the density of operating systems on a host simply increases the management requirements. One solution for this management problem is the Virtual Machine Manager, or virt-manager. This article explores the use of virt-manager, illustrates its capabilities on modest hardware, and shows how to manage and monitor live VM performance.

We've been anxiously awaiting our chance to mess with a MaKey MaKey after we wrote this post, and we finally got our hands on one just in time for Halloween. MaKey MaKey's are based off Arduino, and you plug them into your computer with a USB cord. Basically you can alligator clip anything that conducts electricity and to make anything into a key.

OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition application. It is a type of software that leaves much to be desired on the Linux desktop. OCR software is a companion tool to scanning a document. The scanner software creates a photo-like image of the scanned document. The OCR component lets you edit the text and then export the edited version into a word processor or page-design program.

Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki. The case study, available since May 2011, underpins a plea to schools to increase their use of free and open source software. 

Markdown icon An effort is emerging to take the Markdown plain text formatting conventions originally developed by John Gruber in 2004 and create a standardisable specification. Markdown's syntax allows a minimal set of plain text 'markup' characters to offer useful basic formatting, for example, underlining text with "=" or "-" makes the text a heading as does preceding text with one to six "#" symbols. The apparent simplicity of the format has seen it used on many blogs, Reddit, GitHub and other sites as a way for users to present formatted text through the system. With this wide take up, developer Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has called for a standardisation of Markdown.

The Common Criteria Certification process is a long and arduous one. Common Criteria provides Evaluation Assurance Level that is the standard that U.S. Government and other large enterprises use as the basis of software qualification for production usage.

Apparently, problems caused by last week's Ext4 bug only occur when combining several critical mount and umount options; this renders the bug harmless for most Linux users – so far, it has only affected one user. Nevertheless, ext4 lead developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o plans to draw the necessary conclusions from the incident.

LXer Feature: 28-Oct-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

After writing this morning about the most interesting Linux 3.7 kernel features, I also decided to list some of the work that's likely to land for the Linux 3.8 kernel, This list is far from being exhaustive but just some of the interesting and known features that will likely be ready for the Linux 3.8 merge window.

The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is moving ahead at full steam in its quest to develop, or spur the development of, humanoid robots that it can use for its own purposes — in this case, disaster response in areas too dangerous for humans but in need of a human touch (DARPA cites the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown as one example).

Being roughly half-way through the Linux 3.7 kernel development cycle, here's a recap of some of the most interesting features for this forthcoming major kernel release...

Head on over to ValveSoftware.com to participate in their Linux survey, which is used to find new Linux gamers to get involved with the beta testing process. "We're looking for Linux gamers to install and test our new Steam for Linux client. We are primarily interested in experienced Linux users. In order to take the survey, you need to first login with your Steam account to link your response with your Steam ID."

Internet memes—those bite-sized, ephemeral cultural artifacts that are shared and remixed over the Web—seem to be evermore pervasive online and offline. Many of them feature reoccurring characters, like Courage Wolf, Good Guy Greg, and Business Cat. They are "characters" in the sense that they are defined by a single unwavering archetype, but what sets them apart from traditional literary characters is that they aren't attached to stories.

According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.

A Working Draft published by the W3C proposes a new push notification API for web applications. The system can use different protocols to deliver notifications to browsers even when the application in question is not in focus