Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using graphical contour lines, aiding in outdoor-activity navigation.

The Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign has introduced a new "DRM Free" label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

When we talk about mobile operating system, the attention immediately turns to iOS or Android. If you recall, not so long ago, there is also another mobile OS in the market – WebOS, which Hewlett-Packard (HP) used on their own tables and phones and resulted in total market failure. WebOS, by itself, is a great mobile OS to start with, but in the world where iOS and Android dominates with tens of thousands of apps, it pales in comparison. After HP decided to dump their tablets at a cheap price, they have also released the WebOS as an open source project. Today, we will show you how you can run WebOS in your Linux computer, using Virtualbox.

Imagine arriving at a conference where you immediately recognize Linux kernel developers from their annual Linux Kernel Summit photo. You connect with colleagues from other companies but with whom you're working on collaborative, open source projects. A lot of faces in the sessions are familiar and a lot are new. Your session and hallway discussions move beyond talk and you start working on advancing your projects right there at the conference. You might even start a new one. And, at night you leave the laptop in the bag and you enjoy amazing venues and great laughs. This is LinuxCon/CloudOpen.

With all the ongoing debate over desktop environments here in the Linux blogosphere, there's never any shortage of discussion of the GNOME project, even on an ordinary day. Last Tuesday, however, was no ordinary day -- at least, if a certain blog post was anything to go by. "The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years," wrote GNOME UX designer Allan Day in said post.

If you are planning to buy one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with a Retina Display for use under Linux, hold off on your purchase. Running the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux isn't a trouble-free experience and after using even the latest development code and jumping through various hoops, Linux on the latest Apple hardware is still less than an ideal experience. Linux support will improve for the Retina MacBook Pro in the coming months, but it's not likely to see any proper "out of the box" experience until next year.

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple, Oracle is now turning to hardware acceleration to speed up Java by harnessing the emerging potential of the GPU. The OpenJDK project’s Hotspot group has said it will explore ways of speeding Java with a native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that taps hardware acceleration.

Today, Debian celebrates its 19th birthday. To commemorate the occasion, parties have been organised all around the globe and users traditionally bake cakes to bring to these events

The team behind Calligra, the graphic art and office suite for KDE, created from KOffice, has just announced the release of version 2.5 of its suite. This release has many new and improved features, and may be especially useful for people who want strong graphics and diagramming features in a suite of applications that includes productivity apps such as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

...Or not keeping up with the Robinsons, as the case may be. I know what Karlie Robinson is up to, thanks to Facebook. But poor Karlie: Todd has his nose pressed to the monitor all month, walking the walk of the talk he talked last month, when he said he was putting out a distro a day for the month of August. Like clockwork, Todd is putting out a distro each day and has done so, so far this month. Allow me a white-flag, hands-in-the-air moment: I surrender! I give up. I can’t keep up with Todd’s herculean project. Rather than sample each distro every day as I had planned, I am going to go about this as if the 31 Days 31 Distros project is a buffet, taking the ones I think I would like and going back to my table to enjoy them.

In recent months there has been an initiative underway called Rootbeer, which is a GPU compiler for Java code. Rootbeer claims to be more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL bindings for Java as it does static code analysis of the Java Bytecode and takes it automatically to the GPU.

Cloud computing has made great strides over the past two years as more companies enter the market and open source projects emerge. But the industry is still young and the current model in which each vendor has its own solution is creating “layers from hell” for the end user, says Kyle MacDonald, vice president of cloud at Canonical.

Building web scale applications means building systems that can survive any number of horrible things happening to your hardware or software. It means eliminating single points of failure, it means scaling horizontally, as well as vertically, and it means being able to respond to influxes of traffic without buckling under the weight. Increasingly, building web scale applications also means handling terabytes, or even petabytes of data; this is where the Apache Hadoop project comes in.

Old stuff rock again! The Hipster community is growing, Amiga is proposing a new computer (running Linux), vintage cars are trendy, etc. To follow the stream, nothing can beat the emulation of old games. Take a break from the most recent FPS and go back to the origin. What made video games what they are today? Story, game play, graphics, soundtrack? The best way to remember is to play again. And why not start with DOS games?

As most Ubuntu users will know, Ubuntu 12.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. As an LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin), released on 26 April 2012, is scheduled to receive updates and support, for both the desktop and server versions, until October 2017. What many Ubuntu users may not know is that Ubuntu 12.04 will see maintenance releases over this period. The first of those, 12.04.1, is due on 16 August.

For years now, in the field of robotics, open source platforms have been ushering in all kinds of innovation. And among the commercial companies focused on open source robotics, none is as prominent as Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage. Scott Hassan, a Google veteran, founded Willow Garage in 2006 as a well-funded robotics research shop. In addition to building innovative robots and robotics platforms, Willow Garage helped organize the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

Dave Mason of Mozilla talks about a possible replacement to "Gecko" and what makes Firefox better than other browsers.

VMware continued its embrace of open source software with its recent acquisition of open source and virtual network provider Nicira. The move continued VMware's aggressive M&A strategy and its effort to transition from proprietary software and virtualization to a broader market and cloud computing, largely through open source software.

The first certified NVIDIA 304 series Linux graphics driver has been released. The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver packs in 41 official changes affecting several areas of this leading proprietary graphics driver...

Matthias Clasen gave readers of his blog another one of his release previews this Saturday of the upcoming GNOME 3.5.5. The big feature this release is the "new screen lock implementation." Beyond that, various applications and System Settings received some improvements as well. Clasen said the new screen lock mechanism is actually a sheild that lifts when depressing "Esc" or by dragging with the mouse. Underneath is the unlock screen. Clasen said it still has a few issues, but it works well.