Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A week after it rocked its developer base with a new set of API rules, Twitter has become a Silver-level member of the Linux foundation, assuring the open source world that it’s “fundamental” to Twitter’s success. The microblog already had a keynote slot at the upcoming LinuxCon in San Diego, with its open source manager Chris Aniszczyk to take the stage and describe the company’s use of open source technology.

I picked a beautiful day to road-test Earth's WeatherBug Elite app. It was a late-summer day on which the National Weather Service had just issued a Red Flag fire weather warning for my brush-fire-prone, tinder-dry neighborhood. Android weather app WeatherBug provides a set of current conditions, forecasts and maps. Extreme weather alerts and social network sharing functions are built-in too.

Drupal is one of the most popular and versatile platforms for Web design. It's free, open source and will run on Linux. Early last year, a new version was released (Drupal 7), making it even better with improvements in usability, performance and security. If you've looked at Drupal before, but didn't end up using it, you may want to take another look.

There are many reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution. It is important to KDE e.V. by helping to create a predictable income. This money is used to support events that accelerate development of KDE software, enhance promotion efforts and help grow the Community. KDE contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds, so their reasons for contributing are diverse. Claudia Rauch and Jayson Rowe from the Join the Game Team asked supporting member Gaurav Chaturvedi why he joined the game.

The SFLPhone team and Savoir-Faire Linux, a Montreal Open Source consulting company, are pleased to announce the availability of SFLPhone 1.2.0, the first version since the KDE client was moved to KDE infrastructure. Our team is proud of joining the KDE family as part of Playground, and looking forward to being part of Extragear soon. SFLPhone KDE and SFLPhone Qt have been in development for the better part of a decade, aiming to provide the KDE environment with a professional software phone app. Recently, we have been working hard to bring the application to the status of KDE first class citizen. Thank you to the Oxygen and l10n community members for showing such an interest in our application and helping us improve it.

The fear of failure factor is one reason why potential newcomers to the Linux operating system never complete the switch. After all, when was the last time you saw a sign in a big-box computer store identifying the aisle labeled "Linux Loaded?" Most desktops and laptops come out of the box with Microsoft Windows preinstalled.

Last week I delivered OpenGL/3D benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing the performance of the default Unity desktop to the now-defunct Unity 2D environment. Canonical's decision to kill Unity 2D means that for those now forced to use the Compiz-based Unity may experience lower frame-rates, high power consumption with Unity-over-LLVMpipe, and other differences. Additional testing has shown how Unity is affecting the 2D graphics performance.

Well it was a dark, dark week in the Linux blogosphere last week, as further evidence of the economy's sickly state spread across the land. Tale after tale of personal tragedy has popped up on Google+ and beyond, in fact, making it more clear than ever that the magnitude of this economic crisis has reached nothing short of epic proportions.

LXer Feature: 19-Aug-2012

In the Roundup this week we have a 3.5.5 review of GNOME, as well as going all out and starting a OS of there own, Debian celebrates its 19th birthday, Red Hat finally commits to OpenStack and Carla Schroder talks about discovering and monitoring your hardware. Enjoy!

Adobe surprised many in open source circles with its August 2 release of Source Sans Pro, an open font made available under the standard SIL Open Font License (OFL). Adobe has not historically been an open source player (beyond its involvement with standard file formats like PDF or SVG), so Source Sans Pro is not only its first foray into open fonts, but may also herald an interest in adopting open source development methods. Designer Paul Hunt announced the font in a post on the Adobe typography blog. The font is available in six weights, with regular and italic versions for each. The first release covers an extended Latin character set, but according to the comments other writing systems are reportedly still to come. Downloads are hosted at SourceForge.net.

If you have been in the industry for a decade or more, you probably have a pretty good idea of what being a Unix sysadmin is all about. Load the OS? Check. Configure local user accounts? Check. Install packages, compile some from scratch? Double check. Unix has not changed all that much, so it would be easy to assume that the job you were doing ten years ago would be the same job that you can do for the foreseeable future. But, that is the trap of dinosaurs my friend, the weather has already changed, and the days of dealing with bare metal are already moving fast behind us.

In our last installment, we created a set-up allowing you to keep all the various revisions to your documents, without the need to resort to tricks like appending file names with version numbers. So now you have this repository of documents, how do you take advantage of it? In this article we’ll show you how to recall a previous version of a document (we’re all familiar with thinking putting something brilliant in a document, only to have it overwritten), as well as how to download all your in-process work to another machine.

KMSCON is turning out to be a successful and interesting project with high ambitions of being the leading terminal emulator for Linux while running from user-space...

Next month in Nürnberg prior to the start of XDC2012, X.Org developers hope to get together and write a book about graphics driver development. An X.Org book sprint is planned in the two days leading up to XDC2012 at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg, Germany. This book sprint isn't starting from ground zero but rather the developers that show up to participate will be working off of the documentation that was begun by Stéphane Marchesin a while back (here's a PDF of where it's at today).

In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory. Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a "Red Hat" of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs. As ever with open source, this means the Hadoop market ultimately comes down to a race for community support because, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady argues, the biggest community wins.

Valve's Steam Linux beta will be available fairly soon. In a new video interview, Gabe Newell confirmed "we will have betas for Steam for Linux and Steam Big Play fairly soon." Newell mentioned, "If customers want to build game consoles with Steam based on Linux. That's great." Plus other interesting comments during his interview about Valve.

Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more.

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.