Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I spend a lot of time on airplanes. It used to be you'd often strike up a conversation with the person next to you on a plane. Over the years I met the editor of a newspaper in Roswell, New Mexico (and, yes, he was human as far as I could tell), an LA Laker Girl (no kidding), and many other interesting characters. But these days, you don't get much chance to visit with your flying neighbors because everyone has an iPod, or a laptop, or some other gadget to keep them busy.

The business office is where the Linux desktop should reign. Why? Linux is a reliable, stable, secure solution that would have any business user working day-in and day-out without fail. With an unheard of resistance to viruses, trojans, and worms, the office user enjoying the Linux desktop would have no concerns about down time as does the average Windows user. But what tools are there available for the usual office worker? Plenty!

On a security mailing list over the weekend, an unknown party published details about the structure and content of databases on the website of database vendor MySQL. The information was apparently accessible via a security hole on the MySQL.com website.

James Gosling, the father of Java, has joined Google – despite his previous criticism of the company's Java-happy Android operating system. Gosling announced his new job with a post to his personal blog entitled "Next step on the road", but did not provide specifics. "Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities. I find it odd that this time I’m taking the road more travelled by, but it looks like interesting fun with huge leverage," he wrote

Last week I introduced tmux, a handy "terminal multiplexer." This week, we'll take a look at basic tmux usage and configuration. To start tmux, just run tmux or tmux new-session if you're feeling verbose. Then you'll have a session with one window and your usual login shell. To add a second window, run Ctrl-b c. (Same thing if you want a third, fourth, and so on.)

LXer Feature: 27-Mar-2011

In the LXWR this week we have HP declaring its OS independence, the claims regarding Linux kernel headers in Android "seems totally bogus" according to Linus. Can free software idealism be pragmatic? Richard Hillesley thinks so. And our own Carla Schroder talks about the freeloading digital economy. Enjoy!

Hewlett-Packard's recent presentation of its plans to place webOS at the heart of a broad cloud strategy highlighted a route that Microsoft, Google and Amazon will also take, in their different ways. Essential to HP's desire to offer an end-to-end cloud platform – giving it control of a vast range of web apps and devices – is a new-style operating system that can be embedded in each of those end points. This is not a traditional OS: it does not need to participate in the OS wars and can live alongside other systems. It is stripped-down in function and footprint and largely based on the browser.

The discussion surrounding issues with the Linux kernel DRM code has been quite interesting. From the 40+ comments so far, there's been some interesting feedback from some of the key open-source driver developers along with AMD. In particular, the generation to succeed the next-generation of AMD graphics processors (what will be the "Radeon HD 8000 series" if they continue with the same marketing names) should be a pivotal moment for AMD's open-source strategy.

As some may have heard, via Twitter or in other communications, with Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad we'll be ramping up several key areas of our open-source benchmarking software and with our collaborative testing platform, OpenBenchmarking.org, and our continuous integration system, Phoromatic. From this already, Half-Life 2 and 3DMark are running by the Phoronix Test Suite.

We first glimpsed the CR-48 prototype Google Chrome OS netbook at CES in January and they've finally appeared in the UK courtesy of the Big G. Our Chrome OS netbook has arrived in the office today, so we've ignored the big hot sun to bring you more in-depth thoughts on Google's Windows basher than we were able to put together in a few minutes on a baking show floor at CES.

Microsoft seems to be trying to get its own personal unfair competition laws passed state by state, so it can sue US companies who get parts from overseas companies who used pirated Microsoft software anywhere in their business. The laws allow Microsoft to block the US company from selling the finished product in the state and compel them to pay damages for what the overseas supplier did. You heard me right. If a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let's say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue *not the overseas supplier* but General Motors, for unfair competition.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided that the Ubuntu will not enable the installation of restricted third-party software, such as Adobe's Flash Player, by default. When installing Ubuntu a checkbox offers option to "Install third-party software" from the restricted extras repository automatically.

Sparkpad has begun selling customizable display computers at sizes ranging from eight to 15 inches, complete with a touch-ready, Lua-based Linux SDK and promised Android support. Sparkpad's Wi-Fi enabled tablets and panel PCs run on ARM11-based Telechips 8902 processors, and are touted as enabling customers to develop and deploy their own touch panels, digital signage systems, and tablets quickly.

Rootkits are a way attackers hide their tracks and keep access to the machines they control. The good rootkits are very hard to detect and remove. They can be running on ones computer and no one can even know they have been running. Read more to learn how to detect them on your system.

During a keynote presentation at Google's IO developer conference last year, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra proclaimed that the search giant created Android in order to bring freedom to the masses and avoid a "draconian future" in which one company controlled the mobile industry. Looking past the self-congratulatory rhetoric, Android's poor track record on openness is becoming harder to ignore.

Unlike OpenOffice.org of yore, LibreOffice developers have been pumping out the updates at a rapid pace. Since the inaugural release two months ago, LibreOffice has seen two minor version updates as well as associated developmental releases. The latest, LibreOffice 3.3.2, was released just a couple of days ago.

First, the obvious: Red Hat has a top-notch legal team, with a lot of GPL experience, so it's a little hard to believe that those lawyers, at least, haven't examined Red Hat's position and believe it is defensible in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. While Red Hat has a legal team, LWN seems to be lacking in the legal budget department, so nothing in this article should be considered legal advice of any sort (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one anywhere).

Yesterday Linus voiced his anger towards DRM, once again. But not the kind of DRM that is commonly criticized, Digital Rights Management, but rather the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager. With the Linux 2.6.39 kernel it's been another time when Linus has been less than happy with the pull request for this sub-system that handles the open-source graphics drivers. Changes are needed.

The money just keeps rolling in at Red Hat, and it looks like this year will be even better as the company is poised to become the first open source software company to break through the $1bn mark. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ended on February 28, the commercial Linux and middleware distributor posted $209.3m in subscription revenues, up 23.7 per cent compared to the year ago quarter. Training and services revenues rose by 32.9 per cent, to $35.5m. Overall sales increased by a flat 25 per cent, hitting $244.8m. (This was better than the $236m at the high end of Red Hat's guidance from three months ago).

The LiMo Foundation says it has approved four mobile device class specifications for the LiMo 4 mobile Linux stack. Citing first-time tablet support plus three different smartphone specs, the Foundation projects commercial releases within multiple LiMo classes starting in the second half of this year.