Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Quick, across the entire history of Amazon, and all the types of products that the site has sold, what is its top selling product ever? The answer is that the Kindle eBook reader is, and that feat was attained while the Kindle functioned as a reading device, without the bells and whistles found on popular tablet devices. No Harry Potter book or other product comes close to the sales Amazon has reaped from the Kindle, and those sales have, of course, driven sales of lots of content from Amazon. For these reasons, and because of the increasing unpopularity of Apple's policies regarding in-app purchasing, the Kindle could emerge as the biggest competitor to Apple's iPad, if Amazon plays its cards right.

In the early 1980s, MIT computer scientist Bob Scheifler set about laying down the principles for a new windowing system. He had decided to call it X, because it was an improvement on the W graphical system, which naturally resided on the V operating system. Little did Bob know at the time, but the X Window System that he and fellow researches would eventually create would go on to cause a revolution. It became the standard graphical interface of virtually all UNIX based operating systems, because it provided features and concepts far superior to its competition. It took only a few short years for the UNIX community to embrace the X windowing system en masse.

The recent uncertainty cast over Android's Bionic library and its use of Linux kernel headers "seems totally bogus", according to Linus Torvalds. In an interview with Brian Proffitt at ITWorld, Torvalds said "I haven't looked at exactly what Google does with the kernel headers but I can't see they they'd want to do anything fundamentally different from glibc in this respect". He also pointed out that he has said making use of the kernel's system call interfaces, as described in the headers, does not "in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL".

Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO, has found a way to bridge the ever-widening crevasse between Debian and its derivatives. The Debian Front Desktop was formed last summer in order to bring together these camps, but Zimmerman wants to go a step or two further.

Firefox is coming to Android devices. Does Android need another browser and can FF and it's add-ons displace the default software on the growing mobile platform? As Firefox inches slowly towards its March 26 release date, the Mozilla folks are also working on Firefox Mobile for Android — a port of the beloved Firefox browser to the Android platform. Can Mozilla make significant headway on mobile devices? Signs point to yes.

The Oracle Technology Network Garage – the blog where system administrators and developers hang out in the World According to Larry – has announced that the software giant has put out a tool to help customers figure out if their Solaris applications will be compatible with the upcoming Solaris 11.

Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against Barnes Noble with the ITC and the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington over Android-based UI techniques used in the Nook-e-reader claimed to be covered under Microsoft patents. The lawsuit also targets Nook device manufacturing partners Foxconn International and Inventec, says the company.

Project Orion is a browser-based development effort run by the Eclipse Foundation, but it does something very different from the Eclipse Framework, a workbench favored by enterprise Java developers for connecting lots of different third party tools into a common and open framework. Orion does not squeeze the Eclipse Framework into the browser, and it doesn't try to plant an IDE in the cloud. It's not even built on the same language as Eclipse. Orion is built on JavaScript while Eclipse is mostly written in Java, though it spits out apps in different languages.

LXer Feature: 21-Mar-2011

In this week's Roundup we have RMS and the new smartphone threat, the loss of a tech pioneer, Fedora 15 vs Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, Emery Fletcher talks about Watson's Children and Carla Schroder tells tales of Dilbert, Office Space, and Layoffs in her return to the LXer team. Enjoy!

There was a Gallium3D OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker proposed for this year's Google Summer of Code to benefit X.Org / Mesa. As this state tracker was going to be written from scratch and without any dependence on Mesa itself, the consensus among the core developers was that the work was simply too ambitious for a lone student developer to complete over the course of a summer. A new proposal has now been drafted by Denis Steckelmacher, the Belgian student developer interested in open-source OpenGL 4.1 support.

Being discussed this week in our forums is an interview that Ryan "Icculus" Gordon gave last week to the Czech AbcLinuxu web-site. In particular, comments made by Ryan regarding the state of open-source graphics drivers and how they basically are just in bad shape.

With the brouhaha begun by Canonical's changing of the Banshee affiliate code dying down there are some important lessons to be learned by all sides involved. One of the most important is that protracted in-fighting causes long term harm in the area of good will and public appearances. While Canonical was painted the villain by the community at large, GNOME, who was already battling negativity from controversial moves in its new GNOME 3 Shell, didn't come out of it unscathed. In essence, there were no winners here.

The open source world has been fixated so long on the “Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop” that it runs the risk of failing to notice that the desktop is no longer the key platform. That's been evident for some time in the developing world, where cost and power constraints mean that big, expensive PCs are simply impractical for most people. But with the rise of smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices, many people in western countries are also ditching their desk-bound systems in favour of powerful, more pocketable ones.

A recent meeting of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in San Francisco saw three new members of the board filling the two empty board seats and the beginning of a reformation for the group's governance. The organisation, which has managed the Open Source Definition and reviewed licences for their compliance with that definition, is looking to expand its role to engage as "a meeting point for global open source communities at large".

With the changes coming to the desktops of some major Linux distributions, it looks like we’re beginning to see some welcome differentiation between how each distro presents itself to users. Fedora and Ubuntu are of course well known as some of the most popular and user-friendly Linux systems, and while they have many similarities, their next major releases are both taking a new approach to the desktop. Ubuntu has decided to drop their Netbook spin and run their homegrown Unity desktop across the board. Fedora however has jumped on board with Gnome 3, confident that it will have all the form and function their users want. While we’ve already discussed both desktops before, Fedora and Ubuntu are both offering more than a makeover, and it’s time to dig deeper.

David Airlie has just emailed Linus Torvalds with his main DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) pull request for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel that 2.6.38 was released earlier this week. As was mentioned a few days ago, the Linux 2.6.39 kernel will feature a number of interesting changes to the open-source graphics drivers, among other areas.

Some tools are so amazing, but unfortunately, if no one ever talks about them, many folks never hear of them. One of those programs is BackupPC. You may have heard Kyle Rankin and myself talk about BackupPC on the Linux Journal Insider podcast, or perhaps you've seen us write about it here in Linux Journal before. If you haven't checked it out, you owe it to yourself to do so.

Does this sound familiar to you? You have taken the plunge and install Ubuntu on your computer. The next moment, you have no idea what to do next and where to head. Now, before any doubt creeps in and you are wondering if you have make the right choice leaving the comfort zone (Windows or Mac) and venture into the unknown ground, let us show you what you can, and should do after installing Ubuntu

Recent reports of the large savings, in the realms of billions of euros per year, that could be made in Dutch government by switching to open source and open standards have been sharply contradicted by the publication of the official report of the Dutch General Audit Chamber (GAC) investigation into cost savings that could be made.

Artila Electronics announced an ARM9-based, Linux-ready industrial box computer with dual, isolated CAN bus interfaces, plus the SocketCAN open source CAN stack. The Matrix-522 is equipped with an Atmel AT91SAM9G20 processor clocked at 400MHz, and offers 64MB SDRAM, 128MB of flash, a microSD slot, failover support, an under three-Watt power draw, plus paired sets of Ethernet, USB, and serial ports.