Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While this weekend saw the release of the Linux 3.3-rc5 kernel, which Linus Torvalds self-admitted was pretty boring, also hitting the mailing list this past week were new kernel patches to implement auto-sleep and "wake locks" support.

For everyone that wants to know more about the application finder for the Xfce4 desktop here it is. The coming 4.10 release is expected to bring some big changes to the application finder. They are planning to merge the xfce4-appfinder with xfrun4. You can use the Xfce4 application finder to find and launch installed applications on your system. This is a very convenient little tool for finding lost applications. You can open the application finder by selecting run program from the main menu, or using the Alt + F2 keyboard shortcut.

Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper. According to an editorial in Nature, this hinders reproducibility, a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

LXer Feature: 26-Feb-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading enjoyment.

The recently released Open Advice has much to offer those who are new to free software and its communities, but there is plenty of interest to veterans as well. It is a collection of essays from an auspicious number of contributors (42) to free and open source software (FOSS) that centers around the idea of "what we wish we had known when we started". As might be guessed, the book encompasses more than that—it ranges all over the FOSS map—including recollections, war stories, philosophical musings, academic research, and good advice.

Very few in Linuxland haven't heard of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, one of the scariest video games every built. It scored high on many lists of favorite games in large part because this independent gaming house chose to release their high quality games for Linux as well as the more lucrative Windows market. Well, these talented young developers are now planning a sequel of sorts. Joystiq.com has been following all the developments and even scored exclusive interviews with key participants. Xav de Matos describes the excitement in Thomas Grip's voice as his team can talk about the upcoming Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.

Coverity's 2011 Open Source Integrity Report gives kudos to Linux for its high-quality code. Coverity, a development testing product provider, has been kicking the code tires on open source projects since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security initiated the project in 2006. Now Coverity owns and manages the Scan program, which is the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source code integrity in the world. The latest integrity report doesn't call Linux "perfect," but "model citizen of good quality" is pretty darn close. With the Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report, Coverity started releasing details on specific open source projects. The Android kernel 2.6.32 (Froyo) got called out for having 359 software defects, with 25% of them considered high risk with potential security and stability problems.

Oracle has reaffirmed that it's in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system. While the extended lifecycle may provide enough reassurance to win over a few customers, Oracle hopes the 30-day free trial of Ksplice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (release 5.4 on) and Linux 6 users will prove more of an enticement. Ksplice, which Oracle bought last year, allows Linux kernel patching without the tiresome necessity of a reboot. Oracle Linux Premier Support customers will now get Ksplice as a standard part of their packages, and Fedora and Ubuntu Linux users get it for free.

Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop might be remembered as the Thomas Watson of our time, based on his remark you don't need quad-core processors for smartphones. "You don't need a quad-core phone unless you want to keep your hands warm in your pocket,” said the Yankee CEO brought in to re-float the Finnish ship.

The past week on the LinuxPlanet saw the return of SCO, a company most of us have long ago written off a footnote in the history of Linux's success. It also saw a new study from Ubuntu showing how broad and diverse its base of Linux users have become.

The legal process of incorporating The Document Foundation as a German Stiftung (foundation) has been completed in Berlin, Germany. The creation of a legally based foundation was part of the founding plan of the organisation when it forked from OpenOffice in September 2010. The foundation, which will be the legal entity managing the development of LibreOffice, now has a set of legally binding statutes that define the foundation's objectives, the use of its assets and its management structure.

No matter where you look these days, there's a profound sense here in the west that the people no longer having any tangible control over what our governments do. Sure, we are allowed to vote every once in a while, but effectively, most of our countries are governed by backroom deals and corporate interests. If matters really do get out of hand, how do we fight this? Well, with technology of course!

"M$ does what it always has done, and that is borrow other people's ideas for software," asserted blogger Robert Pogson. "There's nothing wrong with that -- it is normal in the world of software ... ." What's wrong is when "M$ calls it innovating and applies for software patents on other people's ideas and sues people over them. ... May M$ rot in Hell for that."

The lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, has released version 1.3 of the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is the first major update of the user interface based on code from the GNOME shell and which was first considered "stable" with version 1.2. In Cinnamon 1.3, all panel components are applets which means, for example, that users can remove a menu or window list and replace it with alternative third-party applets. All applets can also be moved using drag & drop so that users have even more control over where to position them.

One of the talks at this year's linux.conf.au that really seems to have struck a chord with people is the keynote by Karen Sandler, the current executive director of the GNOME Foundation. That's probably in part because it came from the heart – literally, in the sense that she spoke about her own heart condition, and issues that implanting a pacemaker device raised. These were principally to do with the fact that the software running the devices was closed source.

LXer Feature: 19-Feb-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading enjoyment.

NautilusNav-icon With the ever-changing world of Linux, you can expect things to be different for no apparent reason. Some changes are good, and some just cause trouble for users. In this case, it can just flat-out be annoying. Most people will instinctively look to the left of the file manager for navigation links, such as back and forward. In Nautilus 3+, that’s not where you will find them. Instead, they were moved to the right side of the address bar. That’s not a very natural place for them to be, so today, I’ll show you one way to move them back to the left.

The European parliament is currently consulting on a wide-ranging draft European Commission regulation on European standardisation. Voting in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, which is spearheading the legislation, is set to take place in March. The initiative is intended to create a comprehensive, effective, broadly applicable standardisation system. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has criticised the proposal as paving the way for standards which are poorly compatible with open source software.

The proper fsck utility for the Btrfs file-system remains M.I.A. while a contribution from an independent developer introduces LZ4 compression support to this next-generation Linux file-system.

Over the last several months, we’ve seen indications of a good faith effort by Hewlett-Packard to become a positive contributor to the open source software development community, in the form of a commitment by the company to release their webOS operating system as open source under the Apache license.