Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, Unity Technologies has released a version of its Unity development platform for games and other 3D apps on Android devices. Meanwhile, Android gamers can turn to a free new Nvidia & Tegra Zone& app for Android that points to games optimized for the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor.

Last week, in "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" I presented one view of Ubuntu and its relationship with other parts of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. One of the first and most articulate responses to the article came from Ubuntu's community manager Jono Bacon.

The Linux Foundation announced that its Intel-backed Yocto Project, which develops open source tools for Linux-based embedded systems, will align and merge technology with the OpenEmbedded community known for its Linux build system. The Linux advocacy organization also announced new partners in the Yocto Project, including major embedded Linux semiconductor manufacturers and software development firms.

After our review of KDE 4.6, we received a great deal of positive comments, but not all of them were sparkling assessments of KDE’s functionality. For that reason, I have decided to get back to the basics this week with a little how-to guide for KDE 3 users who may be reluctant to switch to KDE 4, Gnome or other desktop users who avoid KDE because of certain usability problems, and anyone who might be new to the software and its unique desktop interface.

Expected in March, the forthcoming kernel will contain the new LIO target framework for implementing Storage Area Networks (SANs). Also new are a kernel-side media presence polling feature for disk drives and various Device Mapper optimisations that are relevant for desktop systems.

Recently, the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution. We've covered the concept of national adoption of Linux at a government level a couple of times before, but this is one of the first cases of a government moving back the other way. The most important action that community can take at this point is ask, “why?”

Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied.

With the latest GNOME 3 development snapshots came a lot of disappointment. Several blogged and dozens commented about the missing minimize and maximize buttons. Folks had grown used to using those buttons and wondered how to cope without. Mostly they just wondered why were they removed? Where did the buttons go?

GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April. The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world feedback to the project before the final code gets released into the wild.

A consultant hired by SCO in 2004 to compare UNIX and Linux, with the thought he could be used as an expert at trial, says that, after days and days, his comparison tool found "very little correlation". When he told that to SCO, it paid him and he never heard from SCO again. Interesting, huh? And how odd that SCO went on to sue folks for alleged copyright infringement even after that happened, don't you think?

Thus far we have talked about single-level RAID configurations and Nested RAID configurations. But we've artificially restricted ourselves to only two levels in Nested RAID. Couldn't we have three RAID levels or more? The answer is yes, and in this article we'll talk about three levels (the proverbial "Triple Lindy") and have some fun with a couple of examples.

At last we come to the end of this series and put all the pieces together, and put our fabulous unattended automatic backup scheme to work. You need never lift a finger except to run periodic checks to make sure everything is working correctly.

Offering real-time collaboration tools within a company is becoming a must-have if a company is serious about getting their employees to work as efficiently as possible. Having the ability to instant message fellow employees cuts time down by making communication more efficient. Instead of picking up the phone or walking to someone's office, all that is necessary is to send a message. Don't want to rely on a public service? Check out OpenFire.

China Unicom announced its own Linux-based, Android-like WoPhone operating system, with initial phones to be offered by Huawei and Beijing Tianyu Communication Equipment. The WoPhone announcement follows last week's news that China Unicom rival China Mobile will offer four Asus smartphones and a tablet running the carrier's new OMS 2.0 (OPhone) Android variant on a new TD-CDMA-ready Marvell PXA920 processor.

Google has released version 9.0.597.107 of its Chrome browser, which fixes a total of 19 security vulnerabilities, 16 of them rated as high risk. It was, for example, possible to crash the browser using JavaScript dialogues and SVG files, or to use the address bar for URL spoofing. Also fixed is an integer overflow when handling textareas. As ever, Google is keeping full details of the vulnerabilities under wraps until the bulk of users have switched to the new version.

Cedric Bosdonnat has been tracking contributions to LibreOffice since its announced fork from OpenOffice.org. He uses Git Data Miner to gleen results from the main branch of LibreOffice Git repositories. Git Data Miner is more commonly known as the tool used by Jonathan Corbet in his periodic kernel code reports.

At last here are the final two parts of this series. Today we learn how to tell rsync which files to include or exclude, set up passwordless login on the backup server, and safely test everything. Tomorrow we put it all together and completely automate wakeup, backup, and shutdown.

Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform sound recorder and editor program that allows you to perform simple and advanced sound recording and editing tasks. If you’re into recording, sound effects, mixing, or editing, Audacity takes you there and beyond. Audacity offers a huge (and growing) list of features found in expensive and proprietary sound software. Can you imagine the audacity of developers who would create and maintain software of this caliber? Alas, that is but one of free software’s primary pillars.

In last month's Ask the Experts column, we talked to insiders about how to get paid to work on Linux. The experts replied with a variety of useful tips but one piece of advice was common among all of their comments: get involved in the community. So, this month we've reached out to another group of experts to learn what exactly are the best ways to contribute and/or participate in the Linux and open source software communities.

This news is a few days old, but not many people seem to have caught it while I was busy finishing up Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org: Btrfs may be the default file-system in Fedora 16.