Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There are some commands that turn out to be more useful than first meets the eye. In my opinion, xargs is one of those commands. It takes the standard input and uses it to build a command line. It's nothing fancy, but it's very handy in some situations. As soon as you have a list of files, you can easily do something to them. A favorite, common enough to have a shell script of its own on my machine, is clean-titles.sh. It simply locates all backup files using the pattern *~, and then passes them on to rm. The result is a nice and clean current working directory and sub-tree.

Don't pay top dollar for Microsoft lard when you can get the best mail servers for free. The Linux world is full of great servers, both free and with commercial support options.

Ubuntu's 11.04 release ("Natty Narwhal") is going to be an important inflection point for the project, and for Canonical. The company is banking on its users, and potential users, embracing a user interface (Unity) that differs significantly from the previous Ubuntu release as well as other familiar desktop UIs. Further, the target release date is less than three months away and significant chunks of the Unity interface are still unfinished. The second alpha release on February 3 shows promise, but there is significant work left to be done.

The Linux server admin on the go needs a good remote administration toolkit. Here are 10 useful remote administration apps for Android devices. Here are 10 server and admin apps for the Linux-based Android mobile phone platform. You'll discover clients and servers for the basic protocols: SSH, FTP, and remote desktop (RDP & VNC). There are apps for network discovery and port scanning, remote PC/server monitoring, and an Exchange/groupware client.

Shawn reviews the Boxee Box from D-Link. Oddly enough, it's not really box shaped. Thankfully it still works well, for the most part.

Vic has begun selling an Ubuntu Linux-based, double-DIN car computer with GPS and 3G HSDPA for approximately $410. Based on an Intel Celeron M processor with 2GB of DDR2 memory, the NaviSurfer II Ubu-3G offers a 250GB hard disk drive, a seven-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen, and extensive connectivity including multiple camera inputs, says the company.

After investigating the work being done on KBibTeX a few months ago, we turn our attention to Kile, KDE's LaTeX and TeX editor. LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system built on top of the typesetting system TeX. It is frequently used for scientific publications as an alternative to word processors. There is no stable Platform 4 version of Kile yet, but beta releases are already available and a stable release is not far away. Alexander van Loon took the opportunity to ask Michel Ludwig how the next version of Kile is shaping up. At this moment, Michel is the sole developer working on Kile.

Openistas beware! Politicos at the German Foreign Office are reportedly ditching Linux in favour of returning their desktop PCs to Windows XP-based systems. According to a report on netzpolitik.org, which was diligently spotted by The H, the German Foreign Office recently decided to dump their Linux-based machines.

Acer has announced the first Google Chrome OS device, according to a somewhat sketchy report out of Germany citing Acer itself. Oddly enough, the device is not a notebook. It's an all-in-one PC. Heise Online reports that Acer has unveiled a Chrome OS–based all-in-one PC dubbed the Acer DX241H. According to Heise, which cites Acer itself, the 24-inch LCD display includes an ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip. Much like Apple's iMac, PC brains are built into the monitor. Allegedly.

Although often classed as light-weight, XFCE qualifies as a medium weight amongst the Linux front ends. It's heavier than, say, LXDE or Window Maker but it uses less resources than KDE or Gnome. However, it is a desktop environment rather than simply a window manager, and as such, it comes with a set of associated utilities.

Where oh where can we find refuge from Microsoft Exchange? One option is Open-Xchange, a groupware suite that serves as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange. From a licensing and cost perspective, OX looks like a great deal--but that means nothing if your users are going to revolt. So let's look at how OX stands up from the user's perspective, and whether you can cut the ties or not and still keep users happy.

Customisation is an inherent part of Linux, but if you're not comfortable working without your mouse, tweaking aspects of your desktop can be tricky. That's where Ubuntu Tweak comes in. It's a nifty little app that helps you modify aspects of your Ubuntu installation. It breaks your desktop into various categories and enables you to tweak settings buried inside the regular Gnome admin panel and config scripts.

In a recent interview with The H, Eben Moglen professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke about his ideas for using simple hardware to free individuals from the tyranny of the client/server model imposed by current web services. It seems his ideas may be on the way to becoming reality in the form of the FreedomBox.

Microsoft and Mozilla traded barbs this week in a dispute over what constitutes a "modern" Web browser. The competitive friction is starting to heat up because the Redmond software giant and Silicon Valley nonprofit are preparing to release the next major versions of their respective Web browsers. Mozilla's Firefox 4 is expected to arrive this month and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is in the release candidate stage. Both browsers are set to introduce a significant number of new features for end users and Web developers, including extensive support for critical next-generation Web standards.

Over the last few months the KWin development team worked on bringing the Window Manager for KDE's Plasma workspaces to mobile devices. This has required porting the compositing code to OpenGL ES 2.0, the open graphics API for programmable embedded graphics hardware. With the migration of KWin's codebase to git, the code was imported into the master development tree to be part of the next release of the KDE Platform.

Linux 2.6.38 contains patches to improve the scalability of VFS that has been the topic of much discussion for the past six months and that Torvalds himself was waiting for. Ext3 and XFS now support batched discard, which is interesting for SSDs, while Btrfs and SquashFS support additional compression technologies.

The Linux Foundation announced an event intended to increase & systems level& collaboration among Android and Linux developers -- and perhaps patch up an ongoing rift with Google over kernel contributions. The Android Builders Summit, scheduled for April 13-14 in San Francisco, is now open for presentation submissions, the organization says....

After some heady competition from its human rivals in the second exhibition round of Jeopardy, supercomputer "Watson" handily won round three, as well as the competition. Now the SUSE Linux-powered Watson is heading to medical school to prep for a role as a diagnostic assistant, while IBM readies a more context-sensitive successor dubbed "Racr".

Plug computing seems to be a popular theme at the moment and for good reasons. The devices themselves are relatively cheap, and they provide a basic capability that everyone needs: access to files from multiple devices. Not only that, they now have the ability to stream your media to virtually anywhere and any device including your Android, Apple or Blackberry phones. That's not bad for a device that will set you back less than a hundred bucks.

When Gnome Shell was first becoming available over a year ago, we took a look at it to see what the foundation was like, and to see what direction the Gnome desktop was likely to go. At the time, we liked it, though it was clearly a “rough draft” of what it could eventually become. Since then, time has gone by, and while Ubuntu may have decided to go with Unity instead, others have taken Gnome Shell up to the next level. Fedora, among others, will be putting it front and center in future releases. Today we’re going to take a look at one of the most recent builds available to see what this slick desktop environment has got to offer.