Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

PCLinuxOS has suffered from its share of issues over the years. With difficulties ranging from personnel shake-ups to hosting problems, it seems developing and managing a Linux distribution can be challenging work. Perhaps sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.

I recently spent some time getting one of my long term projects built. For quite some time I've had an old desktop computer serve as my printer server. As this machine is kind of loud, I've turned it off when not using it. This led to some client machines not appreciating the printer becoming available at the wrong time.

oogle Chrome developer Evan Martin has open sourced the custom-designed build system Google uses to port its browser across platforms, claiming that it is considerably faster than anything else available. Martin calls the system Ninja because it "strikes quickly." According to Martin's Ninja manual, Google previously used a customized system based on the old GNU Make build-automation system, and while this needed 10 seconds to start building the open source Chromium browser after a file change was made, Ninja takes under a second.

In less than three weeks the Southern California Linux Expo will be hosting their annual Linux conference in Los Angeles for a ninth year. There will also be SCALE University, an open-source cloud day, and various activities for the openSUSE, Fedora, and PostgreSQL projects. It's also where OpenBenchmarking.org is making its debut alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" during my conference speech.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has announced that it is moving to an all Linux based trading platform when it relocates to Johannesburg. The JSE currently operates out of London and runs on the TradElect platform which is based on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000. It plans to move to MilleniumIT's Millennium Exchange platform by the first half of 2012.

If you caught the Super Bowl over the weekend, and paid attention to the advertisements--which always go for a pretty penny--you no doubt saw Motorola's ad for its Android tablet, and other ads featuring the open source Android mobile OS. Aside from the notable fact that a Linux-based operating system was right there in between ads for cars and colas, it was also clear that big companies mean business in competing with Apple's iPad tablet with Android-based offerings. That doesn't mean the first-generation Android tablets are necessarily competitive, though. In fact, there are criticisms of them rolling in.

On 20 October 2004, the first version of a new and unknown project called Ubuntu was released. It was called the Warty Warthog. The only thing that most Linux users knew about Ubuntu was that it was based on Debian and bankrolled by some millionaire they had never heard of. Little did anyone know that said millionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, would invest so significantly in a much needed aspect of open source – the user experience. I'm not going to talk about how Ubuntu was formed, the impact it's had on Linux or the growth of the project and community; much of that has already been said.

The Linux/FOSS world offers a wealth of excellent Linux-based groupware server choices, suitable for small shops to giant enterprises. Eric Geier rounds up six to get you started.

The Debian Project announced a stable version 6.0, code-named & Squeeze,& available for the first time in a preview FreeBSD version as well as the usual GNU/Linux implementation. Debian 6.0 also offers a faster, dependency-based boot system, streamlines installation procedures, and splits off non-open source firmware from the kernel for separate download, permitting completely & free& installations.

Believe it or not, there is already a discovery dispute in Oracle v. Google. And I'm really glad, because that's the only way we can find out what has been going in discovery. What we find out now is that both parties have served the other with interrogatories, and neither is happy with the other's answers, so both are writing letters to the judge, calling them motions to compel. We get to see Google's answers to Oracle's interrogatories, and that really fleshes out Google's position for me.

[Sorry I don't see what this text has to do with the LO review TA]

Debian 6.0, alias Squeeze, has been nearly two years in development. The new version is the first completely free Stable Release – and also the first Debian distribution that not only has the Linux kernel, but also the FreeBSD kernel.

The strangely named Linux Console seems to be designed to work equally well as a Live distribution and as a permanent installation. It offers an LXDE based desktop alongside a collection of standard applications. It could be used as a typical desktop Linux distro, but I have a feeling that it could see some use as a front-end in appliance type set-ups that need to be a bit more of a typical desktop layout than some of the kiosk or media player distributions. However, I'm not absolutely sure what the aim of this distro actually is.

By default, Ubuntu comes with a set of keyboard shortcut that you can use straightaway. However, some of these keyboard shortcuts might not be desirable, troublesome, or obstructive and disrupting your productivity. For example, if you have a keyboard with a media button, that button is automatically mapped to Rhythmbox. If your favorite media player is Banshee, or Exaile, you might want to change the keyboard shortcut to your favorite application.

ALSA 1.0.23 was released in April 2010 as a major update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, but it's finally been outdone by ALSA 1.0.24. The ALSA 1.0.24 update is also very significant and delivers on quite a number of sound card / audio processor driver improvements.

Computer Lab International (CLI) released a new Ubuntu-based Linux operating system for its MT2300 and ST6800 thin clients, which use Via Eden C7 processors clocked to 500MHz and 1.6GHz, respectively. The OS features Firefox, the CLI Device Manager, plus support for RDP, Citrix ICA 11, host terminal emulations, VNC client/server, and VMWare View4, the company says.

IBM and Oracle have divvied up the leadership of OpenJDK – the leading open-source Java project – finally giving IBM the sort of Java control it spent ten years fighting Sun Microsystems for. The new bylaws for the OpenJDK community outline a governing board that consists of a chairman, vice chairman, OpenJDK lead, and two members at large. Oracle has given IBM the power to appoint the vice chairman, while Oracle will appoint the chairman and the OpenJDK lead.

Soon after the release of LibreOffice 3.3, the Steering Committee posted their position on OOXML support in LibreOffice. Some of those that have tested the LibreOffice office suite knows that they can open and save in Microsoft Office formats. So, The Document Foundation supports OOXML then? Well, no, not really.

In an email, SCO today (Friday) informed its partners that UnXis Inc. was chosen as the successful bidder for SCO's Unix software business on 26 January. The slightly convoluted phrasing is probably due to SCO's current reorganisation under Chapter 11. On 16 February, the transaction is to be submitted for approval to the bankruptcy court where SCO's case is pending. The email also quotes Hans Bayer, SCO's Vice President Worldwide Sales, as saying that “We are delighted that after years of shifting targets, that under the UnXis ownership, we now will be prepared to create a truly customer driven, fully supported, open systems platform for high reliability enterprise computing”.

While 2.6.37 might be considered a quiet release, there are some very nice scalability improvements for file systems and one cool new feature that warrant a review. This year’s holiday kernel was 2.6.37, which was actually released on 4 January 2011 (perhaps it’s a New Year’s kernel) and is a good example of a kernel release during the holidays. At first glance, one would think that it was a quiet kernel with no flaming articles on the web or some seriously flawed benchmarks being posted, but you didn’t see too much of that. However, there are some great things that happened in 2.6.37 around file systems and one really cool feature that I’ll talk about at the end of the article.

If you use the open-source ATI Linux graphics driver, there's a major stable update available. At long last, xf86-video-ati 6.14.0 has been released. This open-source X.Org driver brings official support for the Radeon HD 5000 series, Radeon HD 6000 series, and AMD Fusion Ontario hardware. This release also has a plethora of bug-fixes and flips on the KMS page-flipping support.