Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The new LibreOffice open-source office suite "proves that forking isn’t always the kiss of death," says this eWEEK review. New features in the Linux-ready release -- including wider document format support, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) import into Draw and Writer, enhanced presentation support, and an improved "save as" feature -- should give OpenOffice some robust competition.

Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle has announced on his blog that he, with the assistance of John Duimovich and Jason Gartner of IBM, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, Prof. Doug Lea of SUNY Oswego, and Adam Messinger of Oracle, has been drafting a set of OpenJDK community rules, or bye-laws, by which the community will operate. He says the draft document will soon be published for public comment.

Future distributions will use a consistent, predictable scheme to name network interfaces, using names such as "em1" and "pci2#1" instead of "eth0" and "eth1" to provide more transparency for server administrators. As various new kernels have recently been introduced, the Kernel Log will provide an overview of the most important Stable and Longterm kernel series.

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of six new developer training courses dedicated to MeeGo and Google's open source Android operating system, both of which are based on Linux. Like Android, MeeGo is available for various mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and netbooks – it came about as the result of the February 2010 decision to merge Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms under the aegis of the Linux Foundation.

Despite earlier reports that very few if any new features would likely be seen in The Document Foundation's first LibreOffice release, the influx of new developers allowed much more work to be done. In fact, it was even released ahead of schedule. So, what kind of new goodies might one find?

Recent meetings held among major desktop Linux communities have resulted in an informal agreement regarding an architecture for a common app installer API. Developers from RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Mageia agreed to move forward on the architecture while a separate meeting between OpenSUSE and KDE went a step further, developing a mock-up for a universal GNU/Linux app-store....

Oracle is drafting rules it says even it can obey to run the open-source reference implementation of Java, OpenJDK. The giant's Java platform group chief architect Mark Reinhold revealed on Monday that his company has been working since November on a series of bylaws intended to govern the recently expanded OpenJDK project.

Open source has come a long, long way and video editing has not been left behind. You'll find a number of video editing tools on Linux, but none of them are both as user-friendly and create as high-quality video as OpenShot Video Editor. With this easy to use tool you can have your edited videos up on Youtube (or presented to your company/organization) in no time. With a very small learning curve, and numerous features, OpenShot will make you and your company look very good. Let's take a look at how mult-track videos can be created in OpenShot.

At the Linux.conf.au conference, an Australian-based "Lunar Numbat" project presented its plan for a Linux-based flight control computer for a lunar spacecraft. The open source flight computer will be part of the "White Label Space" entry in Google's $20 million Lunar X-Prize, to be awarded to a team that can send a working rover to the Moon and transmit back images.

In November of 2009 we reported that the Reiser4 file-system may go into the mainline Linux kernel in late 2010. We're now into 2011 with the merge window having closed earlier this month for the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and there's no sign of this open-source file-system designed to succeed the popular ReiserFS. So what gives? Well, we have another update from its lead developer.

Special purpose appliance distributions are one of the things that Linux does extremely well. You can find any number of task-specific appliances from either Turnkey Linux or on the VMware Virtual Appliance marketplace. Another option is to roll your own with a service like Novell's SUSE Studio. In this article we'll take a look at four different specialized distributions targeted at the job of an Internet firewall or traffic router. Our list of candidates for this job includes Clear OS, m0n0wall, Untangle and Vyatta. We'll give you a quick introduction to each along with some context to help steer you in the direction that makes the most sense for your application. Each one has its own set of features and distinctive, and we'll try to highlight those for you.

Linus Torvalds has probably done more for the world than many know, and his influence stretches far and wide throughout all corners of the globe with a variety of amazing implementations of his original vision that started almost two decades ago.

Google announced a Feb. 2 unveiling of Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") at its Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Meanwhile, Dell tweets that it will soon offer a 10-inch Honeycomb tablet, and hackers have ported Android 3.0 to Barnes & Nobles's Nook Color e-reader device.

Started by one of our readers more than a week ago was a compiler deathmatch for comparing the performance of GCC, LLVM Clang, PCC (the Portable C Compiler), TCC (Tiny C Compiler), and Intel's C Compiler under Arch Linux. This user did not stop there with compiling these different x86_64 code compilers, but he also went on to look at the compiler performance with different compiler flags, among other options. The results are definitely worth looking at and here are some more.

In an overwhelming vote for renaming, the Hudson project is to become Jenkins. A vote was announced and held on the Hudson developers mailing list after the breakdown of discussions with Oracle over the governance and management of the CI (continuous integration) software. Oracle claims to own the Hudson trademark and believes that this ownership should give it control over the project.

LXer Feature: 31-Jan-2011

In the LXWR this week it is all about the desktop environments. Bruce Byfield makes a case for running Xfce, Dr. Tony Young wrangles KDE4's window manager into shape and Carla Schroder wants to punt KDE altogether. The Fedora servers get hacked, Python for newbies, LibreOffice 3.3 hits the streets and Glyn Moody states why Android will win the tablet wars. Enjoy!

If you've been wanting to get involved in supporting Linux and other open-source projects with or without a programming background, or you have creative ideas how to get involved, see this thread.

Next weekend (5-6 February 2011) is FOSDEM, one of the largest gatherings of Free Software developers in the world. KDE will be in Brussels with a stall and as part of the crossdesktop devroom. KDE talks will cover: education, an introduction to Qt and Qt Quick, Phonon, KDE on Windows and mentoring. In the crossdesktop devroom, there will be other talks on topics such as application distribution and games development, which will be interesting to KDE developers too.

Do you see what I see? Maybe, if you have taken the time to tackle color management on your machine. The major desktop environments for Linux give 90 percent of users all the tools they need to see all of their images in device-independent accuracy. You don't even need to buy special hardware. This weekend, pull up a monitor and see what all the technicolor fuss is about.

The openSUSE community is celebrating the end of January by releasing openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6. This new development snapshot brings several prominent changes, including the final removal of HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer), the migration to systemd from SysVInit has been pushed back to the next openSUSE release, and it now incorporates support for Novell's WebYaST.