Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The idea of one universal package format for all distributions has been batted around a few times over the years. One of the most notable was Ryan C. Gordon's idea of FatELF files. Reactions varied from supportive to skeptical to down right opposed. Well, it seems a new team from major distributions is coming together to implement a "common application installer API and infrastructure."

In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.

The Apple iPad is a huge hit: 7.33 million of them were sold in the quarter ending in December. That's a pretty amazing achievement. But despite that, there are good reasons to believe that 2011 will mark the start of the ascent of Android as king of the tablet world.

The fourth day of the conference opened with a keynote by Eric P Allman, author of a little MTA some people may have heard of called Sendmail - an "... old program that has changed the world."

If you’re a Linux (or even Mac) user, and you’ve never toyed with your shell prompt, you might not realize just how useful a good prompt can be. Sure, it can show your user and host names, and perhaps the current directory, but a really good prompt can do a whole lot more. Those who spend a LOT of time in the terminal might even want to take it a step further and move into a custom semi-graphical shell with all kinds of bells and whistles. If you’re one such shell enthusiast, then check out Bashish – a way to theme your command prompt. Yep, you read that right.

Google has released an early preview of the Android 3.0 software development kit (SDK). Android 3.0—codenamed Honeycomb—introduces Android's new tablet user interface, which is expected to officially debut next month on Motorola's Xoom tablet. Developers will be able to use the SDK preview to get a head start on updating their applications to support the tablet form factor.

The Sabayon Linux developers have announced the availability of the GNOME and KDE variants of version 5.5 of their Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert (also known as zabaglione) is derived from Gentoo Linux and is intended to provide a "complete out-of-the-box experience" while being both stable and versatile.

Puppy Linux began life as a really cool small-sized Linux distribution designed primarily for lower specification hardware while still providing most of the amenities that make Linux fun and usable. It included lots of original utilities and tools for completing tasks and configurations without a lot of resource overhead. Best of all, it was blazing fast. Well, the little puppy has grown up some and branched out, but is still that same light-weight wonder in spirit.

An attacker stole the account credentials of a contributor to the Fedora Linux project and accessed Fedora servers on Jan. 22. The attack follows other recent cyber-invasions of open source projects, including hacks reported on the Free Software Foundation and ProFTPD.

Ever wish you could set up a small, efficient server? Maybe you're setting up a mail server for a couple of people, or something to hand out music files over a home network. Do you really need a full-fledged PC with a noisy fan, sucking down 100 watts and heating up the room?

Over the past few years the use of JavaScript has grown from a form validation helper to a field-leveler as the user experience of web applications has begun to rival traditional “smart client” applications in some arenas. Clever CSS skinning has not done this alone — another key ingredient is event handling. JQuery Mobile introduces mobile-oriented events to browser based programming. Let’s have a look.

Wednesday opened with Geoff Huston from APNIC presenting on Internet Address Exhaustion, and how it presents a real and present threat to the openness of today’s Internet. Geoff walked the audience through the history of the internet, and covered some of the barriers to IPv6 adoption. Geoff then discussed how without open addressing there’s no open network, and detailed how the current environment provides little incentive for the very big internet players who have benefited from the initial openess of the Internet to maintain that openness when it levels the playing field for their competition. Geoff’s vision of the IP apocolypse was a bleak one, with only one viable solution left - to alter our environment to favour the rapid adoption of IPv6.

Government agencies in Australia should actively participate in open source communities and will be required to consider open source options equally when going to tender, under new policy announced Wednesday.

So let's take a look at what a good IT manager does. Because there are such persons, and they make all the difference between satisfaction and pain, between feelings of accomplishment and feelings of time-killing soul-sucking despair.

KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform. These releases, versioned 4.6, provide many new features in each of KDE's three product lines.

For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it's never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

Kernel version 2.6.38 supports AMD's new Fusion CPUs and offers 2D and 3D acceleration with many current GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. Power economy for the graphics cores in Intel processors and chip-sets has been improved; new page flipping features aim to eradicate image flickering, tearing and incomplete rendering issues.

LXer Feature: 26-Jan-2011

In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.

The Document Foundation launched the first stable version of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, following a breakaway from OpenOffice.org and Oracle's control. Due for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04, among other Linux distros, LibreOffice 3.3 is a bit leaner than OpenOffice, and aims to get more so in the future to support mobile devices, says the group.