Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It’s a few days in to 2011, which means most of us have made (and broken) a set of resolutions for the New Year. While I may not drop all the pounds I want in 2011, I have already shed some baggage: Newfangled apps that don’t measure up to the old school Linux utilities.

The long-awaited new version of the popular web content management system and platform was released today. It represents the hard work of almost 1000 developers (by Greg Knaddison's count) and countless other Drupal community members contributing their time and effort to testing and providing feedback.

Like many people, I have an HDTV in my house that supports HDMI input devices, such as Blu-ray players. I also like to watch streaming content over the Internet, downloaded videos, and listen to music all from my TV and home theater system. Unfortunately, I do not have a Boxee box or a Roku box. All I have is a Blu-ray player that supports very few video formats and only offers a few streaming options, such as Netflix.

Asus unveiled three Android based tablet devices running Android 3.0, due to ship this spring. The tablets include a Snapdragon-based, 7.1-inch & Eee Pad MeMo& tablet, and two 10.1-inch keyboard convertible tablets running on dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processors: the Eee Pad Slider, which offers a slide up design, and an Eee Pad Transformer with a fold-up, detachable design.

Sometimes, the naivety in the free and open source software (FOSS) community seems willful. How else to explain the outrage in some circles when another company is caught fulfilling its natural function of maximizing its profits at the expense of FOSS ideals? Too often, FOSS supporters fail to understand corporations -- and, consequently, they are unable to deal effectively with them.

Stephen Walli, now technical director of the Outercurve Foundation, has written a guest post for OStatic, The Rise of Open Source Software Foundations. I guess he thinks Outercurve is one. He explains why Microsoft set up the foundation in the first place, which I have wondered about for quite a while. His article also reminded me that I promised to explain what bothered me so much about the recent OpenSUSE Project meeting on December 15th. We're still working on the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits, but I need to take a break. So here goes. I will use the OpenSUSE Foundation discussion to show you why it's so important, if you are setting up a foundation, to set it up right in the beginning, and why you absolutely must have a lawyer to protect your interests. It's not good if only the corporate entity's guys know what bylaws are and how to set up corporate structures, and the community is relying on them to explain it. Your interests are not identical. Not by a long shot.

The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011. One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments.

Google is allegedly mulling a periodical publication push for Android smartphones and tablets to challenge Apple's iTunes store for its iPad magazine and newspaper apps. The planned digital newsstand for Android, which follows up on Google's recently announced Google eBookstore, will offer more favorable terms to publishers than does Apple, says an industry report.

For the first time in a decade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is no longer the leading Web browser in Europe, ceding the top position to Mozilla’s Firefox, an Irish research firm that tracks Web-surfing activity said Tuesday. While three other research firms also active in the field disputed the finding, StatCounter, a company in Dublin, said Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer as the top European browser in December, with a 38.1 percent share, compared with Explorer’s 37.5 percent.

Thanks for the link Herschel - Scott

Cloud computing is the hot buzz phrase. But as both Shawn Powers and I have pointed out, cloud computing is not a new technology, or even a new implementation of new technology. But that does not mean it is well understood, either by those who are designing or those who are crying out for it as they follow the yellow-brick road (or the latest issue of PC Week). As several Anonymous (and not so anonymous) commentators have said, there is a lot more to cloud computing then just hardware, some good data links and some smart coding.

In a seemingly short period of time, JavaScript has gone from a form-validation tool to a game changer. Having my head buried into SDK development for a number of years, I have taken relatively small notice of JavaScript until this past 18 months. It’s no longer just a scripting language for pulling off Web2.0 tricks but a mainstream language for building full-blown applications.

As illustrated today by the release of Intel's "Sandy Bridge" CPUs there is a new desire by Linux users: open-source drivers "out of the box" at launch. Over the years the expectations of Linux users have gone from simply wanting Linux drivers for their hardware to wanting open-source Linux drivers (read: no binary blobs) to now wanting open-source drivers in the distribution of their choice at the time the hardware first ships. This is a great problem to now be experiencing, as since starting Phoronix seven years ago, the Linux hardware experience has improved a great deal where it's no longer a question if there will be Linux support but when. Some hardware vendors, such as Intel, are now working towards this goal of same-day open-source Linux support -- and in some cases achieving it -- but for open-source Linux drivers for graphics it's a particularly tall hurdle to jump.

Last week we looked at Yum Plugins and how to extend Yum's functionality. This week, I'll look at a few of Yum's plugins, in particular the security plugin and the priorities plugin. As I mentioned last week, I'm using Fedora 14 in these examples. If you're on another system using Yum, like CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Yellow Dog (the original distro to ship Yum, by the way), the plugin behavior might be slightly different -- or the plugin may not be available at all.

Android is set to explode at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, with smartphones and tablet computers including a newly revealed HTC Shift 4G phone for Sprint and a four-inch smartphone/tablet hybrid from ViewSonic. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is cutting the price of the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet by $100 to $500, says an industry report.

Not only has Intel's Sandy Bridge met the world today, but VIA Technologies launched the VIA eH1. The VIA eH1 is a discrete graphics card for PCI Express systems, but will it work with Linux?

Canonical's decision to go with the Unity shell on GNOME may be a game changer for Ubuntu, but it doesn't come without risk. Mark Shuttleworth's declared aims are to unite design with free software. He hopes to blur the line between the web and the desktop, to create an intuitive Linux desktop that is a thing of beauty, and to make Ubuntu and free software popular among the kinds of user who have never heard of free software before.

FreeBSD has a long and strange history, tracing its roots back to the original Unix from Bell Labs. FreeBSD can almost be seen as the older brother to the younger, more popular Linux. While they are similar, FreeBSD’s long history has given it a very different philosophy and purpose. You can, and many people do, run FreeBSD as a desktop OS, but that’s not where the systems real talent lies. While Linux has tried, and in many cases succeeded, to be everywhere that a kernel can run, FreeBSD has decided that it belongs in the datacenter, a belief that is personified in the FreeBSD slogan, “The Power to Serve”. FreeBSD’s Jails are a great example of where the philosophy of Linux and FreeBSD diverges and produces systems that are functionally similar but logically very different.

The smart mobile user shouldn't overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick? You'll get a different answer depending who you ask. You'll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps. If that's not enough choice to make your head spin, Slackware has its fans too – particularly among people who use older laptops.

This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

If you use Ubuntu, you're almost certainly familiar with GNOME, the default desktop environment that comes with it. You may have also heard that the next Ubuntu version--Natty Narwhal, version 11.04--will use the 3D-enabled Unity desktop by default instead, along with the Wayland graphics system... Now that there are already big changes coming down the pike, this is a particularly good time to take a fresh look at the Ubuntu desktop and all the many free alternatives that are available.