Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Support for fast USB 3.0 storage devices with USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), an audio loopback driver plus extensions to support Apple's Magic Trackpad are only some of the advances that improve the hardware support of the forthcoming Linux kernel version 2.6.37; final release is expected in January.

VectorLinux is one distribution that seems to hum along under most users' radar. This is a mistake because Vector has many of the characteristics that make Linux great while adding some that has often been heralded by competitors as not existing except with larger commercial distributions.

There is a word that is to me as a pebble in a shoe, as fingernails on a blackboard, and that is the word consumer. Consumer is a perfectly good word that has become incurably tainted. One dictionary definition is "a person who acquires goods and services for his or her own personal needs". Farther down on the same Dictionary.com page it says "one that utilizes economic goods; specifically : an individual who purchases goods for personal use as distinguished from commercial use". And so we have Consumer Reports, consumer protection laws, Consumer's Union, and other organizations devoted to protecting consumer's rights and interests.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents. Putin's order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.

This year, I'm giving up making predictions. By my count, my record for 2010 was slightly worse than random chance, and my inability to impress readers individually with cold readings makes me conclude that I should leave fortune telling to the tarot readers.

The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts. We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.

The second release candidate of the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, has been made available and announced in the Document Foundation's blog. In the announcement, the developers say the release is "beta quality software", ask for users to play with it so they can test and give feedback, and list over 80 individuals who have contributed to development between the third beta and current release candidate.

Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It's also about preserving choice, not locking a student's experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there's no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it's going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.

I've been thinking and thinking about everything, and I've figured out what I need to explain to you next. Reading the log of the recent OpenSUSE board meeting discussing setting up a foundation for the project turned on the light in my head: you need to understand bylaws. Because corporations are setting up foundations to get you to donate code to, and they set them up to suit themselves, not to benefit you. There's a difference between the community setting up a foundation to be a project's home and a corporate sponsor doing it. I'm going to write about that in more detail later. To really explain it, I need to explain some things that you might think will be boring or too foreign, but if you can learn Perl, you can learn bylaws.

LXer Feature: 27-Dec-2010

Welcome to the last Roundup for 2010 and please accept my apologies for being a day late getting this to you. It seems the holiday festivities have caused me to lose track of time.. Enjoy!

AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.

Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it's a big event, and one worthy of close attention.

It's a testament to how far Linux has come that users today don't typically have to use the command line if they don't want to. Such is the quality of the graphical user interfaces in many modern Linux distributions that there's simply no need, in general.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but paying for everything make Jack rather poor. Here's a look at the most popular places to score free games online for some cheap end-of-year fun.

I took a few days off from writing any articles, partly to try to make a serious dent in transcribing the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits. We're in the home stretch, and a quiet weekend, marking on a curve, is perfect. I know there's lots going on, other than work. I also needed to take some time to think about the recent discovery about Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events. Should Groklaw stop helping people like that, I asked? Is it time to shut Groklaw down? If not, is there a way to carve out helping Linux and FOSS, which is what we are about, from helping self-interested executives and board members so that in essence we end up being used by them so they get larger piles of money because we worked ourselves to the bone and then they repay the community with such a deal as this?

Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer and praying that one of them wouldn't be a duffer and make you have to start again. After this lengthy installation process, you were typically presented with this not-entirely-intuitive interface:

Photoshop users who have switched to GIMP will notice that some of the PS features are not readily available in Gimp. Drawing arrows is one of them. As a tech blogger who have to edit plenty of screenshots everyday, there are times where I need to draw arrows on the images to illustrate the point. While this can be easily done in Photoshop, the feature is not available in the default installation of GIMP. Here is what you can do to enable the arrow feature in GIMP.

Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won't do what they want it to? Fear not, here's your guide to bringing your friends over to the light side...

In early November we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs on an early Linux 2.6.37 kernel as our latest round of tests comparing these two leading Linux file-systems. There were some changes in the Linux disk performance with these file-systems using the latest Linux kernel code, but overall it was not too interesting. However, as the Linux 2.6.37 kernel does introduce a new mount option for Btrfs, the space_cache option, we decided to explore its performance in today's article.

If 2010 was the year that taught open source "how to disappear completely," 2011 will be the year we're reminded that "anyone can play guitar"…or open source. At present, open source is de rigueur with the underdog class, those vendors seeking to challenge incumbents like Apple and Oracle.