Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The headline pretty much reveals the brunt of it, but indeed, it looks like next week Google is going to start talking about how its Chrome operating system is coming along. Multiple sources have told us that Google will be holding some sort of event on Tuesday, December 7th -- we're not sure if it'll be a live event, a webcast, or something else entirely -- and that the shindig will see the launch of that Google-branded Chrome OS netbook we've been hearing about.

The Document Foundation has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 3.3 of LibreOffice, the free open source office suite. LibreOffice forked from the OpenOffice.org office suite following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems the original copyright holders of the name and main sponsors of the project.

LXer Feature: 06-Dec-2010

Recently SkySQL announced itself to the world with its focus being on former Sun MySQL customers. This comes in the aftermath of Sun being bought by Oracle and the subsequent departures of former Sun executives and engineers before and after the purchase. I recently had a chance to talk with Ulf Sandberg the new CEO of SkySQL for a few minutes.

A new edition of a study by the Linux Foundation explains the Linux kernel development process and includes various statistics that demonstrate the kernel's growth rate. It also analyses how much is contributed to the kernel's development by which developers and companies.

LXer Feature: 05-Dec-2010

In the LXWR this week we have part 1 and 2 of Steven Rosenberg's farewell to Fedora. why Glyn Moody is rooting for Microsoft, a long overdue look at XFCE, Dr. Tony Young's final (or is it?) installment in his switching to KDE 4.4 adventures and the Linux foundation releases their annual list of who writes Linux. Enjoy!

If that someone special in your life has storage on their mind come the holidays, we may be able to help with gift ideas. With ideas ranging from the very affordable (free) to very expensive (skipping a few mortgage payments), we’ve combed the world of storage procurement so you don’t have to.

Summary: Oracle's MySQL is in pretty good shape, considering the circumstances. Chances are the community will be happier with the 5.5 release than anything we've seen for a very long time - focus is on scalability, finally! The community has been able to patch over the problems that are due to Oracle: keeping the MySQL conference alive, retaining the talent within the ecosystem and addressing enterprise customers with new 3rd party support providers, not the least of which is SkySQL..

[Funny he should say that.. - Scott]

As we shared last week, Unigine Corp launched a Linux game development competition where any independent game teams/studios could submit a written proposal to them for a new Linux game and then later this month they will pick one submission and grant them a free license of their expensive, very advanced, multi-platform engine. There's still another week left to this competition, but we have learned some details from Unigine Corp about the submissions thus far.

There are hundreds of compelling reasons why Linux is better than all the rival operating systems. Here are just 20.

Front-line measures like firewalling, strong authentication, and staying on top of security updates are mandatory steps to keeping your system secure. But you also need to check your system's health frequently and make sure a compromise didn't slip past you unnoticed. A good place to start is with an intrusion detection system (IDS) that monitors your machine's resources and flags any changes that might indicate an intruder or a rootkit. The Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment (AIDE) is an open source IDS that you can set up in a weekend.

Less than two weeks left for SCALE Call for Papers; Sponsors start lining up for event. As everyone's sights are set on the December holidays, the Southern California Linux Expo reminds those who plan to submit papers for SCALE 9X to get them in before the deadline, which is a little over a week away. The deadline for the SCALE 9x Call for Papers is Dec. 13, with notification of acceptance being sent to speakers by Dec. 27.

Canonical's Ubuntu One personal cloud service for Ubuntu 10.10 users has expanded its reach beyond Linux with new iOS, Android, and Windows clients. Ubuntu One's beta Windows client is off to a solid start, but work remains if Ubuntu One wants to overtake Dropbox, says this eWEEK Labs review.

Previously only available in the Beta channel, Google has released version 8 of the Chrome web browser into the stable channel. This major update is the first version capable of using the upcoming web store and includes a built-in PDF viewer that's sandboxed to help prevent attackers from exploiting security vulnerabilities in the plug-in. A sandboxed Adobe Flash Player plug-in has been integrated into the Development (Dev) channel version of the browser, so that too should appear in the stable release in due time.

A rather small crowd of researchers, kernel developers and industry experts found their way to the 12th Real-Time Linux WorkShop (RTLWS) hosted at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. The small showing was not a big surprise, but it also did not make the workshop any less interesting.

Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization. The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of [the] enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux-based operating system, began shipping last month, boasting a bevy of core improvements around scalability, resource management and virtualization. What's more, the system ships with a slate of updated open-source software components that stand to make life easier for developers and system administrators who wish to take advantage of recent features without leaving Red Hat's support and certification umbrella to do so.

Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged.

One of the standards that has become normal in the US federal sector is the requirement that all mobile devices, such as laptops, have encrypted drives. This was a direct result of a number of laptop thefts earlier in the decade that resulted in the supposed leaking of personal information. As a former federal contractor, I watched a number of successful and not so successful methodologies implemented and deployed. Some resulted in real data protection and some resulted in wonderful bricks. In some cases on a regular (read daily) basis.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers a strong foundation for hosting virtual workloads, and boosts support to ten years, says this eWEEK Labs review. Yet, price increases and the lack of Xen or .NET support could make Novell's SUSE a better choice for some enterprise users. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux-based operating system, began shipping last month, boasting a bevy of core improvements around scalability, resource management, and virtualization.

If netbook computers have done nothing else, they have increased the choices of desktops for Linux software users. Some existing desktops have found a new niche in netbooks, while the last couple of years have seen new ones designed specifically for the restraints of memory and screen size imposed by netbooks.