Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Recently, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu shocked the Ubuntu Linux world when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Why move from pure GNOME to Unity? As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, "Lots of people are already committed to Unity -- the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors." In particular, he noted, "Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They're happy to ship it."

To those that missed it in our Phoronix Forums where it was discovered, NVIDIA two days ago uploaded a new binary Linux (x86/x86_64) driver to their FTP server. This NVIDIA graphics driver is marked as the 260.19.26 beta, but they have yet to officially announce this new release or even provide a change-log.

For the past eighteen months, KDE has been my primary desktop. I use it about two-thirds of the time, with the rest of my desktop usage divided between GNOME, Xfce, and occasionally other desktops like LXDE. You could call me a generally happy user -- but, as with any desktop not designed for me personally, KDE has one or two quirks or deficiencies that make my computing less than ideal. To be sure, KDE has made many improvements since the last time I complained about its shortcomings, in 2008.

The graphics capabilities of modern computers are truly amazing. Whether you're viewing an animated Mandelbrot fractal, watching a DVD, designing a highly-detailed 3D image in a CAD program, or just playing a contemporary game, impressive graphics are the rule. Until recently the creation of stunning displays depended on deep familiarity with programs and coding environments that seemed to require a Master's degree in digital image processing and an arcane knowledge of video hardware. In fact, the old ways of creating complex graphics really were almost that demanding. But the old ways are always steadily morphing into the new ways, and the new ways are bringing greater capabilities to the normal user, even in specialized fields such as computer graphics and digital signal processing.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

Learn to manage file ownership and permissions on your Linux® filesystems. Learn about access modes such as suid, sgid, and the sticky bit and how to use them to enhance security. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about file ownership, permissions, and security.

Lightweight Portable Security is a LiveCD distro designed by the US Department of Defense to function as a secure end node, in other words, a safe environment from which to access the web or a remote desktop host. The focus is on security, and for this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and a few other small tools.

If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent. That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.

Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you're not an expert on cron, don't worry -- just use the Corntab site or iPhone app. Generally speaking, cron syntax is not hard to remember. You have five fields to specify the minute, hour, day of the month, month of the year, and/or day of the week that you want to run a job automatically. It seems straightforward, but plenty of users and admins get it wrong -- not because it's really difficult, but just because it's not something they do often enough to memorize the correct syntax for oddball times.

The SuperComputing Conference is THE international conference and expo for all things HPC (High Performance Computing). The astute attendee of this year’s conference could see that storage is a big part of this year’s show. Two major storage trends from this year’s conference: really fast storage and really dense storage.

It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it's broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.

The Brazilian subsidiary of Electrolux has joined with ProFusion Embedded Systems to develop a refrigerator that includes a Linux-based touchscreen computer. The Infinity I-Kitchen's computer is based on a 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor, offering a 800 x 480 display and an Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) user interface.

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too...

I love coffee, I love tea. I love the Java Jive and it loves me.* If Java is giving you jive, put your fears aside. You'll soon love it sweet and hot. Or maybe not. How many times have you run into problems with Java? Chances are very good that most of you have. If you perform a Google search using the words “Linux” and “Java,” you’ll have an all-day scavenger hunt on your hands. Searching for answers to installing Java, making it work and surviving the aftermath could use up whatever energy you’ve gleaned from actual cups of java. If you install the correct package, you need never fret again. You’ll learn to love Java again. You might even sing about it.

If you are a user of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice you might be familiar with styles and formatting. These are pre-defined text formats that you can select from in order to change various aspects of your text. With both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice you have the ability to create custom styles and formats that can be used, and re-used, easily. And best of all, this is all done without a single bit of scripting or coding. Thanks to the Styles and Formatting tool, you can become a LibreOffice power-user in no time.

Novell channel partners are expressing mixed reactions to news that the software vendor, once a critical player in the channel, will be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. "We've been assured by Novell that there are no planned changes to partnerships," said Phil Cook, lead architect for identity management technology at Identropy, a Novell platinum partner that provides managed services built around the vendor's identity management software. Cook said Novell sent an e-mail to reassure all of its partners on Nov. 22, the day the sale was announced.

Developed as part of KDE4 was Nepomuk to handle meta data of all kinds on the desktop in a generic fashion regardless of file type as a step towards a semantic desktop. While Nepomuk continues to advance, the KDE developers are now collaborating with GNOME developers to bring Zeitgeist to the KDE desktop too. Zeitgeist is one of the GNOME 3.0 projects and is basically a desktop engine for logging and tagging all sorts of desktop activity from document openings, the web-sites you visit, emails and notes you create, etc. This information is stored on your system in a central database so that via other GNOME applications you can access this data or perform queries to help you in different ways.

When Novell first announced that it was being acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion, the question of who would retain ownership over Unix copyrights was an open issue. As part of the Novell sale, the company also revealed that it is selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-led technology consortium for $450 million. Potential ownership of Unix by the Microsoft-led group could have led to a new round of patent battles between Microsoft and the open source community. In a terse statement, Novell has now publicly stated that it will not be selling Unix as part of the patent sale.

Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

It’s common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn’t be recognised as “open source” by many of us on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Actions that deny the software freedoms of end users – and even developers – appear like a fungus, spuriously justified by the need for profit. Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants. Open source is the pragmatic product and projection of software freedom.