Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

My name is Oscar Castañeda, I am a student from Guatemala currently doing a master’s in Computer Science at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands. For the 2010 Google Summer of Code I completed a project with the Google Open Source Programs Office as my mentoring organization and professor Michel van Eeten (TUDelft) and Nitin Bhide (Founder SVNPlot) as my project mentors.

The announcement that Attachmate would acquire Novell for $2.2 billion has naturally provoked a flurry of comments and analyses in the free software world. But it's important to pick apart the news to find out what is truly new – and to distinguish between what this changes, and what remains the same.

Attachmate buying Novell came as a bit of a surprise to industry watchers, but now that the deal is inked (but not closed) what does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE, and the rest of the Linux industry?

Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.4 of Quirky. The Quirky Linux distribution is a platform for trying out new, "quirky ideas" and is in the same family as Puppy Linux, but its creator points out that it's a "distinct distro in its own right."

LXer Feature: 29-Nov-2010

In this second part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. In this installment he configures media players, K3b, Crossover Office, Lucid and Post Script and his final thoughts on his adventures.

The Diaspora project has launched a private alpha test of its open source social network. It is opening up its own hosted instance of Diaspora to a select group of testers, starting with people who contributed financial support when Diaspora was first getting off the ground. The initial group of participants can invite other people, and the developers will be opening up the service to more users each week.

LXer Feature: 28-Nov-2010

In the Roundup this week we have all kinds of Open Source goodness for you including the news that Novell has been acquired by a company that may or may not have ties to Microsoft, how to wake up a Linux server remotely, Part 1 of how a KDE 3.5 user moved to KDE 4.4, ARM's co-founder says Intels days of dominating the desktop are numbered and on a personal note today is the 5 year anniversary of the day my relationship with Linux got serious. Enjoy!

If you've already played through Warcraft III, The Sims 3, and all the other heavily Wine-compatible games out there, PenguSpy is a great resource for Linux gamers. Whether you're looking for arcade games, board games, MMORPGs, or first person shooters, PenguSpy will have a good number of games to recommend to you. The site's very simple to navigate; you just pick a category (or search for a title) and check out the recommended games. Clicking on a game not only gives you a rating, description, and link to the homepage, but each page also has a YouTube video of the game so you can get a closer look.

We are just at the beginning of a massive change in the way we use computers, and traditional desktops and laptops will be giving way to more and more internet-connected devices—that's the vision presented in two keynotes at the first ever MeeGo conference. But in order for that vision to come about, there needs to be an open environment, where both hardware and software developers can create new devices and applications, without the innovation being controlled—often stifled—by a single vendor's wishes. Doug Fisher, Intel's VP of the Software and Services Group, and Nokia's Alberto Torres, Executive VP for MeeGo Computers, took different approaches to delivering that message, but their talks were promoting the same theme.

After the wonderful news that Mandriva would be continuing as usual despite financial difficulties and an exodus of developers comes the technical specifications and other tidbits for Mandriva 2011. There are quite a few exciting changes ahead, many of which prove that Mandriva is still a cutting edge distribution.

Linux is really a versatile piece of software. You can use it as your daily working OS, a server that runs most of the website in the world, as a multimedia center or even as a way to promote your religion. A more creative use of Linux is to turn it into an educational piece of software for kids. We have gone through several ways of configuring Linux for kids. DoudouLinux is yet another Linux distro that you will want to check out.

When we install computers for our kids at The HeliOS Project, one of the main sources of confusion is the differences between Windows and Linux file systems. Most Windows users don't know much about their Program Files or Win32 folders but they do know about My Documents. In most cases, this is where their personal files, pictures, movies and music reside.

The KDE project has announced the release of version 1.1 of ownCloud, an open, web-based storage application which runs on a user's personal server. According to KDE contributor and openCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, thanks to a growing development team, the 1.1 update includes a variety of bug fixes, as well as new features.

Likely codenames for the first Chrome OS netbooks have been revealed – with Mario and Andretti the motor racing-themed monikers to emerge. Tech Crunch has taken a look at the Chromium issue tracker – working out what names have emerged from people testing machines from within Google HQ. Mario Andretti – as if you didn't already know – is one of the most iconic racing drivers, and has won races in Formula One, IndyCar and Nascar.

..“Netflix used an open-source network, the U.S. Postal Service, to launch an alternative distribution business without asking anyone for permission,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” “Now they are using another open-source network, the Internet, to transform the business. It is much easier for Netflix to change, because they don’t have to undergo a kind of religious conversion like media companies will have to.”

Community interest in continuing the development of Google's Wave communication platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation (OSM). The proposal was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration.

With Xen Domain 0 support finally going into the mainline Linux kernel, those interested in virtualization atop Fedora are now looking at getting the Fedora Xen host support back up to speed for the next release (Fedora 15) or by the time that Fedora 16 rolls out. The Linux kernels since Fedora Core 8 have not been capable of Xen Dom0 hosting, but with the Linux 2.6.37 upstream merge that brings pvops-based support, work is getting underway within the Fedora community to better prepare this KVM alternative.

Novell has moved to quell growing concerns that it has sold Linux out to Microsoft as part of its Attachmate deal. On Wednesday, Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon issued a short statement saying that Novell – not Microsoft – owns the copyrights on Unix. Sentence two of Dragoon's terse, three-sentence statement said simply: "Novell will continue to own Novell's Unix copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate."

Open source has won. Oh, how time flies. When I started writing in Database in May 2003, my first column was about how the ICT Ministry had got the budget PC programme all wrong. ICT Minister Surapong had announced his great success at negotiating the inclusion of Windows XP and Office XP at just 1,500 baht, a 90 percent discount. He saw it as success. I saw it as capitulation.

You thought you had it all working, didn't you? And then you find out that your process you thought was running and collecting data hasn't reported anything for two hours. Or maybe it's something on the desktop -- your browser has frozen and isn't responding. Or suddenly everything's gotten really slow and you're not sure why. And this happens every few days, and you're tired of it.