Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux server admins need good scripting skills and command-line chops, but who says they can't be fun? Learn Bash Karaoke with 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, quickly find disk hogs, and display used/free disk space.

Scott McNealy has kept a low profile since Oracle bought his company earlier this year, but on Wednesday the former chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems shared some thoughts on the acquisition. "Do I have a problem with Larry Ellison buying Sun? No, that's part of capitalism, as soon as we go public we're for sale, that's part of the deal," McNealy said, referring to Oracle's chairman and CEO. "And do I have a problem with him exercising his intellectual property rights? No, I don't have a problem with that. Would it be how we necessarily ran and operated? Obviously not."

The Google Instant predictive search technology has launched in an Android version. In other Android app news, Twitter and Facebook have each released updated apps, Verizon is prepping its V Cast Android Store for the Droid Incredible next week, and the U.S. Defense Department unveiled a T2 Mood Tracker app allowing veterans to monitor their emotional health, says eWEEK

If you work with open source software of any kind — whether at work or as a volunteer — then you understand the importance of license compliance and keeping track of copyright ownership. But as a project grows, those tasks can get tricky, even when everyone is on the same page. That is exactly the problem that led Hewlett Packard (HP) to create FOSSology, an open source tool you can use to analyze a source code tree for this type of metadata and more. This weekend, why not set it up and dig into your source code — you might be surprised at what you find.

Canonical’s announcement that it would not adopt GNOME Shell for Ubuntu 11.04 has not been universally loved. But is Unity divisive or just a typical development decision being given too much weight?

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project Founder and Chairman Dr. Nicholas Negroponte has confirmed that the launch of the next-generation OLPC XO tablet computer, the XO-3, has been delayed. In an interview at the MIT Media Lab, Negroponte said that, while the OLPC Project wanted to show the XO-3 at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, at the beginning of January they will miss CES by 45 days. Negroponte says that the delay has to do with "finding an unbreakable material" for the device's display, noting that it may end up as glass rather than plastic.

Pardus Linux, a popular independent distribution funded and developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, will be releasing version 2011 in the coming weeks and with it lots of nice updates and improvements.

Last week Mark Shuttleworth dropped the bomb that the next release of Ubuntu, 11.04, would ship with Unity as the default window manager. This caused a lot of concern throughout the community, but most were getting used to the idea, appeased by the knowledge that GNOME Shell would be but a few clicks away. But yesterday he went even further - he announced that Ubuntu would be moving to the Wayland graphical server as well. Has Shuttleworth lost his mind? Or does he know something we don't?

The team at Adafruit Industries is offering a bounty for the first open source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect hardware for its Xbox 360 gaming console. According to a post on the Adafruit blog, the first person or group to upload their code, examples and documentation to the GitHub project hosting service will win the team's first ever "X prize" project bounty.

Just one year ago, I posted a piece on O'Reilly Radar about an unlikely group working happily together to vastly increase the amount of U.S. Patent information available at no charge on the Internet. I've done no heavy lifting whatsoever on this project, so it has been a pleasure to watch the U.S. Patent Office, the White House, and Jon Orwant at Google plow through this rather daunting task. The system is now in full production including all the current feeds that were previously only available for big bucks by subscription. Also available for the first time is the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) data, which is the full "wrapper" for a patent application. PAIR data was only available previously on a rate-limited query-only service.

Intel and Nokia last week rolled out MeeGo 1.1, which is now officially available for Intel Atom netbooks, the N900 handset, and in-vehicle "infotainment" systems. The netbook spin of MeeGo 1.1 is out there to compete with the likes of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, which was released just shy of a month ago. While nothing radically has changed with MeeGo 1.1 compared to the initial MeeGo 1.0 release from earlier this year, the software stack is updated so for the past few days we have begun conducting a performance comparison between MeeGo 1.1 and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook. Here are some of our initial findings.

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.

The world’s largest mobile enterprise has just joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member. The company in question is China Mobile, the largest and most valuable nationwide telecom enterprise in the world. With 570 million subscribers, it also has the largest user base of any such company.

This is going to be short as I have another flight to catch to San Diego for the next week [if anyone wants to meet-up to discuss Linux, Phoronix, or the Phoronix Test Suite in the area, contact me]. Anyhow, Mark Shuttleworth just sent over an email saying that they will be deploying the Wayland Display Server with their Unity Desktop -- that's replacing the GNOME Shell by default -- in a future Ubuntu release!.

In an effort to continue our efforts to promote and educate the public on Free/Open Source Software projects, the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 9x invites you to share your work with the rest of the FOSS community by submitting a talk for the first-of-the-year Linux expo.

I have no doubt that Linux-based tablets will eventually be winners. I've been unimpressed though at how slowly the Linux tablet OEMs have been about getting their products to market. Those that have made it tp store shelves, like the Augen GenTouch78, haven't been much good. Things are about to change. The forthcoming Nook Color and the rumored Amazon Kindle Tablet will bring good Linux-powered tablets to users this year after all.

Monitoring traffic on your network is only as important as the data and or computers you want to protect. Understanding how to do basic network troubleshooting will save you both in wasted time and money. Every Linux operating system comes with a number of command line tools to help you diagnose a network problem. In addition, there are any number of open source tools available to help you track down pesky network issues.

In future, Oracle will offer three paid MySQLEditions at subscription fees of $2,000, $5,000 and $10,000 per year. The previous $600 "Basic" subscription has been dropped, in effect more than tripling the price for some customers. These subscriptions do not represent different levels of support, but rather different mixes of software. The free "Classic" edition provides only an embedded database with a MyISAM back end. The transactional InnoDB is available in the Standard, Enterprise and Carrier-Grade Editions, the Cluster NDB engine only in the Carrier-Grade Edition.

Mobile-app developers are gearing up for an Android push next year, with the rise of Google's mobile operating system likely to push iPhone app-development activity into second place behind the Mountain View juggernaut.

Linux is so useful, you don't even need to install it before it gets to work. One of the popular uses of Linux is to create live media that can be used to run desktop systems or to create utility discs for all kinds of administration. Confused about the live CD that's right for you? No worries, we've got the top five live Linux CDs to get you started.