Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

If you’ve never tried desktop screenlets, you’re missing out. We’ve previously discussed how to set up your screenlets, but we’ve never put together a showcase of the best ones. Today we’ve gathered seven of the best from Screenlets.org, and they cover everything from audio eye candy to steampunk system monitors. If you’re finding your desktop lacking in flash or functionality, look no further.

While we are still waiting for Unigine Corp (or their partners) to actually release a game based upon the Unigine Engine (Primal Carnage backed out and so their own OilRush game should be the first when it ships this quarter or next), the advanced multi-platform engine continues marching forward. The Unigine Engine already supports OpenGL 3/4 and has amazing graphics as shown by their tech demos like Unigine Heaven and many other features, but they have just made another huge update to this Linux-friendly game engine.

Governments are increasingly interested in promoting open source software. Yet policymakers have seldom laid out any clear theoretical or empirical justification for these policies. This column explores recent studies suggesting that open source and proprietary software strengthen each other and should co-exist – too much open source could actually be a bad thing.

[Found this on Groklaw, I agree with PJ's take. Linux is not a cartel. - Scott]

MyPaint is an easy to use paint program. It supports several the popular image formats, comes with a load of brushes, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. After 5 years of development, version 0.9.0 was released on November 2 with some nice new features.

The recent PostgreSQL 9.0 release offers several significant improvements to PostgreSQL's built-in replication solution. Ready to add replication to your PostgreSQL install? It's easier than you might think. Replication is a key technology for any database offering, because databases are typically mission-critical systems. Downtime — or, worse yet, data loss — can result not only in inconvenience to employees and customers but also in lost productivity and lost revenue. By replicating from a primary server, or master, to one or more secondary servers, sometimes called standbys, the probability of data loss or extended downtime can be greatly reduced.

Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, more than three out of four Android devices are now running version 2.1 (Eclair) or later – an increase of 3% compared to early October and nearly 13% over early August of this year. Android 1.5 and 1.6 devices now make up 7.9% and 15% of devices respectively, a decrease from 9.7% and 16.4% at the beginning of last month.

One tends to think of "the NASDAQ" as a single exchange based in the US, but, in fact, NASDAQ OMX operates exchanges all over the world - and they run on Linux. In the US for instance, that includes markets like the NASDAQ Stock Market, The NASDAQ Options Market, and NASDAQ OMX PSX, its newest market that launched on October 8. At a brief presentation at the Linux Foundation's invitation-only End User Summit in Jersey City, NASDAQ OMX vice president Bob Evans talked about the ups and downs of using Linux in a seriously mission-critical environment.

Pinta 0.5 has been released and with it come some new tools and several bug fixes. Pinta emerged in February and garnered lots of enthusiastic attention for its user-friendly interface. It was compared and contrasted to The GIMP, but consensus at the time seemed to be that it needed more time to simmer. Will today's update bring it closer to prime time?

Remember those insane arcade games that kept you up all night, blasting away at ship after ship, leading up to a showdown with a massive star destroyer that relentlessly hurled various dangerous objects at you? More than likely, the game you remember offered a 2D top-down or side-scrolling view of space. But now take a moment to imagine all of that in 3D. Sun Blast is a cross-platform, independent game from OBLONE Software that offers you exactly that experience. With it, you will feel like you are immersed in the arcade action, as space debris, enemy vessels, and menacing star ships all take aim at you.

Google has open sourced an Apache server module designed to speed website performance. Presumably, the module is based on the mystery Google Web Server the company uses to serve its own pages.

If you are running Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and own a copy of the Photoshop CS 5 installer, you will find that you won’t be able to install it under wine. Photoshop CS5 on Ubuntu 10.4 works fine, but not 10.10. Here’s what I did to get it running on my Ubuntu Maverick machine.

It had to happen eventually. Open source software is all about letting anyone have access to the source code, and Apple is all about restricting any software access on its platforms. So when questions began to be raised about whether VideoLAN's popular VLC Media Player, which is licensed under the GPLv2, could legally be sold on the Apple's App Store, you knew something had to give. Well, it just did. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just told the VLC developer community that the GPLv2 does, indeed, conflict with Apple's App Store Terms.

This past weekend, while the US was ramping up for yet-another contentious election, politics of another sort were happening in the land of open source software. Specifically, 33 members of the Germanophone project within the larger OpenOffice.org community gave Oracle and the OpenOffice.org team leaders notice that they would be walking away from the project and working for the new LibreOffice project, now being managed by The Document Foundation. The reasons for the walkout are clearly stated: the developers are unhappy with the OpenOffice.org stance that any current OpenOffice.org project or team leader who is also working on LibreOffice should withdraw from their position in the OpenOffice community.

ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, and Tcl, has launched its Python Package Manager Index (PyPM Index) to give developers a more complete picture of Python build information and package availability across multiple platforms. PyPM Index shows developers instantly if Python packages they need are available for all the platforms they must deploy on, providing critical information to speed up the design phase of development. With PyPM Index, developers now have direct access via the web to search PyPM repositories (collections of ActivePython packages).

Stormy Peters is stepping down as GNOME's executive director and heading to Mozilla to work on developer engagement. In a post on her personal blog today, Peters announced the decision to leave the GNOME Foundation to join Mozilla and work on "pushing freedom on the Web as much as we've pushed for it on the desktop." Peters was hired by GNOME in July of 2008.

A group of Italian developers has just released a free and open-source framework for creating e-books for the iPad. The Baker E-book Framework allows designers and developers to turn fixed-width HTML5 pages into an e-book format and publish the finished product. After that, all you need to do is follow the App Store submission guidelines, and you’re on your way to e-book greatness. To design for the Baker Framework, simply build HTML5 pages with a fixed width of 768 pixels. You can test your HTML versions on an iPad using the Safari browser and iterate accordingly.

The Fedora Project announced the Fedora 14 final release, adding Amazon EC2 support. Fedora also features faster boot-times and JPEG downloads, the MeeGo for Netbooks UI stack, improved debugging, and a new "Spice" virtualization desktop framework, says the project. Released in beta form at the end of September, Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") is now available in final form. This community-driven open source distro is a techie-focused upstream contributor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The community has also upgraded its Fedoraproject.org site with the Fedora 14 release.

This week the Linux Foundation has unveiled the Self-Assessment Checklist (SAC) as part of the Open Compliance Program (OCP) announced earlier this year. If your organization is involved in working with open source software, you'll want to take a closer look. The Linux Foundation's checklist is a set of best practices to ensure that your organization, or its suppliers, are complying with licensing requirements. The checklist covers several areas, such as compliance management, training, business processes, and more.

I love using Linux. I enjoy the control over the computing experience it affords me and how I can choose exactly how my desktop is to be run. I'm not some guy writing Linux articles on a Windows box or a Mac. I "live Linux" exclusively, every-single-day. And I have done this for years. That said, I’ve put myself into the position of those who are new to desktop Linux or simply overwhelmed by something within the platform. With this article, I hope to address new ideas alongside some challenges that I believe, if dealt with realistically, would make using Linux more accessible for everyone.