Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ten days after releasing Linux 2.6.36, Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate of Linux kernel version 2.6.37. This concludes the kernel's merge window – the first phase in the development of a new kernel version during which the kernel hackers integrate the majority of changes into the source code management system of the main development branch.

OpenOffice.org 3.3 Release Candidate 3 was released on November 1 with many updates and new features that have been in development for the last six months or more. This comes when as many as 33 OpenOffice.org developers are handing in their resignations. While the loss of the German team is unlikely to affect this release, one has to wonder what the future holds for OpenOffice.org.

At the recent openSUSE Conference, Frank Karlitschek introduced a new KDE initiative intended to bring developers and users closer together, Bretzn. He admitted that they came up with the name Bretzn (a kind of German pretzel) only the day before the Saturday keynote, illustrating the speed and ease that are appropriate to the initiative.

The Paul Allen against the World case is moving forward. In fact, faster than the parties probably expected. There was a stipulation to extend time to complete initial disclosures from November 1 to two weeks past whenever the claims were clearer, either through an amended complaint or two weeks after infringement contentions are due. But the judge denied it. And he goes on to remind the parties that the date for filing the joint status report is November 8.

The LDAP command line can be a bit frightening at first, but once you get to know it it's not all that bad. In order to successfully manage your LDAP data from the command line you need to be familiar with three commands: ldapadd, ldapmodify, and ldapsearch. They may be, at first, a challenge to understand, but once you get the basics they are as simple as any other Linux command.

OpenBSD 4.7 came out this past summer, but OpenBSD 4.8 is now available for those interested in this BSD operating system that focuses on providing portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. With OpenBSD 4.8 there is now ACPI-based suspend-and-resume support for most systems utilizing Intel or ATI graphics, but the suspend-and-resume support when utilizing NVIDIA graphics is still problematic. There's also other hardware support improvements, new tools, daemon improvements, and various other improvements to this free software operating system.

If you open nautilus and browse to the root filesystem, you’ll see something that looks like the image to the left. This is the default layout of the filesystem in Ubuntu 10.10, and is a peek into the ancient (by computer science standards) history and genealogy of Linux. The directories listed above are holdouts from one of the oldest standards, the Filesystem Hierarchal Standard, FHS. FHS is the system that defines what belongs where.

Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC's GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

Last week was the Ubuntu 11.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida of the United States where a variety of topics were discussed. Aside from the very surprising announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will use the Unity Desktop rather than GNOME's interface, most of the coverage on Phoronix was focused around the X.Org / graphics side of things, such as the xorg-server and Mesa to be used by Ubuntu 11.04 and the other discussions. Of course, other things were discussed too at this Ubuntu Developer Summit, and here's some of the other major happenings from the event.

I like Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, a lot. But, let me warn you right now, that it's not a Linux for beginners. That's not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It's not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you'll be better off with Ubuntu.

Fresh off of an $8.5 million round of funding that was announced earlier today, Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert is feeling pretty good about the open source business model. The company that he co-founded in 2007 sells software and products that leverage Drupal, the open source project he started in 2000. Drupal has grown from Buytaert’s experiment with new technologies into a worldwide group project that includes thousands of programmers. The White House, Harvard and MTV all use Drupal to run their sites. Acquia is just one of many companies profiting from the volunteer project.

Samsung and Google are planning to announce a "Nexus Two" heir to the Galaxy S smartphone on Nov. 8 based on Android 2.3, says industry reports. Another report says the Nexus Two will go on sale exclusively in the U.K. for the holiday season.

Those who remember a time before Ubuntu will undoubtedly also remember that GNOME, although probably the second most popular desktop manager, didn't hold too much share of the Linux desktop market. KDE was king, and GNOME was a distant second. Then Ubuntu appeared and not only climbed its way to the top of the distribution game, but brought GNOME with it. Polls over the last few years have shown its use increasing to the point that it is oftentimes equalling or out-ranking KDE. But what will happen to GNOME now that Ubuntu 11.04 is going to ship with Unity?

Following the fork in the open office suite development and the foundation of The Document Foundation, the dispute with main sponsor Oracle appears to have come to a head. More than 30 leading figures in the German-language section who have previously donated their time to the OpenOffice.org project have announced their resignations. They include almost all of the core figures in the German-language branch of the project, which now finds itself without leadership.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to finalized. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months.

Our Web browsers do everything these days, and they're also the #1 malware vector. Eric Geier reviews four excellent Web browsers for Linux, Mac, and Windows users that are safer, friendlier, and better than Internet Explorer. Just about all the mainstream web browsers today are available for download in Linux. Since most of your computing time is likely spent in front of the browser, you shouldn't just settle with the one that came preinstalled with your distribution. We'll review four different browsers you can use in Linux, where you can pick the one that's best for you.

As anticipated, the 2.6.37 merge window closed yesterday and the first release candidate for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel is now available. Major changes that were pushed into the Linux 2.6.37 kernel include support for building the kernel without the Big Kernel Lock (BKL), many graphics DRM improvements, and more of the responsiveness patches.

Acquia, a company that sells products and services for popular open source content management system Drupal, has announced an $8.5 million round of funding led by by North Bridge Venture Partners.

The non-profit One Laptop Per Child has engineered laptops for the world's computerless masses. Given that billions of people don't have electricity, OLPC has designed laptops that can operate off-the-grid, perfect for Rwandan cities, aboriginal Canadian settlements -- and Amish colonies.

When Oracle sued Google over Android, many assumed the database giant would target code Google lifted from the Apache Foundation's open source Java incarnation, Project Harmony. But Oracle just pinpointed six pages of Google code, claiming they were "directly copied" from copyrighted Oracle material, and according to Apache, this code is not part of Harmony. "Recent reports on various blogs have attributed to the ASF a number of the source files identified by Oracle as ones that they believe infringe on their copyrights," the Foundation says in a Friday blog post. "Even though the code in question has an Apache license, it is not part of Harmony."