Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When Nokia acquired Trolltech, there was a question mark over Nokia's long term strategy for the Qt framework. Qt for many, is the toolkit behind the KDE desktop and it's associated applications, so what would a phone company do with it. Over the past years, the strategy has steadily crystallised, and at this years Qt Dev Day, Rich Green, the new CTO at Nokia and first Nokia CTO to speak at the annual Qt developer conference, confirmed that Qt is core to all of Nokia's plans for mobile applications; "We're betting the whole company and smartphones on Qt" Green told the audience at the opening keynote.

I've written before about my deep skepticism regarding the true motives of Canonical, Ltd.'s advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate copyright assignment without promises to adhere to copyleft. I've often asked Canonical employees, including Jono Bacon, Amanda Brock, Jane Silber, Mark Shuttleworth himself, and — in the comments of this very blog post — Matt Asay to explain (a) why exactly they demand copyright assignment on their projects, rather than merely having contributors agree to the GNU GPL formally (like projects such as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a contributor's copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. refuses to promise to keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it (FSF, for example, has always done the latter in assignments). When I ask these questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the subject.

Oracle will never grant a license to Project Harmony, the open source Java implementation. According to a source familiar with the situation, Oracle has told a closed meeting of Java's leaders from major companies and organizations that it will never grant Harmony a license, claiming this would damage the future of Java. The meeting took place in Bonn, Germany, between October 5 and 6 and was hosted by T-Mobile.

nny September weekend in Cambridge, England, ten KDE and Telepathy developers met in the Collabora office to plan the future of Instant Messaging in KDE software. Once everyone had arrived, our host George Goldberg gave us an overview of the current state of the codebase, which parts are usable, which parts still need writing, and which parts were written years ago and need revision. This turned into a project management session to determine the order for getting things done, and a discussion about a release schedule that will make the project visible without tying it prematurely into compatibility guarantees that slow down development.

LXer Feature: 17-Oct-2010

In the Roundup this week we have news of IBM deciding to back Oracle's OpenJDK instead of Harmony, Phoronix releases the 2010 Linux graphics survey results, 5 mistakes Linux newcomers make and lastly John E. Dunn gets the crazy idea to ditch Windows for Ubuntu. Enjoy!

While OpenShot and PiTiVi are the two currently most talked about open-source non-linear video editing systems for Linux, that's not all there is out there. There's also Kdenlive, Kino, an open-source Lightworks is coming soon, and then perhaps the most advanced open-source video editor of them all: Cinelerra.

After some days with the latest Ubuntu Linux desktop release, I was planning to devote a few graphs to extolling its many virtues. This is not a hard exercise because Ubuntu 10.10 is exemplary, about as good as it gets at doing the main things desktop operating systems were originally invented to do. It’s refined, uncluttered, comes with plenty of apps for most people and, most of all, it’s stable and fast. It runs happily in 1GB of RAM, something no version of Windows has done since the obsolete XP. There’s even a netbook edition with larger icons.

QEMU, the processor emulator that can be used alone for running unmodified guest operating systems and can optionally take advantage of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for greater virtualization performance with Intel and AMD hardware, has finally reached version 0.13 after suffering from a few delays. As was reported by us back in January of this year, QEMU 0.13 would focus on bringing new features and with this release they have achieved introducing several new features.

Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

At the start of September we reported on Unigine's OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that's powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.

If you spend much time with any open source project, you're probably going to be spending time in IRC. If you want to make sure you don't miss a minute of your project's conversations, you'll want to check out Smuxi.

Regardless which platform you are using, there’s bound to be a calculator included in the stock OS. For simple calculation, these calculators work fine, but if you want to do more complex calculation, like solving an algebraic expression, it won’t make the mark. Qalculate is a powerful calculator for Linux that can solve complex mathematical expressions, units conversion, graph plotting and many more sophisticated functions.

Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new "intelligent" 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.

The KDE Development Platform is an attractive base for developers of Qt applications. At its core, the KDE libraries provide job APIs for asynchronous processing, transparent network access, caching and more. The KDE PIM Development Platform also provides libraries for common transport and storage standards such as POP3, IMAP, vCard, iCal, MIME messages (email) and more. With Akonadi, the KDE 4 Development Platform is a complete framework for creating full-featured PIM applications with modern modular design, extensibility and scalability.

ApacheCon, one of the biggest open source conferences of the year, is coming up in Atlanta November 1st through 5th, sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Of course, from Hadoop to the web server, Apache software platforms have become enormously influential. Ross Gardler, VP of Community at the foundation, provided OStatic with a guest post--one of a series we'll be doing in conjunction with ApacheCon--on how the Apache Software Foundation approaches open source. Here it is.

The following topic scares me for two reasons. First, maybe I read too many sci-fi novels about Artificial Intelligence (AI) going wrong (or right, we’ll get to that in bit). Second, most HPC people are pragmatic individuals who deal with numbers and results that have a firm mathematical underpinning. Talking about AI as an HPC application is not quite a mainstream discussion.

While we are close to seeing the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, this week LinSched for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released. LinSched is a simulator that allows testing the Linux kernel scheduler in user-space for modifying and observing its scheduling behavior.

This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle's OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like "Great!" Isn't it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project? Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I'll try to explain why.

Akkana Peck completes her introductory series to CouchDB, one of the newfangled distributed "NoSQL" databases. In Part 2 we learn more fundamental ways to manage CouchDB with Python.

The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the "Respects Your Freedom" hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.