Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it's broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.

The Brazilian subsidiary of Electrolux has joined with ProFusion Embedded Systems to develop a refrigerator that includes a Linux-based touchscreen computer. The Infinity I-Kitchen's computer is based on a 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor, offering a 800 x 480 display and an Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) user interface.

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too...

I love coffee, I love tea. I love the Java Jive and it loves me.* If Java is giving you jive, put your fears aside. You'll soon love it sweet and hot. Or maybe not. How many times have you run into problems with Java? Chances are very good that most of you have. If you perform a Google search using the words “Linux” and “Java,” you’ll have an all-day scavenger hunt on your hands. Searching for answers to installing Java, making it work and surviving the aftermath could use up whatever energy you’ve gleaned from actual cups of java. If you install the correct package, you need never fret again. You’ll learn to love Java again. You might even sing about it.

If you are a user of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice you might be familiar with styles and formatting. These are pre-defined text formats that you can select from in order to change various aspects of your text. With both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice you have the ability to create custom styles and formats that can be used, and re-used, easily. And best of all, this is all done without a single bit of scripting or coding. Thanks to the Styles and Formatting tool, you can become a LibreOffice power-user in no time.

Novell channel partners are expressing mixed reactions to news that the software vendor, once a critical player in the channel, will be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. "We've been assured by Novell that there are no planned changes to partnerships," said Phil Cook, lead architect for identity management technology at Identropy, a Novell platinum partner that provides managed services built around the vendor's identity management software. Cook said Novell sent an e-mail to reassure all of its partners on Nov. 22, the day the sale was announced.

Developed as part of KDE4 was Nepomuk to handle meta data of all kinds on the desktop in a generic fashion regardless of file type as a step towards a semantic desktop. While Nepomuk continues to advance, the KDE developers are now collaborating with GNOME developers to bring Zeitgeist to the KDE desktop too. Zeitgeist is one of the GNOME 3.0 projects and is basically a desktop engine for logging and tagging all sorts of desktop activity from document openings, the web-sites you visit, emails and notes you create, etc. This information is stored on your system in a central database so that via other GNOME applications you can access this data or perform queries to help you in different ways.

When Novell first announced that it was being acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion, the question of who would retain ownership over Unix copyrights was an open issue. As part of the Novell sale, the company also revealed that it is selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-led technology consortium for $450 million. Potential ownership of Unix by the Microsoft-led group could have led to a new round of patent battles between Microsoft and the open source community. In a terse statement, Novell has now publicly stated that it will not be selling Unix as part of the patent sale.

Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

It’s common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn’t be recognised as “open source” by many of us on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Actions that deny the software freedoms of end users – and even developers – appear like a fungus, spuriously justified by the need for profit. Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants. Open source is the pragmatic product and projection of software freedom.

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.