Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Nearly Consulting, which specialises in community relations and free software strategy, has published the results of its GNOME Census. According to Nearly Consulting founder Dave Neary, the census report analyses how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.

The old "Ubuntu doesn't contribute back" argument cropped up again when Dave Neary released a report of the talk he gave at GUADEC on the contributions made to the GNOME desktop environment. He found that Red Hat and Novell contributed the most and that Ubuntu and Mandriva (primarily a KDE distribution) was among the lowest. A firestorm of debate ensued and Shuttleworth was accused of name calling and guilt to try to win the argument.

Back in March an announcement came out of NVIDIA as they were getting ready to launch the GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" graphics cards that they would be dropping support for the xf86-video-nv driver. The xf86-video-nv driver really didn't provide much of a feature set and was far behind the Nouveau KMS and Gallium3D drivers even though these were reverse-engineered by the open-source, so NVIDIA announced they would be discontinuing this open-source DDX driver and advised its customers to just use the VESA driver until they are able to download and install NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. However, today they have decided to release an updated driver.

This is the second installment of a two-part series on setting up the OpenVPN server on DD-WRT router firmware. This is a great way to set up secure connections to your network for road-warriors or to remotely connect offices. This a cost-effective solution can support a dozen or two VPN users. In Part 1, we uploaded the DD-WRT firmware to the router, changed the router's IP and subnet for compatibly reasons, and created the SSL certificates for the OpenVPN server and clients.

GNOME and KDE are teaming up again to host the 2011 Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany. Due to the success of the 2009 Desktop Summit the projects will co-locate GUADEC and Akademy once again in August, 2011 for the largest free software desktop event ever. The 2009 Desktop Summit was a fantastic opportunity for the leaders of the free software desktop community to share talks, address common issues, and build relationships between the communities with combined social events.

When the mouthpiece of American capitalism calls a company a dog, it's time to re-evaluate that company's chances. In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr asks if "Steve Ballmer is a failed CEO?" then forecasts Microsoft's feeble future even as it banks record profits. Microsoft is a company stuck in the glory years of the 1980s and 1990s - truly glorious years for a company that built not one but two massive cash cows: Windows and Office. To remain relevant in the future, however, Microsoft must build a third.

Looking through my home for Linux systems I just realized that it is everywhere. First of all, I find it on my computers - from servers to laptop. That is the obvious place though. I wonder, where else can I find Linux running?

The Justice Department said on Thursday it sued Oracle Corp, alleging it defrauded the federal government on a software contract in effect from 1998 to 2006 that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle's Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers. This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company's operating environment.

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development.

Amazon announced a third generation of its Linux-based Kindle e-reader, featuring a lighter and smaller body, a screen claimed to have 50 percent better contrast, and a battery life of up to one month. Still available with 3G, the device is also offered in a Wi-Fi-only version that includes a WebKit-based browser, the company says.

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE's recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok 1.4. The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?

SimplyMEPIS is a simply wonderful distribution. It was the first to offer a complete out of the box experience all tied up in a pretty package. It would be fair to say that it was probably the inspiration for many of the easy-to-use distributions available today.

It's a sad truth that advancements in technology often make jobs obsolete, usually sooner than most people are ready. The more savvy workers learn to keep up with the times, and adapt their skills to make the best use of their experience, without becoming redundant themselves. The role of Systems Administrator may soon be one of these changing jobs, simultaneously much less, and much more, than what it is today.

I applaud the Indian effort, just as I applauded the effort by OLPC to create an ever-lower priced entry into what people hope is a more inexpensive way and effective way to deliver information to the masses of people unable to afford a 400 USD laptop or 300 USD net-book. In some countries the cost of these devices is almost doubled through import duties levied by the government, so every dollar in cost savings is effectively two dollars saved by the end customer. And for people who make a very low wage (or who are unemployed), this amount effectively doubles or quadruples again. Having the “pad” manufactured in India will reduce those duties to zero, and the pride of having developed something in their home land will encourage younger Indians to contribute to computer engineering.

Even though most Android users are still waiting for Android 2.2, details about the next version Android 3.0, or Gingerbread are starting to emerge. Android 3.0 release date is looking like Q4 of this year, possibly around October. And Gingerbread may already be in some testers' hands - Phandroid has shown an unverified photo of a test build of Android 3.0 running in the wild.

NCR announced two compact POS (point of sale) devices that run SUSE Linux for Point of Service, as well as a number of Windows operating systems. The RealPOS 40 and RealPOS 60 use Intel Atom and Celeron processors, respectively, offer enhanced energy efficiency, and provide both four powered serial ports and up to eight powered USB ports, the company says.

The Linux Mint development team have issued the KDE Edition of version 9 of their Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, code named "Isadora". Linux Mint aims to be user friendly and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, and various plug-ins and media codecs.

Basket Note Pads is a multipurpose note-taking application for KDE. Business people can use it to keep track of important tasks and notes. Writers can use it to organize their thoughts. Students can use it for note taking. And generally anyone can use it as a virtual paste bin or clip drawer. Basket was one of the last KDE 3 programs to be ported to KDE 4. While the development appeared to have stalled for some time, it has picked up again, and the developers have released a beta version for KDE 4.