Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I have no doubt that Linux-based tablets will eventually be winners. I've been unimpressed though at how slowly the Linux tablet OEMs have been about getting their products to market. Those that have made it tp store shelves, like the Augen GenTouch78, haven't been much good. Things are about to change. The forthcoming Nook Color and the rumored Amazon Kindle Tablet will bring good Linux-powered tablets to users this year after all.

Monitoring traffic on your network is only as important as the data and or computers you want to protect. Understanding how to do basic network troubleshooting will save you both in wasted time and money. Every Linux operating system comes with a number of command line tools to help you diagnose a network problem. In addition, there are any number of open source tools available to help you track down pesky network issues.

In future, Oracle will offer three paid MySQLEditions at subscription fees of $2,000, $5,000 and $10,000 per year. The previous $600 "Basic" subscription has been dropped, in effect more than tripling the price for some customers. These subscriptions do not represent different levels of support, but rather different mixes of software. The free "Classic" edition provides only an embedded database with a MyISAM back end. The transactional InnoDB is available in the Standard, Enterprise and Carrier-Grade Editions, the Cluster NDB engine only in the Carrier-Grade Edition.

Mobile-app developers are gearing up for an Android push next year, with the rise of Google's mobile operating system likely to push iPhone app-development activity into second place behind the Mountain View juggernaut.

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.