Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Let's catch up quickly in the Psystar/Apple situation, so we don't miss any of the action. When I read the new DMCA exemptions EFF won, I immediately started to think about Psystar, so I wanted to see what's new. Maybe you did too. So here's the latest I could find. The appeal is going forward. Presumably the next step in the appeal will be oral argument, although I can't swear to it, since Psystar filed its brief under seal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals back in May, so we can't read it, and that's when they would have made the request or not. I can't believe the entire document needed to be sealed, but that is what happened. Perhaps they'd prefer we not get a chance to analyze it?

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment. The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users.

Corporate backing and a large supportive community – almost all Linux distributions can boast of at least one half of that. Fedora, since its inception in late 2003 as Red Hat's community distribution, has nurtured around itself a devoted community. It has achieved this after providing, release after release, an innovative and complete distribution that demands attention and respect.

If there was any justice in this world, there would be two cars parked in my driveway. One would be a 1977 Ferrari 308 GTS. The other would be a midnight blue BMW M3 convertible with all the amenities. I'd want the leather seats and power everything. When I'm in the BMW, I don't want to have to roll the windows down; I want to push a button and have a leprechaun come out and roll them down for me. I want to point the car in the general direction of where I want to go and have it drive me there. That's right, sometimes a guy just wants to be pampered.

ALSA has been the default Linux sound system for many years, and it is a perfectly capable audio subsystem even in this modern era of fancy new things. Carla Schroder shows us how to to control Linux audio with ALSA.

The U.S. military and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are putting their heads together to help the military adopt more open source software. The military wants in on the cost savings, speed and flexibility which OSS offers to users, as opposed to being stuck waiting on proprietary software vendors to modified their tools when changes are needed. If the open source model can be secured enough for the military, surely it can be secured enough for the enterprise.

It's summer. And frankly, that means no one's all that excited about working. Oh goodness no. In honor of the season of laziness, we've put together a list of some of the most fun open source downloads you can find. No, none of those office productivity tools here just lots of games, hobbyists tools and other time wasters. Is it quitting time yet?

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released on June 4 and a new master workspace was branched off for the upcoming 3.3 on June 5. The code in this branch will be stabilized and later become the product release that will find its way onto your desktops. With the feature and UI freeze of June 24, only fixes will go into this new OOO330 release code branch. New features will be merged into the DEV300 development code line as 3.3 is readied for release.

As was widely anticipated, today AMD is rolling out their Catalyst 10.7 graphics driver for Windows and Linux platforms. On the Windows side, their Catalyst 10.7 rolls out support for OpenGL ES 2.0. ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (along with the FirePro hardware) running Windows can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 support with HTML5 for in-browser graphics rendering. However, that support hasn't yet made its way to the Catalyst Linux driver, but there are other changes packed away in this month's update.

Android 2.2, AKA "Froyo," was announced amid wild phone-nerd scenes a couple of months back, although we're yet to see much of it in the wild. The only phone currently running a non-hacked version of Google's latest OS incarnation is the Nexus One, with all the other Google-powered smartphone users of the world still anxiously scrolling up and down the 'About Phone' page waiting for an over-the-air upgrade to arrive.

Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences? Is it market share, perceived ease of use, slick marketing overtures, users wanting to use what they already know? This list might explain why people might choose OS X or Windows. But what approach to computing (and life) prompts a person to use a Linux box on a daily basis? I’ll share my insights based on personal experiences and other observations accumulated over years of living the Linux lifestyle full time.

Measures to optimise the power management code and fully support the Turbo Core function of recent AMD six-core processors increase the data throughput and processing speed of Linux 2.6.35. Further kernel additions include tracing interfaces for KVM, another kernel configuration program, and functions for de-fragmenting the working memory.

If you've read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui's chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I've known of it, I've used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.

Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit. Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPressWordPressWordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.

LXer Feature: 25-July-2010

Troy: Peter, to begin, as a first time attendee of Akademy, what was your initial impression of the event? Peter: Okay, there were a lot more people than I expected. When I arrived at the university grounds, I met a guy who was also looking for the entrance, and we started talking. This was the starting point for talking and it just continued from there - talking and talking and meeting people everywhere. It was really nice that I could talk about an issue I was having with KMail. Many other people also use KMail and knew what I was talking about. read more

One of the best references for Linux and UNIX system administrators over the years has been the "Handbooks" (either Linux Administration Handbook (LAH) or UNIX System Administration Handbook (USAH) at various points). But the last edition was published in 2000 (as USAH), and included information on then-current Red Hat Linux 6.2 and FreeBSD 3.4. A new, updated version, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition (ULSAH), is due out any day now, and the principal authors, Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, and Ben Whaley, agreed to answer some questions for LWN readers. Below are their answers on the book, the impact of Linux, the future for UNIX and Linux, and more.

If you read the previous R600g news post from less than an hour ago this should come as no surprise, but: the ATI R600g Gallium3D driver has finally reached the milestone of being able to properly run glxgears. This GLX demo is simple and useless as a benchmark, but is an important development milestone and as talked about in that previous news piece, Jerome hopes to tackle texture support within a few days so then we will see more interesting OpenGL capabilities and we are potentially just days away from being able to run Quake with R600g and a modern ATI graphics processor (you can already do so with an open-source driver stack using the classic Mesa R600/700 driver).

As an open source enthusiast, there are thousands of great tools available to me. However, some things in Linux are harder than they need to be. The world of open source has come a long way, but keeping an eye on what is going on outside of the open source arena can show that there are still areas where we need to improve. Here are three tools from IBM and Apple that I would love to see incorporated into the next great Linux distribution.