Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In two reports filed from this week's OSCON conference, The Register says that Google will open Android's internal development kit to contributors, and that Linux maintainers are holding tough in negotiating with the search giant regarding Android's readmission to the kernel. Meanwhile, Linux 2.6.35 RC6 was released, featuring enhancements to network scalability, memory management, and sleep-wait detection.

Google announced today via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.

At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O'Reilly Media's Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O'Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their "dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source".

At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including "random motorcycle adventurer" Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation. read more

I've already covered tar and all the wonderful ways to use it, but it's not the only tool at your disposal. Another popular backup tool is afio. Depending on your distribution, it already may be installed.

Several patches submitted by a Google developer will enable the kernel to push considerably more data through network cables on multi-core systems. Some of the LAN and Wi-Fi drivers also promise greater throughput, or to use less power, due to various driver enhancements.

Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it's also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian's package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.

When Oracle began the acquisition of Sun, few doubted that MySQL was the main asset of interest. With MySQL still breathing six months later, users hoped Sun's other projects would survive as well. But despite Oracle's early claims and intermittent assurances that OpenSolaris would remain open source software, very little else has been said. Some, including the OpenSolaris Governing Board, are beginning to think OpenSolaris will be allowed to die a slow and quiet death.

The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint variant of Ubuntu Linux released a scaled-down, fast-booting, site-specific browser (SSB) version. The "Peppermint Ice" distro switches to Google's Chromium as the default browser, and while still supporting native apps, is even more focused on web-based apps than is Peppermint.

Although my intent is not to start the next GNOME/KDE-level war, it seems there must be a happy medium between total desktop insecurity and total desktop unusability. Linux offers so many ways to secure data that it's important to realize it's okay for folks to have different needs and desires.

PulseAudio was supposed to cure desktop audio in Linux. It promised useful features like device routing and individual volume controls. It may well do these things; in my experience it has been frustrating, opaque, and unreliable. Some have claimed that Ubuntu's implementation is flawed; I haven't looked at other distros yet, so I don't know.

In 2005, the Debian project voted to declassify messages on the debian-private mailing list after a period of three years. That is easier said than done, apparently. The General Resolution (GR) calls for volunteers to do the work of declassification, and few Debian Developers seem eager to do the work required to make it happen.

Google will crack open more of Android's development process but keep new versions of its mobile OS closed for competitive reasons. The giant will change Android's Native code Development Kit (NDK) so that contributed code joins the publicly available Android source tree rather than going into Google's private tree.

In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today. The reason for the desktop's success is obvious. A desktop requires much less knowledge than a command line, and is suited to maybe 80% of the most common tasks that an average user needs. If the desktop needs much larger applications, that hardly seems a problem on a modern computer.

Have you ever wanted to look inside a tar.gz file but without expanding it? Have you ever wanted to just dump files in a .tar.gz file without having to organize it and periodically tar and gzip this data? This article presents another REALLY useful user-space file system, archivemount. It allows you to mount archives such as .tar.gz files as a file system and interact with it using normal file/directory tools.

Banshee, the open-source media player that's built with Mono and Gtk#, is working towards their 1.8 milestone but today they have put out a new development snapshot. What's special about this new development release, Banshee 1.7.3, is that it adds support for Amazon's MP3 store and brings other enhancements too.

Many people still cling to the notion that Linux is for 30-year-old male geeks. While that may be true, there are plenty of other people of all ages, ethnicities, and genders who enjoy Linux and other free and open source software. For the most part, the operating systems a child uses are determined by the child’s parents and school. As the parent and Linux user yourself, you may prefer your child to use Linux at home.

Acer is switching its consumer-oriented EP101TC tablet (pictured) from Windows CE to Android, claims NetbookNews. Meanwhile, HP has trademarked the word "Palmpad," which is likely to be the name for its upcoming WebOS-based tablet, says The Inquirer.

Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other. This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog the each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the value of simplicity in systems administration. The more simple a setup is, the more likely it will be stable and easy to fix and maintain. If a setup is so complicated that it takes serious brainpower just to comprehend, chances are that there is going to be something wrong somewhere. Obviously, systems administrators have been dealing with complexity for a long time, and the basic sysadmin toolbox reflects the lean towards keeping it simple.