Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

We love Linux, and want to make it easier for others to do so, too. This first edition of the Lifehacker Pack for Linux includes our favorite apps that get things done and make your desktop great. Linux isn't quite like Windows or Mac, as there are many, many distributions, usually running on one of two desktop systems (GNOME or KDE). We've chosen to write this list up from the perspective of a standard, GNOME-based Ubuntu user. Ubuntu is what the Lifehacker editors use, it's what most of our Linux-leaning readers use, and it's generally popular and frequently updated. Many of these apps can be downloaded and installed on other Linux systems, of course—check the Download link, or search out its name in your own system's package installer.

Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla's Director of Developer Relations and Open Source Evangelist, has announced that he has taken a new role at the company, the non-profit organisation behind the popular open source Firefox web browser. In a post on his personal blog, Blizzard, the former Software Team Lead for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, says that, over the last few months, he's "been focused on one aspect of that job more than others – helping to drive the web-facing side of our platform."

The PC-BSD development team have announced the release of version 8.1, the "Hubble Edition", of their open source operating system. According to the developers, the first point update to the 8.0 branch of PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD 8.1 and includes a number of enhancements and improvements over the previous release.

Traditional mobile phone carriers love to play games with syncing phones to PCs. But it's a new game now with Android---There are many ways to sync your Droid phone with your Linux PC, all easy and using standard Linux applications. Paul Ferrill shows us how.

Spotify is a streaming music service that previously was only available to Windows and Mac users. Spotify offered a way for music lovers to enjoy their favorite tunes on their computers and gadgets legally. But Linux users were left out in the cold... until July 12.

In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.

One of the most compelling reasons for using free or open source software is that it provides an opportunity for the user of the product to add whatever features he wants or needs. But the ability to add features is constrained by a project's size and complexity, and the nature of available documentation. So, while GIMP is one of the most well-known and successful open source software projects, its huge code base can be intimidating.

When your camera is 500 feet up hanging from a balloon, how do you tell it when to shoot photos? Or you want to shoot some time-lapse photos of clouds, the changing light on a mountain, a slow-moving highway repair crew...Akkana Peck shows us how to remote-control all kinds of Canon camera functions using CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit.

We've covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin's "Browse the Web without a Trace", January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I'm justified in featuring it this month.

Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.

NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source. NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.

Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved - for desktop systems. The situation in the fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next big problem to be solved.

Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.

The Linux and open source community provides countless user and server applications. They also provide solutions to help support these and other applications, even to support non-technical departments. You'll find many help desk or customer service trouble ticketing systems in the FOSS (free and open source software) world. Right now we'll review 5 different solutions.

When it comes to trouble-shooting an application printing things to the screen, or to a file, is not as full-featured as attaching a debugger to a running device, but there is a time and place for printing a simple message to the screen.

Microsoft has cracked open .NET a little further and surrendered some control over its development platform to the open-source community. Latest code for company's take on Python and Ruby – fine-tuned for .NET, IronPython, and IronRuby – has been quietly released under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) license.

Earlier this month an Intel employee began asking about making optimizations to Mesa's shader compiler (on the Mesa-dev list). This Intel employee was not one of their usual Open-Source Technology Center developers commonly working on their Linux graphics stack as part of Keith Packard's team, but instead it was an uncommon name: Benjamin Segovia. Ben is from Intel's Advanced Graphics Lab team where previously he worked on ray-tracing techniques, but as of late seems to be at least dedicating some of his Intel effort towards optimizing Mesa.

Do you have problems keeping time synchronized on your network? Do your systems tend to drift? You can resolve the time drift problem by using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to keep all your system’s time in sync with each other. What’s that? You’ve tried using NTP to find that some of your systems still set themselves apart from the pack. You can go one step further and create your own NTP server for your network.

he London Stock Exchange, which is currently in the process of moving its trading platforms to Linux, has lost its chief technology officer, Robin Paine. Anyone trying to contact Paine via email receives the following message, “Robin Paine no longer works for the London Stock Exchange”.

Not long ago, the overwhelming issue on the Linux desktop was catching up with Windows and OS X. Partly, the concern was usability, but it also included the need for a rich ecosystem of utilities. But some time in the last few years, that goal was reached, so quietly that exactly when is impossible to say. Some might still quibble over a feature or two, but the competitiveness of the free desktop is strong enough that equaling rivals no longer seems a major concern.