Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux is blessed with several different package managers, so using a different distribution often means learning a different way to install, update, and remove software. Use Juliet Kemp's handy package manager cheatsheet to get going with a minimum of fuss.

Let’s say you are doing research on your desktop browser and you need to leave your computer to run some errand. Wouldn’t it be great if you can sync what you are reading to your mobile phone so that you can continue your research on the move? If you are using an Android phone (running Froyo) and Google Chrome/Firefox, you just got yourself a great deal.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project occupies a unique niche in the free software community. As Richard Stallman is fond of reminding us, much of what we run on our systems comes from the GNU project; much of that code, in turn, is owned by the Free Software Foundation. But most of the GNU code is relatively static; your editor wisely allowed himself to be talked out of the notion of adding an LWN weekly page dedicated to the ongoing development of GNU cat. GCC, though, is FSF-owned, is crucial infrastructure, and is under heavy ongoing development. As a result, it will show pressures that are only seen in a few places. This article will look at a couple of recent episodes, related to licensing and online identity, from the GCC community.

Android has continued to gain smartphone OS market share this spring, gaining four percentage points from February through May to take 13 percent of the market, says ComScore. Meanwhile, a recent Pew report shows that 40 percent of Americans are now using mobile phone Internet services, up from 32 percent in 2009.

A flaw in the module pam_motd (message of the day), which displays the daily motto and other information after login (to the shell), can be exploited under Ubuntu to expand access rights. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access. Ubuntu has already provided a patch for the flaw. Operators of multi-users systems should install it as soon as possible because directions are already in circulation via Twitter on how to exploit the flaw to get access rights to the password file /etc/shadow. The file can then not only be read, but changed.

Android's share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android's share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.

Power management features for Radeon graphics chips, the first groundwork for supporting 3D with Evergreen GPUs, H264 decoding in Intel's Ironlake driver and the support of Intel's next generation of desktop and notebook chips, are some of the major graphics driver advancements of Linux 2.6.35.

The fragmentation of Linux has become a hot topic in recent weeks as industry leaders debate how the community can collaborate to compete against single, vertical operating systems without creating an ecosystem that pulls the community in too many directions at once to be truly effective. As FOSS developers work at a fever pitch to create Linux-based OSes, handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, and mobile phones, the point at which they join forces can make the difference between getting a leg up on other operating systems and lagging behind.

I took ZaReason's Teo netbook, running Ubuntu 10.04, on a 2500-mile road trip. How practical is a tiny netbook? Does it make sense in real life, doing real jobs? Yessirree it does. A couple of months ago the nice ZaReason people sent me their Teo Ubuntu netbook to review. I was favorably impressed and gave it a positive review. Then they let me take it on my vacation, so little Teo traveled 2500 miles with us. This was the ultimate portability, performance, and battery test. How did Teo do? Splendidly.

Sabayon Linux is a very fun distribution based on Gentoo Linux. That tidbit of information may be one of the reasons Sabayon isn't more popular, although it shouldn't be. The mention of Gentoo usually invokes visions of difficulty and hours of compiling to Linux users. While that general assessment of Gentoo may be correct overall, it certainly isn't true of Sabayon. In fact, if it wasn't a known fact that Sabayon was based on Gentoo, many users might never realize it.

Google's Android mobile operating system got some significant performance improvements in version 2.2, codenamed Froyo. A high-performance JIT was introduced in Android's Dalvik runtime environment and the browser got some very deep optimizations. These enhancements make Android's performance more competitive than ever.

It is no secret that Linux is not a popular gaming platform. Despite that stigma, however, the open nature of Linux makes it easy, even for relatively inexperienced developers, to produce quality games. Therefore, while the number of high-rated Linux game titles may be small in comparison to Windows or gaming consoles, there are a number of quality free and commercial games out there. Most of the Linux sites that list games tend to highlight the same bunch; however, there are a few hidden gems that you may have missed but are still worth playing. In no particular order, here are four you might want to try.

Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that its Open Accessibility Workgroup is releasing IAccessible2 for Windows under the BSD license. It is also announcing the availability of AccProbe, a new desktop application testing tool that is available under the BSD license. AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation's Open Accessibility Workgroup.

LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones -- the Optimus One and Optumus Chic -- and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based "HTC Vision" emerged as the device's manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.

In a post on his blog, developer Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD-Jon, says that, "Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows." Among other things, Johansen, the co-founder and CTO at doubleTwist, is well known for his involvement in reverse engineering the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement and for doubleTwist, an iTunes-like application for managing and synchronising content on various devices including Android mobile phones, BlackBerry devices and Palm smartphones.

Google is updating the stable version of its Chrome Web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, addressing a handful of security vulnerabilities -- including four that could put users at risk simply by viewing a maliciously constructed image file. Those vulnerabilities addressed in Chrome 5.0.375.99 are rated as "high" severity, and include a high-memory corruption flaw that could be triggered by an invalid PNG image file. Google awarded security researcher Aki Helin $1,000 for the discovery of the vulnerability, which he reported June 7.

Have you ever felt that you are being watched in whatever you do online? Websites seem to know who you are and can greet you with your name when you visit them. Google always seems to know what you are searching, even before you started the search. Getting scared? Perhaps it’s time to turn your privacy filter on. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes.

In a move to bring screen-orientation awareness to mobile Web applications, Google has added accelerometer APIs to the WebKit HTML renderer. The APIs are based on the DeviceOrientation Event Specification, a W3C Web standard draft that describes DOM events for monitoring orientation changes and accelerometer activity.