Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.

Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.

Getting a bit tired of the font selection your distribution ships with? Want a bit more variety for presentations or publications? Tons of fonts are available under open licenses, but only if you know where to look. You'll find plenty of "free" fonts online, but not all of them are licensed under free or open source licenses. You have to be a bit careful when choosing free fonts if the licenses matter. Some are free to download but not distribute or modify, others are distributed without any licensing information at all. Those make me a bit nervous, as it's hard to tell whether someone is distributing a font legitimately or not. Other fonts have custom licenses that wouldn't qualify as OSI-compliant but might be good enough for personal or business use.

Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old. Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use. After all, Linux is more than a mere efficient platform. It can also provide a great deal of entertainment as well.

Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan "icculus" Gordon.

Firefox is a great open source web browser for Linux and other OSes, but have you checked out Opera? The Opera web browser runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You'll also find its available on many mobile phones and devices. Yes, its closed source, but its still free. Plus its packed with some great features. Right now we're going to look at six of them, not really in any particular order.

LG Electronics announced Monday that it plans to release an Android-based tablet computer by the fourth quarter of the year. The South Korea-based company said in a press release it would use Google's open source operating system but provided no pricing or technical details. The tablet is part of an upcoming line of about 10 smart devices and smartphones the company plans to release by the end of the year, the company said.

I know it sounds crazy. Fedora is more a test-bed for the enterprise-grade RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Fedora is cutting edge software that evokes images of users fixing more issues than enjoying user-friendly software. Fedora is for those who already know; Ubuntu is for those that do not. Right? Wrong. Those assumptions are wrong on numerous accounts... especially since the release of Fedora 13.

LXer Feature: 05-July-2010

Some of the big stories this past week included Cisco creating their own tablet, SCALE moves to a larger venue, Bruce Byfield asks is KDE 3 Zombified or Resurrected?, Run Chrome the easy way and Carla Schroder sets off a nuclear weapon in the LXer forums. Ever drink a bottle of Rum all to yourself? I hope all our U.S. readers had as much fun July 4th as I apparently did. Enjoy!

Many of us like to run more than one operating system on a single machine. It's a great way of experimenting with how the other half live, testing new distributions and even playing a few Windows-based games. But dual and triple booting has always been considered something of a dark art. This is because it involves the double jeopardy of messing around with your disk partition tables and playing with a pre-installed operating system. If things go wrong, it can be a disaster. Or at least, that's the popular perception.

One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we'll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.

It was patch day for the test environment, the group of servers dedicated to testing locally developed code before it is pushed into QA, and then into production. Patches for RedHat Enterprise Linux are applied using "yum update" in our setup, keeping it simple. Things were going well, no conflicts, no problems with our applications after the patches were applied. Then, one of the server's yum processes died with an error--a very familiar error. Yum was trying to install a patch that depended on a certain library being at a certain level. Our library in question was higher than the level required. That library had been updated prior to patch day, so rolling it back would break whatever package installed it. I was immediately flashed back ten years...dependency hell.

The OpenOffice.org Project developers have announced that future Linux and Unix versions of their open source office suite will use the popular GStreamer multimedia framework for audio and video content playback. The developers initially created a multimedia solution for OpenOffice using Sun's 'Java Media Framework' (JMF) for a backend. However, OpenOffice Graphics Project Lead Kai Ahrens notes that, "Time has shown that JMF seems to be a bit outdated today and that support for appropriate decoders is still not as good as expected."

The London Stock Exchange has delayed a move to the Linux-based Millenium Exchange trading platform by two months, in order to give clients and IT suppliers more time for development and testing. The Turquoise dark pool venue will go live on 4 October, instead of an original planned launch in August or September. The LSE UK cash equity market will move off the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect platform to Millennium Exchange on 1 November, instead of the September original plans.

I talk a lot about software in this blog but most of the discussion is at the personal level: I tried this, I experimented with that. I hardly ever talk about what I use for doing my IBM business and more rarely still do I talk about IBM’s internal policies about software use. This entry is different, and gives you a bit of a view inside the company. Like many individuals and members of organizations, IBMers use their browsers a lot for conducting business. Our desktop and laptop software environments have some common applications but also software specific to do our various jobs. And these jobs are varied, as there are about 400,000 IBM employees around the world.

The Ubuntu development team have announced that the next Ubuntu Developer Week will take place from the 12th to the 16th of July. Several online workshops will take place during the week, run by a variety of Ubuntu contributors and community members.

Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" will be a high-end format supporting 1280 × 760 resolution and requiring a 1GHz processor, essentially splitting the operating system into two platforms, says UnwiredView. Meanwhile, HTC and Sprint are readying an Android smartphone with a 2GHz processor and 1080p video recording, says OzcarGuide, while TmoNews says HTC is prepping an Android phone for T-Mobile with dual 800MHz processors.

In order to accommodate its steady growth over the past few years, the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will move to its new home, the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, starting with SCALE 9X in 2011. The new venue – larger than SCALE’s former home for the last four years at the Westin Los Angeles Airport – will allow SCALE to expand its offerings at SCALE 9X, slated for Feb. 18-20, 2011.

This month we take a look at a number of small form factor PCs that either come with Linux or would make a perfect fit for your favorite Linux distro. Each of the computers mentioned takes up very little space, but all deliver plenty of computing performance to handle everything from basic web browsing to watching videos. They make nice little firewalls, basic file/web/print servers, and quiet, low-power media servers. All of these units typically consume a fraction of the power of a conventional desktop and less than many traditional laptops.

Rockbox has been chugging along for years offering an open source firmware replacement for MP3 players. But how relevant is a firmware replacement for a type of device that's slowly going extinct? With the release of Rockbox 3.6 on June 3, now is a good time to check in on the state of Rockbox and the future of the project. Rockbox is considered stable for a range of more than 20 MP3 players from Apple, Archos, Cowon, iRiver, Olympus, SanDisk, Toshiba, and several others. The project also offers unstable ports for a number of other players, and ports are in progress (but largely non-functional) for another dozen or so.