Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Amazon released its Kindle app for Android, while announcing a multimedia version for the iPhone and dropping the price of the Kindle, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Android 2.2 rolled out to Nexus One users, but Sprint suspended its own rollout to the Evo 4G, says eWEEK, and Samsung announced plans for a Froyo update to its Galaxy S.

It was over six weeks ago that rumors, later confirmed as true, circulated stating that Mandriva's financial situation was so dire that it was considering buy-out offers to try to avoid having to close its doors. This news struck many Mandriva users and developers hard and all held their breath waiting for further news and the release of Mandriva Spring 2010.1. Although the final release of 2010.1 is still absent, news that Mandriva S.A. might be saved was met with sighs of relief and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Several weeks ago, I ended a comparison of the KDE 4 and 3 desktops by saying "Unless a project takes over KDE 3 development, sooner or later it may become unusable with the latest generation of computers." What I had missed -- free software being a large place where events move at near-light speeds -- was that a project had already taken over KDE 3 development. It's called Trinity KDE, and is organized by Timothy Pearson, who has been releasing Kubuntu releases that use KDE 3.5 for some time. According to Facebook rumor, he has been planning to revive KDE 3 for some time.

Last Autumn I volunteered to review Windows 7. But in the following weeks, I found Linux to be preferable in many ways. This is pretty significant progress, and outside the 'community' has gone largely unnoticed, too - I haven't seen all that many Ubuntu stories in the Wall Street Journal. But what comes next is going to be pretty challenging for everyone involved – and that's what I'll look at here. But first a bit of history, starting with a confession.

On of the great aspects of Qt is that it is cross platform. Not only across desktops, but also across devices. The Qt make tool, qmake, can be configured to cross compile for different architectures using different compilers and different settings. How to do all this is reasonably straight forward, but you need to know how to get started. When you've downloaded and extracted Qt you find yourself facing a configure script with loads of options. Trying to get control of them all can feel overwhelming the first time, so it is good to know what is about to happen.

In previous articles I have hinted that at Phoronix we are working to take advantage of the Btrfs file-system within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic to provide an interesting feature that will further expand our automated testing capabilities, but how does this file-system come into play? Well, here is what's being worked on and it should be of terrific value to many people. One of the features of Btrfs not found in other Linux file-systems (like EXT4) is support for copy-on-write snapshots / sub-volumes. With this Btrfs snapshotting support is the ability to mount different snapshots in a very easy manner and since they are copy-on-write, the disk storage requirements are not extreme

Cisco announced an enterprise-focused tablet based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom, using Intel's upcoming x86 Android port. Due in the first quarter of 2011, the Cius offers a seven-inch touchscreen, 32GB of flash, 3G and 802.11 a/b/g/n communications, a 720p-capable front-facing videocam, a five-megapixel still camera, plus an optional HD audio docking station equipped with a telephone handset.

Cross-platform efforts to provide interoperability with Windows on Linux systems may cease to be of importance in future as the acceptance of alternative OSes widens, say industry watchers. Linux users have relied on various methods to access Windows programs, one of which is the Wine project. The open source effort offers users a way of running some Windows programs by providing a substitute layer that encompasses APIs (application programming interfaces) and DLLs (dynamic-link libraries) for the Windows kernel.

It's common knowledge that Linux has a fair number of file systems. Some of these are unappreciated and can be very useful outside their "comfort zone". OCFS2 is a clustered file system initially contributed by Oracle and can be a great back-end file system for general, shared storage needs.

Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader. Frields joined Red Hat in February 2008, replacing Max Spevack, another Red Hat employee who ran the open source Linux development product from February 2006 until Frields took over. Smith will take over the FPL position (which is a full-time job with a Red Hat paycheck) to steer the development of Fedora 14, something that Frields already got the ball rolling on.

Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.

If making money from open source was hard, extracting it from clouds might prove to be even more difficult. Particularly when your main rival on the x64 server is none other than Microsoft. Red Hat got its start as Linux magazine publisher that tucked a Linux CD in the back, and then evolved into the largest commercial Linux distributor in the world. The company added middleware from JBoss and created other middleware, such as its Enterprise MRG messaging, grid and realtime Linux variant, and virtualization software for desktops and servers. And now it has to position itself as an alternative to Microsoft as the platform upon which customers can build x64-based clouds.

As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of educational software and I've written quite about about various programs in the past. But, as a programmer, I'm also a big fan of any program that makes computer programming more approachable by younger children. So, when I heard about Scratch, I was pretty enthusiastic.

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you're comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate. However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there's nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.

For many enterprises, the server OS presents a quagmire: They don't want to pay too much for the server OS on which they rely, but at the same time, they don't want their server OS makers going out of business. The big question is whether there's enough money in open source software to build strong and stable enterprise OS makers. If you run your business using Microsoft's Windows server OSes, then you really don't have to worry. The Redmond giant is rolling in cash thanks in no small part to the high prices it charges for its desktop and server OSes and the client access licenses it requires to connect one to the other.

First came Android, the mobile OS. Then came the first Android phone, the G1. Then came the Nexus One, the first true gPhone — Google top to bottom. And it just kept going from there. Today, not yet three years into development, Android is available on dozens of devices, from phones to e-readers to netbooks and more. It's taken the #2 spot in the mobile OS world — well ahead of the "unkillable" iPhone — and reportedly is slated to take on Apple's other hot toy of the moment. Given the explosive growth and variety of devices sporting the OS, it comes as little surprise when a manufacturer announces they have a new Android offering in the works. Unless, that is, if the manufacturer is a networking giant and the announcement comes out of nowhere.

As we reported last week, Red hat has just reported another robust financial quarter--one of many achieved in a row. Earnings came in at 15 cents a share, or $24.1 million, compared to 12 cents a share expected by analysts, on total revenue of $209.1 million. Once again, Red Hat not only maintained its key subscribers but grew subscriptions and renewals.