Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

Intel is working on a fully native x86 version of Android 2.2 and plans to ship its version of the Google-backed mobile operating system to developers in the next two months. Given how slowly Android 2.2, codenamed "Froyo," has come to market, that would make x86 one of the first platforms to get the Linux-based OS. Android had originally been written for ARM-based processors, which are in use in the vast majority of smartphones -- including all of the major HTC Android phones and Google's Nexus One, the only phone now running Android 2.2.

Virtualisation doesn't have to be scary. It isn't the sole domain of the enterprise, or cloud computing, or server farms. It's just as useful, and just as manageable, as the average desktop, and there now seem to be almost as many ways to virtualise Linux as their are distributions themselves. You could pay money, for example, and buy a workstation product from either VMware or Parallels, both of which have excellent performance, support and some advanced features. Or you could try their open source equivalents, the wonderful VirtualBox and Qemu.

As I mentioned in an earlier Linux Journal article, I decided to cut the apron strings with my television provider over a year ago. Bye bye, DISH Satelite TV! Man, you should have heard them whimper. "But sir, is there anything we can do to keep your business?".

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As open source becomes more widely accepted, an obvious growth path for them is to be bought by a bigger, traditional software company. The concern then becomes: how does the underlying open source code fare in those circumstances?

Your editor had the pleasure of giving a keynote talk at the 2010 LinuxTag, immediately prior to Mark Shuttleworth's keynote - a position described by more than one person as being Mark's warmup act. That role must have been successfully carried out; Mark's talk was, indeed, well received from the start. Topics ranged from the familiar (cadence) to issues like quality, with a look at upcoming Ubuntu design features as well.

Commandlinefu.com collects your useful command-line one liners and shares them with the rest of the world. I check it out every so often (if you're really dedicated, there are Twitter and RSS feeds),

What’s the one thing that you see criminals, spies and other mysterious individuals doing just prior to embarking on a caper? If you said, “synchronize their watches” you guessed correctly. And, why do they do it? Because timing is everything. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) does the same thing for your systems and for the same reasons; it keeps them synchronized.

LXer Feature: 27-June-2010

In the LXWR this week we have a Mac devotee moving to Linux, you want Linux to run what?, Marcel Gagne talks about when Linux was fun, Phoronix does a five-way Linux distro comparison and Steven Rosenberg says goodbye to Ubuntu..sort of. Enjoy!

The iPhone 4 may be on sale now, but the Android community is doing a good job of keeping quite a lot of the spotlight on itself - mainly thanks to Verizon Wireless' aggressive promotion of its flagship phones, Droid Incredible from HTC and the new Droid X from Motorola. Such efforts are beginning to show results in terms of Android's market share and developer commitments, and could even create some enterprise momentum soon, say analysts.

In this post, I’ll talk about the REMOVE_ASSET and INSTALL_ASSET mechanisms that can be invoked by Google via Android’s GTalkService to not only remotely remove applications from an Android device but also remotely install new applications.

I touched briefly upon OS independence when I wrote a little bit about the Q10 minimalistic word processor a few weeks ago and PyRoom, another minimalistic word processor, last week. Or, if I didn’t, then I certainly should have done. The point that I’m trying to make is that as both of those applications save their data as straight unmodified text files; those file are obviously readable on pretty much any system out there, from computers to word processors, tablet devices to mobile phones – hell, I think that even my Microwave displays text files. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly?

Until a few years ago, hardly a day went by without an article being featured on Linux Today about how “the year of Linux” had arrived. Every Linux user with a blog was willing to bet, year after year, that this was finally going to be “the year of Linux.” This was going to be the year when the public got wise, quit paying the Microsoft tax and moved over to the obviously superior Linux. And year after year, it didn’t happen.

Mozilla says it has "no official position" on NPAPI Pepper, the revamped browser plug-in API developed by Google for use with Native Client, a plug-in that runs native code inside its Chrome browser. Google is also using Pepper to integrate Adobe's Flash player and a PDF reader with Chrome, and in announcing its plan to bundle Flash with Chrome, the company seemed to indicate that Mozilla was backing the API. "We are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API," Google said in a blog post.

Wine, the project that lets Linux users run Windows apps within Linux, has released a major update that fixes a number of bugs and includes 64-bit support. Wine 2.1 includes a new set of icons, a number of fixes for video rendering – improving Windows gaming – and better font anti-aliasing and handling of desktop link files. Wine has always been a controversial app in the Linux community with purists claiming Wine is exactly what Linux doesn't need – a Windows crutch that just undermines claims that Linux can do anything Windows can do. Rather than relying on Wine, the argument goes, Linux users should concentrate on improving the Linux apps that cover the same territory.

Intel has confirmed that it will create a native version of Android 2.2 that will run on devices sporting the Atom chipsets. Intel's Renee James told APCmag.com that an X86 version of Android 2.2 – codenamed FroYo – would be available for developers this summer. "Our expectation is that (native x86 Android) will be based on the Froyo release and will be available this summer to developers," said James.

LinuxTag 2010 is the host of a Debian miniconf; that, in turn, was where relatively new Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli delivered a relatively high-energy "state of Debian" talk. According to Stefano, Debian is doing great, but can do better yet; he has some ideas for how to make the project better.

For several years now, Sprint has been in next-to-last place among U.S. wireless network providers. But that might eventually change if Sprint continues to offer smartphones like the HTC EVO 4G ($200 with a new contract), a well-reviewed Android 2.1 handset boasting several firsts and currently a Sprint exclusive in the U.S.

A little over a month ago we released the Linux port of Osmos, promising statistics on our sales and downloads. We wanted to find out - from a financial perspective, for our studio - “is it worth porting games to Linux?” The short, simple answer… is “yes.” Did we get rich off it? No. But the time we invested was repaid, with room for margin of error, and possibly with a little extra at the end. Allow me to break it down..

Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It's approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.