Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The VideoLAN project is shipping version 1.1 of its open source VLC media player, adding hardware acceleration, WebM support, and faster HD decoding, but deleting Shoutcast support. Meanwhile, several industry reports suggest possible reasons for Adobe's temporary suspension of its beta 64-bit Linux version of Flash.

In this part of the series we complete our tour of the Grace algorithmic composition environment. The Targets: Grace can format its output for the following targets and file types : * Audio - Realtime and file (WAV, AIFF, etc) * MIDI - Realtime and file (MID) * OSC - Realtime * Csound - Realtime and score file * FOMUS - File (LilyPond and others). We've already considered Grace as a generator for MIDI files and realtime performance. Now let's see how it works with Csound.

LinOn Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn't need multiple layers of security software.

The NoSQL database that powers Facebook's popular FarmVille and Café World games is being released as a public open-source project. Zynga (the games' creator), NoSQL start-up NorthScale, and Korean games portal NHN have announced the membase open-source project at Membase.org, under an Apache 2.0 license. All three have contributed code.

Over the night on Phoronix an article was published entitled Is LGP Going The Way Of Loki Software? Linux Game Publishing has been around since 2001 when Loki Software had collapsed, but in recent months LGP has been eerily quiet, has stopped responding to inquiries from customers and other Linux gamers, and their only announced game ports are titles they began working on back in 2002 and 2003. This had led many to worry and wonder whether LGP is dead.

Canon's digital cameras, like all digital cameras, are really little computers. Certain features are enabled or disabled to justify different price points. It's all done in software, so the wizards of CHDK have created firmware to add new features (such as RAW support), and to do it safely without bricking your camera. Akkana Peck tells how in part one of this series.

Having file systems in the kernel has its pros and cons. Being able to write file systems in user-space also has some pros and cons, but FUSE (File System in Userspace) allows you to create some pretty amazing results. This article takes a very brief look at user-space file systems and FUSE.

Red Hat is not as precisely coupled to the economy as many other IT players. Throughout the Great Recession, Red Hat got its brim a little wet, but it never blew off Wall Street's head and got trampled in the mud like so many other companies. And as the economy recovers, the commercial Linux operating system and JBoss middleware distributor is growing at more or less the same rate – like nothing ever happened.

Last weekend a team of KDE volunteers (wo)manned a booth at LinuxTag. As hopefully many of you have already read about (and maybe already joined) on Wednesday the new Supporting Membership program was launched. There is some more content upcoming, but for now we'd like to give you all a quick taste of what those four days were like. On Tuesday afternoon, Eckhart Woerner and Frederik Gladhorn arrived at the KDE e.V. office in Berlin, not only to say hello and have quick look at the office but also to equip the boothbox. Then everybody took off to the fairground venue in order to set up the booth.

A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE. Today we are happy to announce the winning designs. Read on for details of how to download the labels to use. read more

Building on what we already know about Android development, we take a look at adding App Widget functionality for your phone's "desktop."

A few weeks ago, Google announced that Chrome OS will be ready for release this fall. Like many Google products, Chrome OS is designed to be a game changer. There are no desktop applications, as we typically think of them. Instead, the entire user experience happens within the browser. Naturally, some people think this is ridiculous while others see it as the natural evolution of technology. The success or failure of Chrome OS might even be a major factor in determining whether or not that evolution happens. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s how to build the Chrome OS image.

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.

The ARM processor family is a complicated one, with many different variations, leading to large numbers of separate sub-architectures in the Linux kernel. A quick glance at the ARM directory in a recent kernel tree shows nearly 70 different sub-architectures, each corresponding to a different CPU or system-on-chip (SoC). That complexity has made it harder to develop new products for new or existing ARM devices. A new organization that was formed by six silicon vendors, Linaro, seeks to simplify that landscape, and allow easier—faster—development of ARM-Linux-based products.

The Linux Foundation today announced the addition of new sessions and keynotes for LinuxCon 2010. The announcement finalizes the list of speakers and professional session planned for the conference, which will take place in Boston August 10-12. In the newly added sessions, Red Hat's Matthew Garret will discuss what he's learned from recent Android/Kernel community talks. MySQL author Monty Widenius will discuss why he forked with MariaDB. Canonical's Matt Asay will comment on the success of the Linux desktop. Hank Janssen of Microsoft will explain the physics behind the Hyper-V drivers built for Linux.

The last two years have seen the KDE desktop not only rewritten from scratch, but adding innovation after innovation. Sooner or later, the moment had to come when its breakneck pace of development slowed -- and, judging from the second beta, that moment is the upcoming 4.5 release. Not that KDE 4.5 is short of changes. However, most of them are either concerned with stability and appearance, or minor enhancements. By contrast, new applications or directions are few. You might call the 4.5 release a consolidation and refinement of the improvements made in previous releases in the KDE 4 series.

Unless you are one of the few who have upgraded to Froyo, or you have rooted your Android phone, chances are, you are still not able to tether using your Android phone. Those who are seeking a solution, PdaNet is the easiest way available to provide tethering to your Mac or PC. PdaNet allows you to, without rooting your phone (and thus keeping your warranty intact), share your phone’s data connection with your computer, enabling you to go online on it through your phone and its data plan. Obviously, this requires a data on your wireless plan for your phone, but if you’ve got an Android phone, in all likelihood you’ve also got data, so let’s move forward!

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we'll review several of these. Let's get started!

Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows. Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client's machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.

Were you imagining that "Paul Murphy" was going to apologize for his attacks on Groklaw or for being so wrong in his support of SCO? Or that he'd keep his promise to stop blogging if SCO lost? Or that he'd finally admit SCO has no case Au contraire. He continues to insult, and he predicts SCO, or a new owner of Novell, will surely succeed yet in fulfilling SCO's plot, in what he believes, if I've understood him, will be a legal Hail Mary pass to go down in history. The new FUD is his article, Suicide by Victory: More on SCO, in which he predicts gloom and doom for Linux because Novell won at the jury trial in Utah. I know. He's so funny. It makes no sense. But I'll answer him seriously anyway.