Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the common complaints about Linux is that there are too many different editions (or “distributions”) to choose from, and only a hardcore nerd can tell them apart. Well, it's true, but you can safely ignore 99 per cent of them. Welcome to The Register's guaranteed impartiality-free guide. Tomorrow, we'll tell you how to get them, burn them and set them up to dual-boot with Windows and on Wednesday there will be a guide to tweaking your new setup and getting it ready for use.

A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell's interest in experimenting with new platforms.

LXer Feature: 21-June-2010

In this week's Roundup we have a battle between KDE3 and KDE4,Linux versus the world: The unwinnable war?, Dell removes "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® " statement from website and today marks my three year anniversary as E-i-C for LXer. You know, I think my grammar has gotten a little better.

My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II -- in Europe, in Ron's case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.

Your prime directive as a system administrator is to keep those systems whipped into shape and running without interfering with user’s daily operations. Sometimes the systems put you in a difficult position when their disks overflow with files. The simple solution is to remove files. But, what if you can’t do that? You have to add disk to your ailing system. But, how and where do you add that space? And, how do you keep this from happening again?

Earlier this week AMD released the Catalyst 10.6 driver that on the Linux side of the table had finally made use by default of their new 2D acceleration architecture, offered official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, and formalized their OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support. Since the release of the Catalyst 10.6 Linux driver, we have been running a new set of tests on their new ATI 2D acceleration architecture, but the results are not what you may expect when compared to the open-source ATI Linux driver.

Over the past decade, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has been supporting the Apache community’s development of some of the most ubiquitous products in Open Source, benefiting billions of users worldwide. Its collaborative, consensus-based development process, affectionately dubbed "The Apache Way", is one of its secrets to creating dozens of high quality, industry-leading software products that all began with a single project.

Apple's iPad was hardly the first tablet to appear on the scene, but it is unquestionably responsible for the recent spike in tablet development. Now it looks as if Ubuntu — the Linux distro everybody loves to hate, but uses anyway — will be entering the field as well.

When you work with large amounts of photos, it can get tiresome to have to manually manage the file and directory structures. To help resolve this, many people use photo managers such as Picasa, DigiKam, and iPhoto. There are several options for Linux, so we’ve decided to check out each of the major photo management options for Linux to see exactly what each one offers. Today we’ll be comparing Picasa, F-Spot, Shotwell, DigiKam, and Geeqie.

Google has released version 6.0.437.1 of Chrome for Windows and Linux, and version 6.0.437.2 for Mac OS X into the WebKit-based browser's developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel). The latest update addresses a number of bugs found in the previous Dev update and integrates a PDF reader into the browser.

Last week prior to heading over to Germany for LinuxTag, I had ran a new set of ATI R500 Gallium3D benchmarks with an ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics card and comparing the latest Mesa/Gallium3D graphics driver performance in the Mesa 7.9-devel Git code with both the Gallium3D and classic Mesa DRI drivers to the older Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The ATI "R300g" driver as its known continues to advance, and over the past week this driver has pushed forward even more. Here is another set of ATI Gallium3D tests.

Google has added an experimental branch to the VP8 code tree, encouraging developers to begin work on the next incarnation of its newly open sourced video codec. Mountain View open sourced its $124.6 million VP8 codec less than a month ago in an effort to create a royalty free standard for web video, rolling it into a larger media format known as WebM, and WebM has already turned up in developer-build and beta browsers from Mozilla, Opera, and Google itself.

Moonlight, the de facto open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight platform for Linux that leverages Mono, is nearing its 3.0 release. Moonlight 2.0 was just released a half-year ago, but Moonlight 3.0 Preview 7 was just released and it's offering up more features.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

Some rumours have emerged that IBM is considering an OS/2 comeback and I'm filled with the same mixed feelings that always emerge whenever the subject is raised. Would I want OS/2 back on my desktop now? Not really. Have these rumours got me a bit excited? Absolutely. In fact, I'm willing to take a guess about what the new OS/2 might be.

Making an image copy of your system disk is a great way to create a backup. With the cost of portable USB drives at all time lows, you could keep a couple around for rotation purposes. If your main drive does crash, you could be back up and running in a matter of minutes. Now all that's left is making the actual image copy. There are lots of ways to accomplish this task, and we'll spell a few of them out to help you along.

Have you always wanted to set up your own music station to stream your latest music collection to your friends or colleagues? Have you been thinking lately of setting up an always-on music streaming server so that you can just open up your web browser and listen to your favorite tracks? A music server is great in a dormitory, laboratory or office where the file server can double up as the music server! I will show you how using Zeya.

The enterprise software vendor consolidation trend has now reached the open source corner of the market, with Consona's announcement that it is acquiring Compiere, Inc.,

First quarter global notebook PC revenues grew to $31.1 billion, representing a 31 percent year-to-year increase, says DisplaySearch. Leading the way were mini-note PCs (netbooks), and slates (tablets), which together grew 56.4 percent year-over-year, but tablets may soon start cutting into netbook sales, says the study.

If something doesn't work, try something else. That's a lesson that the FSF needs to embrace, if it wants to succeed with a mainstream audience. Being the Party of Gno, and trying to tell users to just avoid Windows, Cloud Computing, iPads, and proprietary software isn't cutting it. It's time to come up with credible alternatives or be satisfied with remaining irrelevant to the majority of users.