Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When you add text to a photo in GIMP, sometimes it comes out looking flat and boring. Akkana Peck explore three ways of adding an extra dimensions to your images and text.

Google's Android will continue to run an unauthorized version of Java for the foreseeable future — something the Apache Software Foundation has warned will fragment the community. Talks between the ASF and database giant Oracle on tests that could certify the open source version of Java running on Android have made no progress, the group told us.

Intel's Eric Anholt has been working on writing a GLSL2 compiler for their open-source Mesa graphics stack. Mesa's GL Shading Language compiler has been limited to version 1.4 support, but Eric is making headway in supporting version 2.0. In response to the recent ATI R300 GLSL discussion, Eric has provided an update on the Intel efforts.

In the roughly five years that the Git distributed version control system has been around, it has gained quite a following. But at its core, Git is command-line oriented, which doesn't necessarily suit all of its users. Along the way, various GUI interfaces to Git have been created, including two Tcl/Tk-based tools that come with Git. Giggle is a GUI front-end for Git that is based on GTK+, which released a 0.5 version in late April.

Learn the correct location for files under the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) on a Linux® system and learn how to find important files and commands. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to explore file organization and management.

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

Qt 4.7 has not been released yet, but the curious can download the beta or even grab a snapshot from git. The big news in this point seven release is Qt Quick - a new approach to user interfaces. Before I get carried away and start throwing screenshots at you, let's step back and look at today's user interfaces. On the desktop, standard buttons, sliders, text fields and windows still serve a purpose. However, on all gadgets running Linux these days, gray buttons are considered boring. Instead, the users want fluid, animated, glossy user interfaces that go with the branding of the device. This is where Qt Quick fits in.

Fragmentation is often cited as a major challenge for the Linux platform and mobile software ecosystem. The word gets thrown around a lot and tends to be used as a catch-all phrase to describe a wide range of loosely connected issues. The rapid growth of the Android ecosystem and the significant number of new Android devices that are reaching the market with heavy software customizations has raised some questions about whether Google's Linux platform is going to succumb to the fragmentation menace. In this article, we'll take a look at what fragmentation means for mobile Linux and how Google's operating system addresses some of the biggest challenges.

Mozilla open source evangelist Chris Blizzard has unloaded on both Apple and Google for abusing the HTML5 moniker, confusing netizens everywhere, and undermining the slow march towards truly open web standards. Blizzard is so peeved at Apple and Google that he even goes so far as to lavish praise on Microsoft for its belated embrace of open standards.

One good thing about Linux system is that you can change almost every single aspect of the system. Dislike the dull wallpaper? Change it. Not happy with the default splash screen? Change it. Getting bored of the default panel menu (the place where you access Applications, Places and System)? You can change it as well.

Fifteen years ago today, on the 8th of June, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf launched PHP with a post to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Usenet news group. He announced version 1.0 of his "Personal Home Page Tools", software that was originally intended for managing job applications on a web site. As Lerdorf made the tools available as open source code (originally under the GPL, since version 4.0 under the PHP Licence) his PHP software, written in C, was bound to find a wide audience.

Linux' share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent, says Net Applications, making Linux the only OS to gain in May. Meanwhile, Linux server revenue share grew to 16.8 percent, says IDC, and Linux is now running on 91 percent of the 500 fastest supercomputers. Linux has soared in recent years in the embedded world, especially with the Linux-based Android giving it a boost in smartphone sales. More fun is on the way, according to ABI Research, which recently projected that Linux-based mobile operating systems, led by Android, will own 33 percent of the global smartphone market by 2015, with a growth rate that is faster than the robust smartphone market at large.

Not too long back, I highlighted my feelings on KDE, detailing some of its shortcomings and talking about why it’s not necessarily the de facto desktop I’d recommend to people. In this piece, I want to show you that the GNOME desktop has a number of issues that need attention as well. I’ll outline eight areas in GNOME that need to be improved for a better user experience.

Apple Safari's new "make web go away" button is based on an open source project distributed under the Apache 2 license. The Safari Reader – which debuted yesterday with version 5 of the Apple browser — is built using the source code for Readability, an Apache project from Arc90 Labs. In the wake of the browser's release, Arc90 praised Apple for including a tool that mimics its own — a tool that strips a webpage of its ads and site branding, reducing to text and core images — and only later did the outfit realize that Steve Jobs and cult had actually dipped into its code.

In my last column, I mentioned the idea of disposable HPC. The concept is based on building clusters using low cost nodes (less than $500 each). Because lower cost nodes will run slower and have less cores than the big server nodes, they would need to be smaller and use much less power. They will also need a lowerThermal Design Power (TDP) to accommodate dense packaging designs.

The conventional wisdom about Linux is that it isn’t owned or created by any one company, but instead a whole group of players that give and take as needed. That said, there are several major companies that are readily identifiable as the biggest corporate sponsors of Linux, who market Linux most directly to enterprises, and who are in many people’s minds synonymous with Linux in both the server and desktop markets.

Just about anyone who’s attempted dual booting or another non-standard boot setup has, at some point, made their own system unbootable. If the words “GRUB Error 2? or “No Valid System Disk Found” make you break into a cold sweat, then fear no more. Now you can include the Super Grub Disk in your geek arsenal, and say goodbye to boot errors. SGD can work with Linux or Windows systems to bypass or repair the broken bootloaders that have kept many of us awake at night, and all in under 2MB. That’s right, it can even run from a floppy disk.

In preparation for this year's annual motorcycle trip, I purchased an Acer Aspire One Intel Atom N450 netbook. I'd been looking at netbooks for a while, and finally made my choice. I picked the Acer because of its decent price, reasonable battery life, the fact that it was powerful enough to do everything I needed for mobile blogging, and because it will fit nicely in one of the BMW's saddle bags. What follows are a few notes and suggestions for installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 10.04 on this model.

Linux's share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent, says Net Applications, making Linux the only OS to improve its position in May. Meanwhile, Linux server share dropped to 20.8 percent, but revenue share grew to 16.8 percent, says IDC, and UC Berkeley's Top500 survey shows Linux running on 91 percent of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

Profiting from Linux doesn't involve an obvious winning formula. There are as many different business models as there are distributions, and you seldom find much overlap between those that are working. Instead, you find something more like the world of medieval patronage. It's a place where the great distribution families fight for favour, sponsoring masked balls and conferences, while trying to attract geek heroes to work under their flags.