Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last month we reported on four indie games going open-source that were part of the pay-what-you-want "Humble Indie Bundle" after the developers experienced very favorable returns. The source-code to Aquaria has now been published with the source-code to the three other titles (Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture) already being available.

The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented - multiple different ARM-based CPU's from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them. Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there's additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.

Google has added the newly open-sourced VP8 video codec to the latest developer-channel build of its Chrome browser. The codec is already part of developer builds from Mozilla and Opera, and it was rolled into Chromium, the open source incarnation of Chrome, in late May. But this marks its debut in Chrome itself. Version 6.0.422.0, available in the developer channel here, also includes various bug fixes.

Yesterday, Stephen Kelly wrote on the dot about the successful KDE PIM sprint. Today, you can read more about him and his role as KJots maintainer in this interview by Giovanni from our Italian KDE community. This continues a trend of recent interviews talking to members of the KDE PIM team - last time we heard from Thomas McGuire of KMail. For our Italian readers, there is also the original interview.

The MeeGo Linux operating system for mobile devices gained software support at the Computex show this week in Taiwan. Novell and Linpus both announced MeeGo-based netbook distributions, Movial announced a "MeeGo Services" development suite, and Telefonica has weighed in with support for the open source platform.

The first article in this series showed how to use Hadoop in a single-node cluster. This article continues with a more advanced setup that uses multiple nodes for parallel processing. It demonstrates the various node types required for multinode clusters and explores MapReduce functionality in a parallel environment. This article also digs into the management aspects of Hadoop -- both command line and Web based.

In my line of work I get to test, try and evaluate all kinds of new open source software and the occasional new distribution flavor of the month. Sometimes it's a smooth process but other times I find myself casting a line in the lake of forums hoping to get a bite. In a lot of ways, this is how it was when I was first introduced to Linux in the late 90's. When I look back and compare my experiences then with my experiences now I see the progress we've made in a number of areas but I am left with one conclusion: we're not quite there yet.

One of the original targets of Linux was the under-powered computer gathering dust in the closet destined for electronic disposal. While that sounds like a noble goal, it isn't reality for the majority of today's Linux distributions. Xubuntu says it's for the limited resource computer, but even it has a minimum memory requirement of 256 MB. You probably won't have a very pleasant experience running Firefox on a machine with less than 512 MB of memory.

With Facebook stomping all over users' privacy, there's been a lot of interest in open source and privacy friendly social network tools. The good news is that Mozilla is getting involved with a new platform called sudoSocial. The bad news is that sudoSocial is very new, and not quite sure what it wants to be when it grows up.

Microsoft and Intel are fighting for the affections of hardware makers as the PC industry tries to answer Apple's iPad. The world's biggest software company used the annual Computex show in Taiwan to release a preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 — the latest rebranded version of Windows CE, which has been promised on tablets from Asus, LG, and MSI.

People sometimes ask which distribution to try if they want to learn how Linux works. Common answers are Gentoo, Arch, or Debian. However, I disagree. Each of these distros teach users their particular brand of Linux. There's only one truly pure Linux, and that is Slackware.

Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will launch in the late autumn. Speaking to the press at this year's Computex PC trade show in Taiwan, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said, "We will be selective on how we come to market because we want to deliver a great user experience," adding that, "We're thinking on both the hardware and software levels."

Mozilla has announced plans to integrate cloud synchronization features into an upcoming major version of the Firefox Web browser. The functionality is based on Weave, an experimental add-on that was incubated in Mozilla Labs.

Intel has released more details and the deployment roadmap for the company's MeeGo operating system (OS), highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open source platform.

Freemind, the open source Java based mind mapping application, makes a great writing planning tool. A final release of version 0.9 has been a long time coming, but the current release candidates are very usable and stable, and I would recommend making the extra effort to install one of these rather than an 0.8 “stable” release. Fortunately, the 0.9 RCs have made it into the standard Ubuntu 10.04 repository.

Sitting at the heart of every Linux OS distribution is a Linux kernel. When it comes to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, the issue of which kernel is being used is not a cut and dried answer, however.

People who use and promote free software cite various reasons for their choice, but do those reasons tell the whole story? If, as a community, we want free software to continue to grow in popularity, especially in the mainstream, we should understand better the true reasons for choosing it—especially our own.

Learn how to create and manage hard and symbolic links to files on your Linux® system. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to explore the differences between hard and soft, or symbolic, links and the best ways to link to files, as opposed to copying files.

Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and "could be an incredible iPad alternative," according to a hands-on Laptop story.

Once again, the buzz has grown surrounding rumors that Novell may soon be snapped up in a buyout. As many as 20 companies may have registered bids for the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. Matt Asay notes that an auction of the company could become a patent troll bonanza, and I have to agree. Let's remember that Novell is no spring chicken. It owns lots of patents and lots of legacy applications. Overall, it would not be good to see Novell bought out, partly because it's one of the few U.S.-based public companies focused primarily on open source.