Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Intel and Nokia have released the first code from their joint mobile Linux project, MeeGo, an effort to challenge Google's Android. Three months after the project was announced, the two companies have delivered MeeGo 1.0. Intel said it provides a stable core foundation for application development and a "rich user experience" on netbooks. MeeGo for touch-based handsets, tablets, and in-car systems is due to appear in June. MeeGo 1.1, which will combine code for netbooks and touch-based devices, is scheduled for October.

When you’re reading up on Wi-Fi security, you’ll find many different interpretations and opinions. One might say disabling SSID broadcasting will hide your network, while others might say it just draws hackers into an easy job. Some might think WPA encryption is cracked, while others say it’s secure. Here we look at each myth and tell you whether it's verified--or busted.

In part one we made a basic movie with kdenlive. Pretty easy! But we can make a better movie by adding some effects, so Akkana Peck shows us how to add transitions between scenes, music and titles.

Google has indicated it will offer native code browser applications from the Chrome web apps store that's due to launch later this year. The Chrome Web Store is designed for use with Google's Chrome browser and the company's upcoming Chrome OS, and it would appear that the store will make its debut when the OS hits netbooks in the fall. Chrome OS will include Native Client, the Google add-on that verifies and executes "untrusted" native code inside the Chrome browser, and in the past, Google has said that Native Client will be an "important part" of the browser-based operating system.

Google released version 5.0 of its Chrome browser -- including the first stable build for Linux -- promising faster performance, multi-machine sync, and HTML5 utilities. Chrome is also part of MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks, which was released yesterday -- and our early tests showed zippy performance.

Emery Fletcher has been exploring small-footprint Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux, SliTaz, and Puppy. Since even small mobile devices have lots of RAM and storage these days, and cloud apps are everywhere, are these small Linuxes still worthwhile?

Now that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is devoting his full energies to desktop design, the changes are coming thick and fast. But are these new designs based on flawed assumptions? Is Ubuntu forking GNOME?

The program and schedule for LinuxCon 2010 has been finalized and with the announcement comes news of additional keynote speakers and session details. Representatives from Intel and Nokia will discuss the future of MeeGo in the keynote, "Freedom to Innovate: Can MeeGo's Openness Change the Mobile Industry?"

The Free Software Foundation has said it has approached Apple because a GPL2 licensed application, a port of GNU Go, is available from Apple's App Store. The FSF say that distribution through the App Store is not in compliance with the GPL's conditions because they clash with Apple's terms and conditions. The developers of the application, are also not in compliance with the GPL as they do not currently distribute the source for the application. Brett Smith, writing on the FSF blog, is at pains to say that the FSF have not sued Apple or made any legal demand and says the only reason they are announcing this is because Apple has removed applications from the store before without explanation and that they want to prevent wild speculation.

Microsoft have announced two open source projects which are designed to allow developers to work with Outlook's PST file format. One of the projects, PST Data Structure View Tool (PSTViewTool) is a MFC / C++ applications for viewing the data inside the Microsoft email client's data storage. The other project, PST File Format SDK (pstsdk) is a cross platform C++ library for reading that same information.

Dell says its Streak mini-tablet -- featuring a five-inch touchscreen, voice telephony, the Android operating system, and a Snapdragon processor -- will begin shipping next month. Meanwhile, Opera Software announced an Android-ready, "touch-optimized" tablet version of its Opera Mobile 10 browser.

The developers behind the popular Fedora Linux distribution announced on Tuesday the official release of version 13, codenamed Goddard. It brings some important platform improvements and several new desktop applications. In order to get hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on the Linux desktop, users have typically had to rely on the proprietary drivers that are supplied by the graphic card vendors. The Linux community has had tremendous difficulty building its own alternative open source drivers, but the hard work is starting to pay off.

Network effects being what they are, OpenOffice.org tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room when talking about open source productivity applications. But OpenOffice.org isn't the only game in town for open source word processing. One of the best, if underexposed, open word processors is AbiWord. AbiWord has been around for ages, but without the weight of a company like Sun behind it, the little word processor has gotten less attention than it deserves. Let's try to remedy that a bit.

'One day, Google says, it will merge Android and Chrome OS. But at the moment, despite Android's ever-expanding influence, the web colossus is intent on delivering Chrome OS before the end of the year, complete with its inability to run local applications or store local data. "Chrome is part of our strategy to make the web more powerful," Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told reporters last week at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, referring to the Chrome browser, the basis for Chrome OS.

Almost nine months after Slackware Linux 13 was released, the Slackware developers have announced the availability of the first point update for version 13 of their popular Linux distribution. Discussing the new release, the developers say that, "We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect".

Can't bring yourself to love logs? You should take a second look. The lowly and lonely log files sit there day after day gathering dust and events as your system purrs along without issue. That is, until something bad happens. Then you scramble to find out why the system rebooted or had a memory problem. Maybe it was a network denial of service attack. Or was it a runaway process? Or worse still, a hacker after your MP3 collection. How will you know? If you said, “Look at the logs”, then you’re halfway to a resolution. In most cases, those lowly log files are your best friends. Disasters, system anomalies, user error and careless hackers all leaves tracks in the logs. If you know where to look and what to look for, you’re that much better off.

The announcement last week at Google IO of the creation of the WebM project and the release of the VP8 codec was a positive and welcome development, finally offering an alternative for online media to the royalty-liable H.264 and to Theora. WebM arises from Google's purchase of ON2 last year and had been widely anticipated. Google did their homework, securing endorsements from competing browser vendors Opera and Mozilla and even from Adobe (possibly in exchange for Google's endorsement of Flash on their TV platform) and, weakly, from Microsoft. The parade is now in full swing, and we can expect many more announcements of support like the one from the Miro Project. Only Apple was painfully absent, pushing the Google-Apple tension further into the spotlight

A board member with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — the organization that approves open source licenses — has warned that there are "some serious questions" surrounding Google's swashbuckling efforts to create an open and royalty-free codec for web video. Hoping to defend the VP8 codec against patent attack, Google has open sourced the technology under a new license that includes some patent-centric language, but it has yet to submit the license for OSI approval. With a Monday blog post, OSI director Simon Phipps questioned whether there's a hole in the license that could expose users to third-party patent holders, and he urged Google to join hands with the OSI on the project, saying that before it does so, the codec cannot be considered open source.

Microsoft appears to be serious about making Outlook more accessible to open source developers. On May 24, the Redmond, Wash software giant announced two new open source projects designed to complement its recently released technical documentation for Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst). The two open source projects — dubbed .pst Data Structure View Tool and .pst File Format Software Development Kit — will make it easier for developers to access data stored in digital formats created by Microsoft Outlook and use that data in cross platform solutions.

Apple Macs are secure because they don't get computer viruses, and because OS X, the operating system they run, is based on the rock-solid and highly secure BSD UNIX. These are two popular misconceptions which make many Mac users underestimate the security risk of allowing their computers onto a corporate network. In a presentation at the EICAR conference in Paris this month David Harley, Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence at anti-virus company ESET, his colleague Pierre-Marc Bureau and Andrew Lee of security outfit K7 Computing pointed out that underestimating the risks presented by Macs can make them less secure than Windows machines.