Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Not a full day after news comes from Asus that they’ve got some larger screen EeePCs in works do pics of one show up online. jkkmobile hits us up with some pictures of this new model. No word on release date yet.The good news here is that the design of the screen is looking much nicer now, with an all white bezel replacing the somewhat cheap looking black speaker covers. The bad news? The resolution is still 800 x 480.

Your shiny new Linux system has it all -- except that one program you really needed it to install. You get online, you find the program's website, and click 'download'. Except there's not just a link to the program there. There are four, or five, or more links to the program. Each has a slightly different format, ending with .rpm, .deb, .tgz, or possibly even .ebuild. Some include x86 in the name, while others say ppc or amd64. What's the difference? What's actually included in these packages?

Amid the gigantic televisions and booming speakers at the Consumer Electronics Show, a tiny laptop computer stands out for its minimalist approach. The Asus Eee PC is about the size of a small hardback book, and weighs two pounds. Rather than storing data on a spinning hard drive, it uses the type of solid-state flash memory more common in portable music players. It comes with the Linux operating system preinstalled, and it sells for as little as $300. The trend is complicating matters for Microsoft Corp.

Apparently Asus and Everex aren't the only ones capable of shipping dirt cheap linux boxes these days. Shuttle is getting into the game with its new KPC box. Unfortunately, we're way short on specs, but we do know that it'll be coming in $199 pre-built and $99 barebones versions. At least it's a looker, here's hoping there's something decent under the hood. No word on release date. More pictures after the jump!

For years, discerning Windows users have relied on Tweak UI, a semi-official Microsoft program for system settings not available on the default desktop. Now, in the same tradition and with something of the same name, Ubuntu Tweak (UT) offers the same advantage to Ubuntu users. Currently at version 0.2.4, for now UT is limited to features for GNOME and focuses mainly on changing default desktop and system behavior and how GNOME interacts with your hardware, but this small feature set is more than enough for proof of concept.

Last year Google announced Android, its Java-based software stack for mobile devices. Initially the company released Android with an emulator for testing. Hackers, however, have quickly hacked the software to run on real-world devices. LinuxDevices list the first hardware platform to run Android as the Atmark-Techno’s Armadillo-500 development board back in November last year.

We already reported about the LimePC yesterday, which is an iPod nano sized Linux UMPC based on Freescale's MPC5121e mobileGT processor, which is a so called "motherboard-on-a-chip" device. Freescale has now released a full press-release on their site and technical specifications for their highly integrated multi-core embedded computing platform.

It looks like the head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Chief Nicholas Negroponte is not only alienating Intel, but Microsoft, too. A day after published reports quoting Negroponte as saying OLPC XO laptops would dual boot Linux and Windows, Microsoft is denying that the company is pursuing such a plan.

Intel is displaying four new ultramobile PCs designed around its Menlow chips at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), including highly anticipated devices from Lenovo and Toshiba. The Lenovo device runs a Linux OS from Chinese developer Red Flag Software and boasts a 4.8-inch touch screen, an onboard camera and other features. Intel personnel at a booth detailing its Menlow chips called the Lenovo device and two others "Mobile Internet Devices," saying that their smaller screen sizes and use of the Linux OS make them different from ultramobile PCs, a category created by Microsoft.

Surprisingly one of the media establishment's darling devices at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is fully open, runs Linux and invites hacking - er, customization. The device is the Neuros OSD, a $200 video recorder that allows you to archive, organize and play back all of your video media, such as live television, DVDs, VHS tapes, etc. The acronym "OSD" stands for "open source device". Hot dog, this is our kind of gadget!

Last week I started a series of blog entries about my personal view of challenges and priorities for this year. That first entry was about open standards and today I’m going to look at free and open source (FOSS). Incidentally, the first item on this list was on the previous list as well. Needless to say, this is a big topic and one that encompasses a broad range of opinions. My list will be different from someone who runs a FOSS project, someone whose primary and perhaps sole business is FOSS, someone in academia, and someone who is strictly a user of software.

If you run an ecommerce site, you may want a content management system (CMS) to help manage your online product line. VirtueMart, available under the GNU GPL and fully integrated with Joomla!, does that and more. It provides a full ecommerce solution in a LAMP environment.

The Mozilla Coporation, the non-profit open source organisation behind the ever-popular Firefox and Thunderbird, has announced a change in its upper ranks. Chief executive Mitchell Baker has stepped down and has been replaced by chief operating officer John Lilly. Baker will remain as chairman of the organisation.

Coverity, which creates automated source-code analysis tools, announced late Monday its first list of open-source projects that have been certified as free of security defects. Eleven projects made the list: Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL.

[As Slashdot points out, compare this article to Information Week's sensationalist gutter reporting posted earlier. - Sander]

Open source code, much like its commercial counterpart, tends to contain one security exposure for every 1,000 lines of code, according to a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security to review and tighten up open source code's security. Popular open source projects, such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, and Tcl dynamic languages used to bind together elements of Web sites, and Amanda, the popular open source backup and recovery software running on half a million servers, were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures and quality defects.

Wikia Search, an open source community edited search engine, was released in its first alpha version this week. Conceptualised by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it came as a response to concerns over the lack of transparency in the way that Google ranks its searches.

Bug Labs, a company I never heard of before, is releasing something very cool for all the hardcore geeks out there. Is it a computer, a GPS device, or a camera? What if I told you that it is all that and a whole lot more. BUG is a modular computer system that will appeal to those who like to tinker around with things. It is a GPL device that has modular components to enhance functionality, and it is fully programmable.

Due to popular demand, and just because it’s a nice KDE application that does a similar job as what I covered last time, I’m now going to show you Filelight. Filelight bills itself as a program that “creates an interactive map of concentric segmented-rings that helps visualise disk usage on your computer”. In essence, it’s a graphical program that helps you look at and understand how much space different files and directories are taking up on your hard drive.

As Christian Einfeldt of Digital Tipping Point recently noted, when Amazon published its Christmas wish lists, Linux devices figured prominently. And it seems like Linux is indeed all around us. Apple showed us Unix could look gorgeous; Nokia has used it as the basis for an open handset; Linksys opened up its routers to modders; and dozens of consumer devices rely on Linux at their core.

OpenMoko has revealed additional details about the upcoming second generation of the company's open-source smartphone. OpenMoko, which spun off of FIC last year, aims to create a unique, Linux-based mobile phone that can easily be modified, improved, and repurposed by individual users. The company has now released additional information about it's second-generation handset and plans to demonstrate it for the first time at a private gathering that will take place during CES.