Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last year, Dell began offering Ubuntu on non-corporate desktops and laptops, opening the door for other large computer companies to follow suit. With this offering came a lot of discussion over what Dell should include with each computer sold. In a recent iTWire article concerning Dell's inclusion of its re-worked Ubuntu 7.10 and LinDVD (a commercial Linux DVD player), comments ran the gamut from FOSS purity to legal questions to even questioning Dell's motives. Clearly the FOSS community is pulled in all directions trying to satisfy users. Is there any happy medium? Can the community balance the requests of purists and pragmatists and still release usable products?

Google invited developers to its London office for one of three workshops - the others being in Munich and Tel Aviv to spread the word and teach developers how to write for their new OS. Another event will be held in Boston on February 23rd (check at the blog for an announcement). Here's what they told us. The mantra for Android is that it’s "a complete and modern embedded OS, with a cutting edge mobile user experience, a world class software stack for building apps and open platform for developers users and industry". That of course breaks into lots of different specifics some of which are more solid than others. Computer people coming to mobile have a very different view of phone architecture to phone people adding features.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Heavy refactoring and work on merging translation branches in Lokalize (which is renamed from "Kaider", and moved from playground to kdesdk). Work on a question editor in KEduca. Work on real-time cloud imagery in Marble. An initial implementation of a new undo stack in KWordQuiz. The start of a KAlgebra, Rot13, KWorldClock, and Pastebin Plasma applet, with the inclusion of more functionality from KDE 3.5 (such as the multi-row taskbar panel) in Plasma. Progress in scripting support and functionality in Plasma. The "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the fuzzy-clock Plasma applet move into kdereview. Viewports support declared "complete" on the KDE desktop.

Free thinking and free code have two things in common: a lot of the best work has already been done, and we can re-use it. That's my second challenge to Social Graph Foo Campers. The first is getting some clarity about what the "social graph" means in the first place.

Webmasters are frequently required to serve up charts and graphs to clients. Part of the planning for such images involves a decision about whether to process the chart on the server or at the client end. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. There are costs and benefits to both approaches. The generation of a chart at the server involves the creation of an image such as a .png file and then displaying this file as part of the delivered page. Prior to the image creation a script must set up the data points and the axis labels, switch on colours, create a legend, size the picture, and send it out.

When ripping CDs from my own collection or (shh) my friends', I didn't always bother to include the cover art. Personally, I never considered album art for my iPod all that important. That has changed now that we have an iPod touch in the family. If I'm missing a lot of album art, the experience of virtually flipping through my music collection, something Apple calls "cover flow," is diminished. iTunes doesn't always offer art for albums I didn't purchase from iTunes. Thankfully, a little GPL-licensed application called Album Cover Art Downloader (ACAD) solved my problem.

The rhetoric surrounding Steve Ballmer's unsolicited $44.6bn offer for Yahoo! will focus on the obvious - the potential market share growth that a Microsoft and Yahoo! tie-up would have against Google. For all the talk of saving Yahoo! shareholders, Google is uppermost in the Microsoft chief executive's mind, and Microsoft is - once more - trying to buy its way into the internet club having already spent billions to no visible effect.

This February, the team at Linuxsecurity.com has chosen NMAP as the OS Security Tool of the Month! In January, we chose GnuPG in part because it had just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Well, it wasn't alone. As of this past December Nmap ("Network Mapper"), the free and open source utility for network exploration and auditing, celebrated its 10th Anniversary as well! And because of its popularity, chances are very good that you've already used NMAP for quite some time. Even if you have, it's always good to take a look at how it all got started and what it's all about...

The rsync utility is smart enough to send only enough bytes of a changed file to a remote system to enable the remote file to become identical to the local file. When that information is sensitive, using rsync over SSH protects files while in transit.To protect the files when they are on the server you might first encrypt them with GPG. But the manner in which GPG encrypts slightly changed files foils rsync's efficiency.rsyncrypto allows you to encrypt your files while still allowing you to leverage the speed of rsync.

A mobile Linux-based 3G phone has been developed that could be made available to operators for less than US$100. The result of collaboration between NXP Semiconductors and Purple Labs--a mobile Linux development company with a focus on mass-market devices--the Purple Magic handset is a "reference design", meaning it can be tweaked by manufacturers to include or exclude various 3G features. Some markets may, for example, not want videocall functionality.

The Gnome project has released the first test version of Gnome 2.22 this week, including a new Web-browser engine, a new virtual file system and updates for virtual network computing and accessibility. Gnome is, along with KDE, one of the two major desktop environments used with Linux-based operating systems. Aside from managing the graphical windowing portion of the OS, it includes a number of applications, such as a Web browser, e-mail client, configuration manager and other components.

Is there anyone who doesn't collect something? I, for instance, have a sizable collection of books. Remembering who gave me which ones, and keeping track of ones I've currently lent to friends, is a nightmarish chore. Happily, the Tellico collection manager can catalog all sorts of collections, including books, movies, games, cards, coins, comic books, and even wine.

Think you're smarter than the meatheads on your local city council? Now you can prove it -- without running for office -- courtesy of the original city simulation game. Electronic Arts (EA) has released the source code to SimCity under the GPLv3. The newly freed game is dubbed Micropolis, and it is playable in most major Linux distributions. The original SimCity was published in 1989, and spawned 18 spinoffs (and counting), plus dozens of expansions and sequels. For years it was the bestselling PC-based video game, until it was eventually unseated by its own spinoff The Sims. Given its nonviolent, educational nature, SimCity was a natural fit when the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project solicited games for inclusion on the XO laptop.

How do you produce a major update of a popular desktop for GNU/Linux? Following the January 11 release of KDE 4.0, Bruce Byfield sat down with KDE and discussed the new and improved elements of KDE, and what it took to get them there.

Those of us living in South Africa are now facing the reality of rolling electricity blackouts for, at the very least, the rest of this year and possibly even longer than that. If you have a laptop and 3G connection then two or three hours a day without electricity is not unmanageable. Add the Flexopower SolarPouch to your backpack and your cellphone, iPod, PSP, GPS and music player are also covered for unexpected downtime.

In the first installment in this series, your editor took on the task of getting video data onto his system in digital form. Part 3 talked about authoring DVDs with the nicely edited versions of those video clips. Now it's time to fill in the missing second part, wherein your editor turns raw captured video into something suitable for DVD creation.

If you need to share files or printers with Windows machines, you're likely using Samba and know how to administer and configure it by editing configuration files and starting and stopping the daemon. However, there's an easier, graphical way to configure your box: the Samba Web Administration Tool. SWAT allows you to set up all aspects of your Samba server through an intuitive Web interface in a style similar to Webmin. (In fact, if you use Webmin, you can access SWAT by going to Servers -> Samba Windows File Sharing and then clicking on the hammer icon for SWAT.)

Let's be honest, the rise of the Eclipse development platform is the best thing to ever happen to Sun Microsystems' NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE). Eclipse rolled out a solid platform, with good performance, high levels of extensibility and a rapidly expanding ecosystem of commercial and open source plug ins. NetBeans, by contrast, has been the poor relation with low levels of industry take up, fewer users and not much in the way of momentum.

During a tutorial today on-stage at linux.conf.au, Sun Microsystems and Frontline donated a server to the KDE project, available for shipment within hours. Aaron Seigo, Plasma developer and KDE e.V President, accepted a certificate from Ross Cunningham of Sun Microsystems and David Purdue of Frontline on behalf of the KDE project.

The really big problem in document formats is what's going to become the next office document format: Microsoft's proprietary Open XML or OpenOffice's ODF (Open Document Format). A far more minor but nonetheless very annoying problem is what do you do about Microsoft's ClearType Collection typefaces: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel?