Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh.

How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage tools? Well, you’re in luck—dcov is here (at least for Ruby code). dcov is still pretty immature , but it’ showing a lot of promise. It’s already capable of verifying that each module, class, and method of your code is documented. The upcoming release adds coverage checking for each parameter to a method

We all know (or are about to find out) that the world of Open Source Software isn’t the same world as proprietary developers live in. OSS coders may or may not be paid to develop the projects they work on, regardless, it’s all about your contributions, how good you are and how well you’re perceived in the OSS community. One’s reputation in the community is a valuable item. When everything you code or produce is freely available for the world to see and especially your peers to review and (ahem, constructively) criticize, the stakes are pretty high.

Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Linux was also installed on a few desktop PCs and a couple of servers. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution selected. OpenSUSE, Debian, Fedora, and Slackware were also given trials on the servers. The open source software and operating systems were met with some acceptance, some resistance, and some skepticism.

Currently, a few developers on Team-XBMC have begun the porting of XBMC to Linux (and OpenGL using the SDL toolkit). The goal is for this to become a full port of XBMC with all the features and functions that are available on the Xbox version of XBMC (with the exception of Xbox exclusive functionality as Trainers, launching Xbox Games, and such). XBMC is a media player for the original Xbox game-console and is free and open source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.

About 6 months ago I was having a conversation with my roommate Beth, talking about her aging Dell laptop. She was considering getting a desktop machine to use as her primary workhorse for her up and coming graduate student immersion. I thought a bit, and said "Hey, I could probably get you something decent. We could even make this an interesting experiment. Tell you what, I'll get you a machine, but it'll run Linux. Up for it?". "Sure!", and we were off...

In the comments to the article I wrote about running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on a Gateway MX7626, I added that my friend who owns the laptop had “upgraded” to Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 4 to try and fix a problem with intermittent sound under Feisty. The initial upgrade did work and her sound functioned properly. I talked to her again last night and she is giving up on running Ubuntu beta software and is going back to Fiesty.

Linux will power about 31 percent of all smartphones sold in 2012, and by then will have shipped in 331 million devices, says ABI. The research firm forecasts 75 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for Linux in smartphones through 2012, making it the fastest-growing OS in the sector. Linux is benefiting from growing support in the handset OEM community, most notably Motorola, but also Nokia with less traditional types of devices aimed at mobile broadband applications.

From the flames, some of you seem to be a bit interested in the new open sauce flavours floating around. One more go at the sauces, and we will see if you like it. Or not. You can flame, or ask for more. Here goes. The three victims for this round of testing are Arklinux 2007.1, Damn Small Linux 4.0, and Sabayon Linux 3.4.

Governments looking to migrate to open source software (OSS) will need to ramp up their internal skills base, according to Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio. Di Maio said that over time organisations had become reliant on external skills in their operations. One of the primary challenges for governments moving to open source would be the need to re-instate internal skills. "In moving to open source you can't rely on external skills and [before the move] you will need to assess whether you will be able to ramp up the the required level."

Sun has announced the UltraSPARC T2, which it has dubbed the world's fastest commodity microprocessor. As a general-purpose processor, the UltraSPARC T2 also provides support for the massively threaded, open source Solaris operating system and other realtime operating systems, as well as future versions of Ubuntu Linux. Sun plans to release source code for the UltraSPARC T2 processor to the OpenSPARC community and the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the open source community through the GPL license.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the latest release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel,"it can mostly be described with the one word,'boring'", he said, noting there weren't any exciting changes. He added that there was two weeks between this and the last release candidate. Actual source-level changes can be viewed through the git web interface. Kernel Newbies maintains a list of all changes in the upcoming kernel

An easy, inexpensive way to double up Ethernet interfaces to get more more bandwidth and reliability is called Ethernet bonding. While Gigabit Ethernet is all exciting and the hot new fad, you can get a lot of mileage out of using Ethernet bonding to give your existing gear a nice boost without spending much extra money. Just stuff two ordinary 10/100 Ethernet interfaces into a machine, tweak a few configuration files, and you're in business. If one fails you won't lose connectivity. It is a good cheap upgrade for your servers—you'll have several options for configuring load balancing and failover, and with the right gear you'll get an instant bandwidth boost by combining the bandwidth of the two interfaces.

If you go by what the mainstream press reports, you’d think there were only two computer desktop operating systems in the world—Windows and Mac OS. This notion would be most unfortunate because it might keep you or your company from exploring Linux as a reliable, secure and powerful desktop operating system for your PC that’s cheaper than the two proprietary platforms. In fact, it’s often free. Today, more than a year after I switched, there’s very little I can’t do in terms of business and personal productivity on my Ubuntu Linux PC that I did when I used Windows.

Few major pieces of free software are more eagerly awaited than KDE 4. With changes to everything from the core libraries and window manager to the look, feel and function of the desktop, by any standard, KDE 4 is an extreme makeover of the popular desktop environment. Scheduled for release in October, KDE 4 can be toured now in the first beta that was released at the start of August. On the way, you'll find major overhauls of general functionality,as well as both major and minor refitting of familiar KDE programs and the introduction of a few new ones.

My Series 1 TiVo is getting old, so I am planning an escape route based on MythTV, a free software system that turns an old computer into a personal video recorder. This week I tested three MythTV-specific Linux distributions: KnoppMyth, MythDora, and MythBuntu. I found MythDora the best overall fit for my needs -- but there are important distinctions between the three that may lead you to a different decision.

Continuing its efforts to connect with social activists, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released an open letter signed by major environmental organizations. The letter urges activists to reject lockdown technologies in general and Windows Vista in particular as hostile to their ethics and the causes they support, and to support free software instead. The letter is only the first in a series that the FSF plans to release in the coming months, each of which will be crafted to make an ethical or pragmatic appeal to a specific group's concerns.

Opinion: Any company that has managed for more than a decade not only to survive within Microsoft's shadow but also to profit from it clearly knows how to run a business. For what I think will prove to be a cheap $500 million, XenSource has been picked up by Citrix Systems. So what, you ask? One of the truisms of the business is that nobody—and I mean nobody—partners with Microsoft and wins in the long run. There is, however, an exception to that rule: Citrix.

If Linux is hardly affected by viruses, why do system administrators use anti-virus software on their Linux email servers? Because an anti-virus scanner on a mail server can serve as another level of defense for Microsoft Windows desktop users. Linux provides several server-based anti-virus applications, most of which can be configured to interact with a variety of messaging servers. Many use the actively developed ClamAV open source virus toolkit on the back end; others work with proprietary or commercial scanners. In this article we'll compare MailScanner and Anomy Sanitizer on a Sendmail messaging server.

Foreword: This guest whitepaper explains how a hypervisor can be used to leverage GPL software while isolating it from proprietary code, in order to ensure compliance with the requirements of the GPL. It was written by a TRANGO Virtual Processors product manager, and uses that company's hypervisor as an example.