Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

We are now on the home stretch of the road to KDE 4.0, but KDE still needs extensive user testing to make sure everything arrives in the best possible shape for the release. There is a pressing need for users to be able to get hold of very up-to-date builds of KDE, especially if they want to participate in Krush days and pick up last-minute regressions, confirm proposed fixes, and avoid re-reporting recently fixed bugs, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

Although some companies and government agencies have embraced open source, the level of adoption in Singapore is still low by most counts, industry observers say. According to Red Hat, open source adoption has grown over the years in Singapore--but not at a rate where it can or should be.

Use of the Linux operating system on desktop machines is continuing to grow with small and medium business showing the most enthusiasm for the open source software.

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 -- my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam -- with mixed results. Probably the hardest part of using Skype or any other VoIP application as a video phone is finding a webcam that is supported on Linux. As I noted in my review of the Ekiga videophone earlier this year, the Creative Labs Ultra NX works flawlessly.

While the mobile Linux community has reacted positively to Google's Android, the new platform has also given it some cause for concern. The arrival of a giant player area with very clear ideas of role it wants mobile Linux to fill was bound to ruffle a few feathers and, despite public proclamations of "welcome" and "support", the Linux establishment is showing a few cracks.

Immediately after the release of KDE 4.0 RC1, the KDE office suite KOffice today announced the release of version 2.0 Alpha 5. As with the previous alpha versions of 2.0, this is a technology preview more than a version for users to test out. Nonetheless there are some exciting new features and developments here. Read on for more information.

This past weekend, November 16th through the 18th, Zaragoza Spain was the home of Akademy-es 2007. The conference began early Saturday morning and finished Monday with a Hackathon. Akademy-es 2007, hosted by Hispalinux, Wireless Zaragoza, and the Zaragoza council, was a conference specifically for KDE developers and users from around Spain.

What do Linux users want from their desktop? The Linux Foundation's survey has the answers. While the LF's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. This is an early look at the raw data.

A wide variety of tools is available to help programmers understand the cache and memory use of a program. Modern processors have performance monitoring hardware that can be used. Some events are hard to measure exactly, so there is also room for simulation. When it comes to higher-level functionality, there are special tools to monitor the execution of a process. We will introduce a set of commonly used tools available on most Linux systems.

When deer hunting season begins in Mississippi, or its time for the alligator lottery to start down in Florida, sportsmen flock to the Internet to order their licenses through companies like Automated License Systems (ALS). To keep its servers running reliably, ALS's Infrastructure Manager Rich Edwards uses Red Hat Linux and servers from Levanta, no questions asked.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed another two cases on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against High Gain Antennas, LLC of Parker, Calif., and Xterasys Corp. of City of Industry, Calif. The cases follow a similar case against Monsoon Multimedia, which was recently settled out of court.

I installed BLAG 70000 on an old 450MHz box with 192 MB of RAM. You might just be interested to know how it turned out.

Gogh is an extremely lightweight drawing program designed for pressure-sensitive devices. Despite its simplicity, it packs in a lot of features and a lot of fun. You can download Gogh packages from the project's Web site. The latest release is 0.1.2.1. Gogh is written in Python, and you can uncompress and run the source code tarballs from any place on your system -- no compilation or installation step required. You do need to have PyGTK, PyXML, and gnome-python installed. All are run-of-the-mill Python packages, though, so check your distribution's package management system.

KDE e.V, the nonprofit organization behind the popular KDE desktop environment, has announced the immediate availability of the first release candidate for its next major release: KDE 4.0. With this release candidate, the majority of KDE 4's components are almost ready for prime time. At the same time, with the final bits of Plasma, the brand-new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, falling into place, Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 that is suitable for general use.

Microsoft's rivalry with Google heated up considerably this past year when rumors surfaced that Google might release its own operating system to compete with Windows. Has Google finally jumped into the fray with its own OS? Unfortunately, no; gOS is not a "Google OS" nor is it affiliated with Google (though Desktop Linux has reported that Google has seen gOS and approved inclusion of the Google toolbar with the operating system).

At Tectonic we're confirmed Ubuntu fans with the occasional copy of Xubuntu thrown onto the older hardware lying around. Tell us what your favourite Ubuntu flavour is.

A survey released this week has found what many in the open source community have suspected all along: Vista has not been as eagerly taken up as Microsoft hoped and has caused many to look at other alternatives such as Linux and Macintosh.

Nobody ever thinks to mention .rpmnew and .rpmsave extensions to new users of Fedora or Red Hat derivatives. Instead, most users suddenly discover that these files are accumulating on their hard drives, or notice a fleeting message on the screen about them during a version upgrade. Many, I suspect, simply leave them alone, uncertain what to do about them. Yet dealing with them is simply a matter of using a few basic commands, and can be a necessity for ensuring trouble-free upgrades in the future.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) said it has filed suit against two companies for allegedly violating the General Public License, which covers usage of Linux and thousands of other free and open source products.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed two more GPL infringement lawsuits on behalf of an open source software project. The second-ever GPL lawsuit alleges that Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas failed to honor "source-code transparency," in violation of Busybox's GPLv2 license.