Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ubuntu's Fridge is reporting that Kubuntu is taking the Canary Islands. KDE is being installed on all of the school computers in the Canary Islands by the way of mEDUXa and in their universities with Bardinux, both derivatives of the Kubuntu GNU/Linux operating system. KDE's Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Riddell toured the schools in which mEDUXa is in use and spoke with the developers during the Jornadas de Software Libre conference. During that conference, Aaron Seigo presented KDE 4 and its exciting capabilities as well as an introduction to KDE and Qt programming.

The confusing world of standards for mobile versions of Linux became a little less confusing last week with a declaration of "alignment" between two key players.

Register Developer is changing. We've moved our base of operations form the UK to Silicon Valley, where under a new editor - the Register's former software editor, Gavin Clarke - we will build on the work of Martin and David, who successfully established Register Developer.

Ever wondered how much your contribution was worth to a project? If you are a Java developer helping out one of the hundreds of open source Java projects, head over to SourceKibitzer. It's a social network of Java developers that provides various metrics for open source Java projects.

If you spend most of your computing life in Firefox, it makes sense to consolidate other online activities in your browser. There are extensions that can help you to do just that: you can manage your bookmarks with the del.icio.us extension, chat on IRC channels using Chatzilla, and read RSS feeds in Sage. Jabber instant messaging users have their own extension: the SamePlace, a nifty IM client that, besides the basic Jabber functionality, offers a few unique and useful features.

In Part 1 of a three-part series, A. Lizard dives into his notes for resources and methods he's found useful in the last three years in keeping his systems running, to give novices some idea what to do once one gets "under the hood" of one's computer at a application/OS level.

MySQL has announced the availability of MySQYL 5.1.22-rc, the first 5.1 release candidate version of the popular open source database.

In proprietary software, Web page design is dominated by Adobe's Dreamweaver and Microsoft's FrontPage. Free software users have witnessed the rise and fall of several Web design apps, but it has been a while since a new one debuted. Now the next new release is here -- KompoZer, heir to the Mozilla Composer legacy and updated for today's technology.

Dossia a consortium of companies for"Lifelong Personally-Controlled Health Record" has announced that they will be using the LGPL (a FOSS license) licensed Indivo personally controlled health record software for Boston's Childrens Hospital Information Program (CHIP) "Since the inception of the Indivo system in 1998, we have firmly held that the best way to get vital and private medical information to the point of care is under the strictest control of the individual," said Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, CHIP researcher at HST and physician in Emergency Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston. "Dossia and Children's share a common vision of promoting widespread adoption of personally controlled health records and are excited to be working together to make this vision a reality."

In this week's roundup of new releases: Ubuntu Gutsy beta rolls out, Pioneer Linux gives really long-term support, PC-BSD updates and Freespire adds an improved CNR plugin.

In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.

Kick-start your week with four easy (but still cool) tricks on your Linux desktop. Install the media server you've always wanted but never got around to, or fine-tune your hardware to squeeze out a few more hours of battery power ... All this an more in this week's How To Roundup. Oh, and send us your favourite Linux tricks.

LXer Feature: 30-Sept-2007

Big stories this week include the "Give one, get one" OLPC promotion, an LXer Feature by Paul Ferris entitled, Linux Education in America: Inspiration from Russia?, The 7 Most Influential GNU/Linux Distributions, The Top 21 Linux Games Of 2007, GPLv2 and GPLv3 for beginners, Slackware: the classic distro and an article you shouldn't read.

One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL. There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success. Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages). To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.

"The fact that we continue to expose internal data structures via sysfs is a gaping open pit [and] is far more likely to cause any kind of problems than changing an error return," Theodore Ts'o noted, responding to a thread discussing a patch to fix an error return code. Andrew Morton agreed, "I was staring in astonishment at the pending sysfs patch pile last night. Forty syfs patches and twenty-odd patches against driver core and the kobject layer." He continued, "that's a huge amount of churn for a core piece of kernel infrastructure which has been there for four or five years. Not a good sign." Andrew then added a humorous quip, "I mean, it's not as if, say, the CPU scheduler guys keep on rewriting all their junk. oh, wait.."

Rubinius is important. A whole lot of folks agree.Ola Bini wrote up a whole post abouthow important he thinks it is. In it, he writes:

2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Confucius asked Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "What is Tao?" Lao-tzu opened his mouth but said nothing. Confucius left with a smile, but his students were puzzled. Confucius explained, "Lao-tzu has passed us the Tao. In his mouth, there are no teeth but only a tongue. The hard ones (teeth) died, but the soft one (the tongue) lives; the soft power is stronger than the hard power. That's the Tao!"

The creator of the Suse distribution says its Linux sales have grown by 243 percent, largely due to partnership with Microsoft.

My friend Dave just built a machine to run CentOS. Last night he lamented that he didn’t like the video player. I cringed, “Is it well-known free software video player? I’ve not had much luck dealing with the developers and I recommend another well-known free software video player.”

Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it. Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.