Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma progress, with new Plasmoids: Browser, Notes, 3D Earth Model, Twitter, Desktop, and Tiger (scripting example), and the development of a mouse cursor data engine. Bug fixing spree in TagLib, K3b, and the Kopete Cryptography plugin. Support for encrypted storage devices in Solid, with better integration of device support in Amarok. Further integration of Plasma in Amarok. Work on making Konsole follow KDE settings more strictly. Much work on revamping Ark for KDE 4...

This tutorial shows how you can install and use Beryl on a CentOS 5.0 desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card). With Beryl, you can make your desktop use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube.

Another week and another set of new Linux releases. Tectonic does a quick roundup of what's new on the Linux distribution front.

Judging by the number of hits tallied for Troubleshooting Linux Audio Part 1 it seems the topic is of interest to many readers. Alas, I must apologize to everyone waiting for the next parts of the series. Various events have kept me from completing it in short order, but you may rest assured that it will return in my next installment. Meanwhile, this week we'll look at two excellent applications that are coming into greater use here at Studio Dave, the LiVES video editor for Linux, and Reaper (yes, again), a native Windows audio/MIDI sequencer running under Wine.

LXer Feature: 22-Jul-2007

This week we have the launching of a new Linux Hardware site, cool videos of PhotoSynth and SeaDragon and MPX or Multi-Pointer X being demonstrated and a Firefox user bangs his head against a wall. All these and more plus I have to create a FUD article section just to contain them all.

As Kermit the infuriating frog puppet once said "It's not easy bein' green" - especially as a software developer. OK you can do all things that everyone else does - buy a Toyota Prius hybrid or even cycle to work (as long as you avoid Lycra and silly helmets). You can scribble notes on recycled paper with a pencil (made of wood from managed forests) and turn your machine off standby. You can even diligently recycle your printer ink cartridges and offset your energy consumption by planting a few trees.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.2.1 saying, "GCC 4.2.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.0 relative to previous GCC releases."

I recently received a new MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.4 from our corporate headquarters. The choice of platform was deliberate, driven by professional requirements for applications not available on Linux. Still, it has been a long time since I've run anything but Linux, and starting to use a different platform after all this time made me curious. I decided to conduct an informal poll among Linux users -- including notables like Linus Torvalds -- to see how their platform usage compared with mine.

For quite a few pundits out there, the fact that there are so many Linux distributions is a bit troubling to them. I am not sure why this argument keeps coming up, but it goes something like this: there are X Linux distros out there, which is too many to choose from for users, and creates a strain on developer resources.

Robert Kaiser wrote in to inform us of the release of SeaMonkey 1.1.3, which contains fixes for several security vulnerabilities and several smaller problems found in previous versions. The SeaMonkey team strongly urges users of the old Mozilla Suite and Netscape 4, 6 or 7 to upgrade to SeaMonkey 1.1.3, as those software packages suffer from an increasing number of security vulnerabilities and are no longer being maintained.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 has been released and is currently being distributed to Thunderbird 2 users via the application's built-in software update system. The upgrade fixes security bugs, which are detailed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page.

Wal-Mart will sell a sub-$300 "back-to-school" PC this fall pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows Vista and OpenOffice.org productivity software. The Everex GC3502 PC is based on a 1.7GHz Via C7-D processor, and will be available later this year preloaded with Ubuntu Linux.

For many users, the xorg.conf file, which configures the system resources, graphics card, keyboard, pointing device, and monitor for a computer running the X Window System, is an exception to GNU/Linux's do-it-yourself credo. Users who think nothing of editing /etc/fstab or /etc/hosts.allow will shy away from xorg.conf for fear of breaking their systems, relying instead on tools such as the KDE Control Center or Debian's dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg instead. But learning your way around xorg.conf not only teaches you a lot about how your system operates -- it can also come in handy when the graphical display fails and you either can't remember the handy command that does the work for you, or you're working with a distribution that isn't blessed with it.

A series of encodings on printouts from color laser printers to discourage counterfeiting? At first, the idea sounds like the urban legend from a couple of decades ago that claimed you could hear Satanic messages when you play vinyl records backwards. Yet the evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is that the encodings are embedded in color printers from all major manufacturers. Moreover, the issues raised by the practice have caused Free Software Foundation director Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of theComputing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab to begin theSeeing Yellow campaign to stop the practice.

In early June, Asustek Computer and Intel announced at Computex Taipei that they would soon be releasing a low-end $199 subnotebook PC, the Asus Eee PC 701. It appears to be on schedule, and when it arrives in customers' hands in late August or early September it will be running a variation of Xandros Desktop Linux. The Eee PC 701 comes with two interfaces. The first desktop is meant for users who may have never used a computer before. The other interface is KDE-based. Both Windows XP and KDE users will find it familiar-looking.

When Microsoft's Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux? When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of the Web browser market it had pioneered, and Linux, while beginning to gain steam as a server platform, was a desktop platform that only a true geek could love.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the Free Software Foundation finally ratified and released the new version of the GPL at the end of June. This marks the newest chapter in the history of one of open source (and free) software’s oldest and most venerated licenses.

Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client. Nevertheless, it is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand.

Reader-submitted nominations were at the heart of the annual "Linux and Enterprise Open Source Readers' Choice awards," revealed at the recent Enterprise Open Source Conference & Expo 2007 in New York. Notable winners include Ubuntu (Linux distribution), Sendmail (email server), and Evolution (productivity tool), conference organizer SYS-CON Media announced this week.

We bring the advice of experts straight from San Diego to your desktop. Red Hat Summit 2007 collected hundreds of Linux users all in one place–many of them experienced Red Hat Certified Engineers® (RHCE). And somewhere between all those smart people walking around–and our video crew shooting footage–the idea for some video tips was born. This tip is from Richard Ray. Look for more in the coming weeks.