Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Some say the Classmate PC is Intel's answer to (or competition with) the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) effort. Intel is hawking the lilliputian laptop in "emerging markets" like Nigeria, India, and Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and secondary students. It's to be officially released and shipped en masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun.

How would you like an easy way to set up a point-and-click Linux image backup that always makes perfect copies if the physical system is OK? That will point and click to a mirror drive or a multiple DVD backup set as you wish? New LinuxPlanet contributor A. Lizard details how to get this done.

The Linksys NSLU2 is a cheap and compact Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with an Ethernet connection and two USB ports for connecting hard drives and/or USB flash disks to a LAN. It sports a simple web-based interface that is used to configure the device, format any attached disks, set up disk shares and so on.

Following a review of Ingo Molnar's Completely Fair Scheduler, Srivatsa Vaddagiri posted a patch allowing the new scheduler to provide fairness at a per-group level rather than at a per-process level. He described the changes that he made and noted,"I have used'uid' as the basis of grouping for timebeing (since that grouping concept is already in mainline today). The patch can be adapted to a moregeneric process grouping mechanism later."Ingo reacted to the patch favorably,"yeah, i like this alot." He went on to comment,"the'struct sched_entity' abstraction looks very clean, and that's the main thing that matters: it allows for a design that will only cost us performance if group scheduling is desired."

"In no case is it ok to just 'shut up the warning'," Linus Torvalds exclaimed in response to a patch that stifled a compiler warning. Reminiscent of a thread on the lkml last year, Linus pointed out that it is very important to understand and properly fix compiler warnings..

On May 24, the rumors and speculation came to an end. Dell officially unveiled its three consumer systems -- the XPS 410n and Dimension E520n desktops, and the Inspiron E1505n notebook -- that come with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux distribution factory installed.

LWN readers will certainly be aware that your editor spends a fair amount of time at development-oriented conferences. In some ways all conferences are alike, but, still, all that experience was insufficient to prepare your editor for OSBC, which is a different sort of affair. Neckties, Blackberries, and Windows laptops are ubiquitous. There are booths for law firms. People wonder about whether customers should buy their "open source" software licenses on a one-time or subscription basis. The wireless network actually works, but power outlets are nowhere to be found. It's all very strange

SpeedFilm, a transparent, polyurethane film paint protection system for fine vehicles, has come on board the Chastain Motorsports Indy 500 program.

Delayed annual report will offer details of Novell's patent, interoperability and sales partnership with Redmond.

Fixed-line operator Telkom has cut its retail price of international bandwidth to all destinations by 30 percent retrospectively from May 1.

A lot of photos tagged with "HDR" turn up on Flickr and similar photo sharing sites these days. They're unnatural, surreal, sometimes crazy-looking images with the bright areas darkened, the dark areas brightened, and lots of saturation. You can get in on the craze under Linux using Qtpfsgui.

Reminiscing aboutmy days at Progeny has me thinking back even further to Stormix Technologies. As a commercial venture, Stormix was a disaster, with an especially virulent strain of dot-com fever infecting everyone. Still, I'll always remember it as my first professional introduction both to free software and general management practices, as well as a snapshot of a surreal time in technology history.

Let's see how long have I used Linux as a desktop? Hmmm. Over 10 years? That's right. And the first issue I had at that time was finding an easy way to get to my ISP. The second issue at the time was the lack of a graphical web browser. Then Netscape produced an unsupported one that worked fine.

Stung by criticism of its patent pact with Microsoft, Novell agrees to support Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent-busting work.

Printing in Linux gets better all the time, especially when you find the right drivers.

Again, after a delay brought on by a bout Real Life (tm), we return to bring you updates on the state of Konsole, KDE's UNIX terminal program. Konsole has been a staple of KDE since KDE 2.0, as has been showing signs of a little bit of clutter and wear. So, Robert Knight has stepped in to clean up the program's code, and more than anything else, fix a cluttered and difficult interface.

Two of the most popular open source instant messaging clients, Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Kopete, can work with multiple protocols, but neither is a great option when it comes to sharing files with friends. For that, try Qnext, a multi-protocol IM client with which you can share files with not only IM buddies but also contacts in your address book.

Miklos Szeredi posted a patch to allow files to be accessed as directories, offering the example of accessing the contents of a compressed tarball as you would any other directory. He noted that this is not the only application of the patch, "others might suggest accessing streams, resource forks or extended attributes through such an interface. However this patch only deals with the non-directory case, so directories would be excluded from that interface. But otherwise this patch doesn't limit the uses of the 'file as directory' concept in any way. It just adds the infrastructure to support these whacky beasts." Al Viro took an interest in the patch noting, "I'll look through the patch tonight; it sounds interesting, assuming that we don't run into serious crap with locking and revalidation logics." This was followed by an interesting discussion between Miklos and Al regarding the implementation of the patch.

IBM is kicking off an experiment to open up its software development process in a way that mirrors the creation of open source applications. "The reward of getting our information out there is going to be amazing and critical to the future of IBM's software," Jerry Cuomo, chief technology officer of IBM's WebSphere middleware suite, told vnunet.com in an interview at the IBM Impact 2007 conference in Orlando.

PCLinuxOS is a live CD distribution that enables users to test Linux without actually having to install it. The highly anticipated new version, PCLinuxOS 2007, was released on Monday. Its intuitive selection of software, high level of stability and functionality, and the quality of the graphics make this the distribution's best release ever.