Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A week-long Phonon/Solid developer sprint redefines and strengthens their API's. The start of a command-line client for Strigi. Continued improvements in the Konsole refactoring work. More work on visual effects in the KWin window manager composite support branch. Experiments to utilise Solid for connection management in Mailody. Initial support for the Jamendo music service in Amarok. A KDE frontend for Marble is begun, to complement the Qt-based original interface. LSkat, KLines and KLettres get support for scalable graphics. SuperKaramba now supports widgets written in Python and Ruby using Kross - Kross is now the default scripting engine for SuperKaramba. Kiriki is moved from playground/games to the kdegames module. The Guidance utility suite is moved to the extragear module, becoming the first non-C++ application in KDE SVN.

The newest version of the Linux distro is still conservative, but with a bit of an edge.

The 5th annual Linux on Wall Street conference takes place in New York City on Monday, April 23. Organizers say the slated presentations will reinforce what bank, investment firms, and other financial institutions and others in the financial market have already learned: that Wall Street is ready for open source solutions.

2.4 kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau ran some tests to compare Con Kolivas's Staircase Deadline CPU scheduler with Ingo Molnar's new Completely Fair Scheduler. He summarized his experiences:

LXer Feature: 15-Apr-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

The much talked about One Laptop Per Child, a low-cost laptop computer for the developing world, was finally on show at the Digital Freedom Expo in Cape Town this past week.

WorldVistA has won the 2007Wired News Rave Award. This is in the latest print edition of Wired on page 147 (not on the website yet) featuring a picture of K.S. Bhaskar, Joseph Dal Molin and Maury Pepper. Bhaskar is quoted as saying"nothing short of world domination" regarding VistA. Shameless Linux Medical News plug: Bhaskar and Joseph Dal Molin are past recipients of the coveted Linux Medical News Freedom Award.

The JBoss division of Red Hat is slated to move to a model in which its source code control system will be public and backward compatibility is not guaranteed, sources say.

I've been following the story of Dell preparing to sell Linux on its business and consumer computer lines so closely that if we were cars and they came to a sudden stop, I'd crash into them. Despite that, I still don't know what Linux, or Linuxes, they'll choose.

When free software supporters participate in the French presidential election on April 22nd for the first round of voting, they will have information that may be unique in the world: position statements from all major parties on issues about free software, copyright, patents, and digital rights. Even more surprisingly -- at least from a North American perspective -- a majority of the candidates have heard of these issues and developed positions on them.

For designers, a font manager that can activate and deactivate fonts on-the-fly is the Holy Grail of the GNU/Linux desktop. Without such a tool, designers either need to devote an inordinate amount of system memory to their font collections, or else install and uninstall fonts individually, manually keeping track of the fonts needed for each project. The trouble is, no such font manager has reached a 1.0 release, or even an advanced beta. So far, the closest candidate is Fonty Python, currently at version 0.2.

A new issue of the Amarok newsletter is out. It talks about interesting new developments, Amarok's Summer of Code projects, the current events in the 1.4 stable branch, and continues to provide cool Amarok-related tips.

Web hosting company Verio chose a lucky day to introduce its new Linux-based managed private server offering for small businesses. The day before, April 17, Microsoft admitted that it doesn't have a fix for a serious security hole in its server operating systems.

Some open-source developers believe that the upcoming GNU GPLv3 will be good for open-source software, but they are concerned about its patent and digital rights management provisions.

TransGaming Technologies last week released Cedega 6.0, subscription-based software that enables Linux gamers to play Windows titles on their Linux OS of choice. Cedega 6.0 offers sharper, brighter graphics, improved sound, faster overall performance, and support for "many more games," new and old, the company said.

OK, you love Ubuntu, but after awhile, the same-old, same-old GRUB and boot splash screens become tedious and boring. Could it be your Ubuntu needs a little SUM-thing to spice it up? If you're up for a walk on the wild side, try StartUp Manager (SUM), a utility created by Glenn Van Loon that lets you change bootloader and splash screen settings in Ubuntu.

The updated free, open-source desktop mail client offers tagging and improved navigation, but faces competition from browser-based options.

As I'venoted before, I am something of aconnoisseur of Microsoft's FUD against open source, in part because I believe each successive FUD-flavour of the month gives important hints about the evolution of the thinking and strategy within the company. The latest development in this area, which revolves around patents, is no exception– not least because I think people are drawing the wrong conclusions from it.

If you have questions about Linux or open source projects, real-time help is often just a keyboard away -- if you know where to look online. Forums, mailing lists, and Googling are all useful when you have questions, but if you really want answers fast, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the place to look. If you've never ventured into IRC, here's all you need to get started.

CentOS 5.0 received high marks in one of the first reviews of its latest release. The OS, which is billed as a "100 percent compatible" rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, targets users who need enterprise-class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support.