Showing headlines posted by RandallDownes

Drupal announced the adoption of a new code of conduct, admittedly borrowed from Ubuntu's own code of conduct. The main difference being Drupal's lack of a conflict resolution section in its code of conduct.

The Software Freedom Law Center plans to create a new branch in New Dehli India to further expand their coverage of FLOSS and legal defense of free software. Mishi Choudhary will oversee the SFLC's New Dehli office.

Mozilla announced today via its blog that Fenec, the mobile version of Firefox is now available for Android 2.0-powered smartphones and the Nokia N900. Unlike other mobile browsers, Fenec supports add-ons as well as tabbed browsing, and now ships with Firefox Sync baked into code. Sync allows users to synchronize their tabs, passwords, bookmarks, and other pertinent material from their desktop Firefox session.

In lieu of the recent announcement of Ubuntu 11.04 codename: Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon revealed details for the Ubuntu 11.04 Developers Summit. Starting October 25, the UDS will take place in Orlando Florida at the Caribe Royale hotel.

Fedora 14 Alpha was released today and with it comes enhanced cloud support, KDE 4.5, and the MeeGo UX for netbooks. New features included in the F14 Alpha include improved system and session management through systemd, improved JPEG compression/decompression, and enhanced Perl support with Rakudo.

The MeeGo Project extended the call for proposals for the first-ever MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Ireland. Conference coordinators still need proposals for Middleware, In-Vehicle Infotainment, Project Leadership, and Birds of a Feather sessions. The deadline is now Friday, August 26. Get crackin'!

Linux stalwarts who hoped, prayed, and begged for a Steam to come to the open source platform got their collective dream crushed when Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi told GameIndustry.biz that there are no plans for the gaming publishing and communication platform to come to Linux.

Canonical founder and former CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced UTouch, the multi-touch gesture suite for Ubuntu. UTouch will be fully integrated into Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 along with the Unity desktop. The gesture suite can also be downloaded for existing versions of Ubuntu and the project itself is open source under GPLv3 and LGPLv3.

Ubuntu-based Jolicloud released a 1.0 build yesterday. The cloud-centric netbook OS features full cloud support, allowing users to manage the apps and launcher from any HTML5-friendly Web browser. The OS features both native applications and Web apps.

Nicholas Negroponte, the project lead for One Laptop Per Child has volunteered his considerable know-how and experience in manufacturing to India, as they prepare a $35 laptop. The offering from Negroponte stands in contrast to his previous position on the OLPC ecosystem. Negroponte has previously stated that competition kills his initiative, now it looks like he's far more willing to collaborate.

In the GNOME Census conducted by Neary Consulting, the firm found that Red Hat lead in company contributions boasting 16.3 percent of company project contributions. Red Hat was trailed by Novell, Collabora, Intel, and Fluendo. IBM didn't crack the top 20 and Canonical boasted a meager 1.03 percent of contributions.

Worldwide smartphone analysts Canalys announced that Android deployments had increased by 886 percent in Q2 2010 compared to Q2 2009. The report also showed that Nokia remained at the top of the OEM heap, selling 24 million smartphones in Q1 2010 alone.

GENIVI, a nonprofit organization setup by car manufacturers and chip makers, has announced that MeeGo will be the platform for future In-Vehicle Infotainment devices. Before you wince at the word "infotainment," know that this announcement essentially means that MeeGo will be the de facto operating system for in-dash GPS devices, media players, and whatever else the member manufacturers of GENIVI can think of. This is a big move for the proliferation of MeeGo, especially considering the project hinted at further iterations of the Linux-based OS on TVs and mediaphones.

The Khronos Group announced the finalized specs for OpenGL 4.1 and unsurprisingly, the focus was primarily on improving graphical performance on mobile devices. OpenGL 4.1 is completely cross compatible with OpenCL, the mobile 3D graphics API and features new tools that allow for the easy porting of code from one platform to another.

Mozilla Lab's Firefox Home app has cleared Apple's approval process and is now available for free in the App Store. The app uses Firefox Sync to import browser history, tabs, and the Awesome Bar, bringing a truncated version of the Firefox experience to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Motorola marched out its newest smartphone the Droid X, which features a 4.3-inch display and a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, but there's one major caveat to the phone: a new security measure designed to disable the phone entirely if it's tampered with. Called eFuse, the security measure corrupts the phone's boot process should the phone be hacked, tampered with, or rooted. And while this won't be a big deal to many consumers, power users should take heed before they wind up owning a $200 paperweight.

Members of the open source hardware community released a public, working definition of what actually constitutes open hardware. The definition, which consists of 11 tenets that a piece of hardware must adhere to in order to qualify as open, is the first document of its kind in the open hardware community.

Build apps for your mobile phone from your browser with Google's creation suite. Google announced the App Inventor beta, a web-based, visual programming suite designed to create custom apps for Android-powered phones.

The good folks at Ars Technica benchmarked and compared JavaScript performance between Android 2.2 and iOS 4. The results were overwhelmingly in Android's favor as it performed almost twice as well in the SunSpider benchmark and nearly five times better at the V8 benchmark.

Tech sites are abuzz with rumors that Android 3.0, Google's follow-up to the recently released Android 2.2, could see a release as soon as October. Additional rumors suggest a minimum processor requirement of 1 GHz and a minimum RAM requirement of 512MB. These specs would make Android 3.0 a natural fit for high-end smartphones and tablet PCs.