Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech. Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.

It seems that the FOSS community sees its ranks expand just about every day, as new fans of free and open source software join the fold. What's much less common is to see former advocates of Linux and FOSS change their minds and depart. That's pretty much what happened last week, when GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza announced that he has abandoned desktop Linux in favor of Apple's Mac platform.

How many times have you heard, "there's an app for that"? But sometimes, there actually isn't "an app for that", or the apps that do exist don't meet your needs. As Linux users, we tend to like to scratch our own itches, and if that means we write some code to do it, so be it. However, writing code to run on an Android phone or tablet has a bit of a learning curve, and it's even worse on Apple products. Fortunately, Phonegap provides a simple way to create standalone apps for Android, iPhone, WebOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone, among others. You just need to be reasonably proficient in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and you can develop native apps for the majority of smartphones currently in use. And, the same code base can run, with obvious limitations, on any Web browser.

The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu's build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.

LXer Feature: 10-Mar-2013

The big news this week was Mark Shuttleworth and his feelings on the Ubuntu community and reaction to it. Miguel de Icaza decides to use a Mac full time instead of Linux at home. The Chrome OS resists being cracked into and more. Enjoy!

While there are many interesting features to the Linux 3.9 kernel, there is some functionality you will not find yet within the mainline Linux kernel.

In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner had no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant ever since the acquisition. As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.

On the second day of Pwn2Own, no browser or plugin survived the hacking contest. Mozilla and Google have already shipped updates for Firefox and Chrome to fix the holes exploited on day one

Red Hat has announced that it is assuming the leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, just days after Oracle issued what it said would be the final patch for version 6 of its commercial Java SE 6 Development Kit. Oracle posted JDK 6 Update 43 on Monday as an emergency patch for the latest in a series of severe vulnerabilities that have plagued the Java browser plugin. But although Oracle is already investigating other flaws, it said that this would be the last set of public fixes for Java SE 6.

Toradex will soon ship the first member of a new SODIMM-like COM (computer-on-module) family. The 82x42mm Apalis T30 is powered by a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, and supported with an embedded Linux OS. The company sees ARM as a growing alternative to x86 CPUs, in applications such as digital signage and high-end multimedia, thanks the increasing integration of interfaces such as 3D graphics engines, PCI-Express, gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI within ARM chipsets.

Karim Yaghmour, founder of OperSys founder and a well-known luminary in the real-time and embedded Linux market, led a panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit in San Francisco last month. “The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour,” writes Libby Clark in a post at Linux.com. “What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in ‘classic’ embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.”

Here in the Linux blogosphere, most fans of FOSS are nothing if not outspoken with their many opinions. Those opinions tend to be unequivocal on matters large and small, so it's always notable when a new technology comes along that leaves bloggers scratching their heads in uncertainty. That's a rarity, needless to say, but just recently a shining example emerged: the Chromebook Pixel.

Self-promotion in an open source world, it starts with a shameless plug—a simple way to make people aware of something you’re passionate about. Then, over time, you get more comfortable with using the shameless plug and that desire to make people aware transforms into purposeful marketing. At some time or another when working on an open source project, you're bound to have to promote it. Self-promotion can be an uncomfortable topic for some people, but I've found word of mouth is the best way to promote open source.

Updated java-1.7.0-openjdk packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical..

SourceForge is pleased to announce our new Enterprise Directory—a sub-section of our site focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company. This might include areas such as project management, office suites, or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, software in this category is backed by a company, but this isn’t always the case, nor is it a requirement for inclusion in the directory.

Responding to ongoing discussions and speculation about the future for Ubuntu's release cadence, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth published a blog post today, detailing his thoughts on the issue. Shuttleworth, who holds the position of "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" of the Ubuntu project, has in the past publicly stated his opinion on cadence and the importance of regular releases for the Ubuntu project. In his latest post, Shuttleworth is of the opinion that "rolling releases are not real releases" and are therefore not the right method for Ubuntu to adopt, but that he is considering accelerating Ubuntu's release cycle.

F-Secure's latest Mobile Threat Report for the last three months of 2012 names Android as the home of 96% of the new "mobile threat families". Of 100 new threat families detected in that quarter, 96 of them were based on Android, up from the previous quarter's 49 out of 74, and only 4 were resident on Symbian, down from 21 in the previous quarter. The numbers are for newly detected families of malware only and do not reflect overall numbers found in the wild.

Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress last week - there seems to be no stopping Google's mobile operating that's now almost as ubiquitous as a colour display. But the success hides the platform's problems, insists one analyst. Former Nomura analyst Richard Windsor paints a picture of increasing fragmentation creating a clear dividing line down the middle - with one half of the split populated by shoddy low-end devices that look good but "barely work".

The ‘rolling release’ meme has been a popular one for years in Ubuntu. It’s one of the top requests from members of our user community. And it’s popular with Canonical team members too (who, largely, come from the community and share its values). The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle.

Right now on Ubuntu they use ConsoleKit for managing logged-in users, but ConsoleKit is no longer maintained. The functionality of FreeDesktop.org's ConsoleKit has since been integrated within systemd. With no longer having upstream maintenance provided to them, the plan is to switch to logind. However, the logind component can mostly work without a full systemd-based system, so that's the only part they're looking at using for the future of Ubuntu.