Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Server provisioning and configuration management and automation are the latest examples of where the tech industry is being driven, largely by open source software. The leading open source server and IT infrastructure automation frameworks, Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs' Puppet, sit on the leading edge of significant trends under way in enterprise IT.

Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, "The Cloud." When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, "let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud."

Barry Kauler, the developer of the Puppy family of Linux distributions, has released version 5.5 of the Wary and Racy branches of the project. Wary is the edition of Puppy designed to be run on older hardware, whereas Racy has more features and needs more system resources but is based on Wary. For version 5.5, both editions had most of their underlying system libraries and some of the applications updated during the development phase; this took almost a year from the release of Wary 5.3 in April 2012.

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. He is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that since the release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012, it has seen 40 million downloads of the 3.4.x release series. This number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge; language packs and source tarballs were not counted. The ASF has released a comma-delimited text file with the download numbers for every individual day and has plotted the results in a graph showing the cumulative and daily downloads.

The X Window System is old, but it works. Many distros including Ubuntu, had been headed toward the use of Wayland as an alternative Linux display technology. Though apparently Wayland is not good enough for Ubuntu anymore. "The traction that Ubuntu Touch is creating is great and the team is happy with where this is leading us," Ubuntu Developer, Oliver Ries wrote. "However, in order to implement the vision of converged devices, some changes to our Display Stack are necessary. After thorough research, looking at existing options and weighing in costs & benefits we have decided to roll our own Display Server, Mir."

A new system launched to curb online piracy of intellectual property is meant to be educational, not punitive, says the organization behind it. But suspended Internet service or slowing service to a crawl sounds pretty punitive to critics of the Copyright Alert System (CAS).

Alan Levy, with Plextek Consulting, has published an interesting whitepaper that examines various issues associated with embedding Android in applications other than the typical smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. In the nine-page whitepaper, “Using Android in your embedded product,” Levy provides a brief overview of Android and its origins, and then proceeds to evaluate its pros and cons relative to applications in the general embedded market.

IBM announced today that its entire array of cloud software and services will be based on the open cloud architecture, allowing end-users and customers to buy various equipment from contributing members of the OpenStack software group without having to face tie-in with one particular vendor.

In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!

Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu's Unity user interface. Assuming you've managed to get past last year’s privacy fiasco, either by being comfortable with Canonical sending your search queries to Amazon and others or disabling the feature, this latest beta - code-named Raring Ringtail - is shaping up to be a high-water mark for Unity fans.

Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.

Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in the still experimental Btrfs will be one of the major new features of Linux 3.9, expected to arrive in late April. This has become apparent because Linus Torvalds has now issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.9 which, as usual, closes the Linux development cycle's "merge window", the phase during which the developers integrate the majority of changes for the next version. This time, the merge window, which started with the release of Linux 3.8, only lasted thirteen instead of the usual fourteen days.

When I think back, I can't remember my first involvement in the Koha community. I remember talking to Chris Cormack on Instant Messenger nearly everyday before ever really communicating with the community has a whole. I remember trying to find a job working with Koha when it was time for me to move on from my first job, but I still don't remember really being involved in the community. I read a great post by Siobhan Mckeown about participating in the WordPress community and I highly recommend reading it, but I thought maybe I should do a Koha variation for those who want to get involved. My own personal story started with a mentor, Chris, and lead to becoming Documentation Manager and a Koha trainer. But we all have different paths and different stories, so I asked the community to answer a few questions to help me produce a well rounded post for you (following Siobhan's model).

LXer Feature: 03-Mar-2013

It was quite the eventful week in Linux news. Linus goes off on (UEFI) Secure Boot option in the kernel, LG acquires webOS from HP, how the “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy program works and SCALE 11x kicks "trades" and takes "shows", Enjoy!

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and certainly I am not. Honest. But one of the problems with working on a show like Southern California Linux Expo and this year’s SCALE 11X leaves me little time to do anything but the wood-chopping and water-carrying that goes with being the publicity chair for the show. Let me be clear: This is not a complaint, but rather an explanation about why you’re not going to get a comprehensive report about the event. Others are doing that for me, and it was as great as they say it is; possibly moreso.

The not-for-profit Wandboard community project has begun shipping its compact, low-power, board-level embedded computer. Based on 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 processors, Wandboard comes in single- and dual-core versions (priced at $79 and $99) and runs community-supported embedded Linux and Android operating systems.

The Ubuntu OS on smartphones and tablets has been grabbing headlines and gaining support quickly since the plans were formally unveiled at the beginning of 2013. ZDNet met the man behind Ubuntu to see what he had to say about the project.

RunRev, the company behind the multi-platform, HyperCard-like development environment LiveCode, reached its goal for its Kickstarter campaign: the fairly ambitious target of £350,000 was met about 60 hours before the campaign was due to end. In fact, although the total amount only approached the target in the last five days, donations then went far beyond the original goal, finally reaching almost £500,000 (about €570,000), allowing LiveCode to be released under the GPLv3 open source licence. RunRev plans to use the additional money to implement more project goals.

With Zopfli, Google has introduced a new, C-based compression library as open source software. Named after a Swiss pastry, its algorithm is said to produce results that are 3 to 8 per cent more compact when compressing web content than the popular zlib library at maximum compression level. These results have been documented by Google. Like zlib, Zopfli is an implementation of the Deflate algorithm that is also used in the zip file format and in PNG files, but it appears to result in smaller output files.