Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Six weeks have passed since Canonical's splashy debut of Ubuntu for phones, but for many here in the Linux blogosphere, the memory is still crystal-clear. It came as some surprise, then, to see follow-up news announced so soon afterward. The news this time? None other than Ubuntu for tablets.

For the first time, both hiring mangers (850) and Linux professionals (2,600) were surveyed in the 2013 Linux Jobs Survey & Report, which forecasts and provides a comprehensive view of the Linux career landscape, including business needs and personal incentives. The report also includes insights into why employers are seeking Linux talent now and what the top incentives are for Linux professionals.

Bill Richardson, a software engineer for Google, has detailed how to boot a conventional Linux distribution on the company's new Chromebook Pixel. Google released the Chromebook Pixel last week – the device costs £1,049, has a 13" touchscreen with a resolution of 2560×1700 pixels, a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB (64GB for the LTE version) of internal SSD storage. Where previous Chromebooks only supported booting Google's ChromeOS directly, the Pixel has an added option to support a third-party bootloader which enables it to be relatively easily modified to boot stock Linux desktop distributions.

The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one. SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.

Mozilla has been a pioneer and advocate for the Web for nearly 15 years. We are dedicated to promoting open standards and creating new Web experiences that allow innovation and creativity to flourish. We created choice and competition in the desktop browser market when we launched Firefox and we are becoming the same catalyst for change in mobile with Firefox OS, enabling developers, operators and consumers to blaze their own path.

The not-for-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser has announced handsets based on its operating system for mobile phones. In a press conference ahead of Mobile World Congress, Mozilla said that 18 operators including Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, were signed up. The mobiles will go head to head with established software from Apple and Google's Android division. Mozilla described the Firefox OS as an "open alternative". Firefox phones are likely to be sold first in the developing world and Eastern Europe and will be at the cheaper end of the smartphone market, according to Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla.

The PowerPC architecture update for the Linux 3.9 kernel is made up mostly of bug-fixes and minor updates, but there are a few highlights. Most of the major work revolves around the yet-to-be-released POWER8 hardware.

As promised, Canonical has released the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, complete with full source code and installation images for supported devices. The company warns, however, that this early, alpha-quality release is strictly for developers and enthusiasts only. "While a huge amount of Engineering and Design work has been put into ensuring that the foundations for our user experience vision are in place, we want to stress that the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview is currently work in progress," Canonical's David Planella wrote in the official announcement on Thursday. "It is not intended to replace production devices or the tablet or handset you use every day."

The Foundation has announced the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) initiative. With industrial uses of software which expect support and maintenance of the software stack from ten to fifty years, there has long been a desire to address this need. With the new LTS initiative, led by CA Technologies, IBM, EclipseSource and SAP AG, the Foundation will provide the facilities and processes needed to create signed deployable updates for older versions of Eclipse. This should, in turn, enable a new ecosystem of companies and enterprises to share fixes and releases. The initiative will be open to all organisations with an interest in extending the productive life of Eclipse technologies.

Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform's sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of "administrator friendliness". Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. To illustrate, I want to go over the single most common "why doesn't it work" issue I encounter among junior admins: cloning CentOS virtual machines (VMs).

There's no denying that Linux has had a lot of great moments since the turn of the millennium, and Linux Girl has done her best to highlight each and every one of them -- at least over the past six or so of those years. Recently, however, the question was the subject of a new poll that prompted vigorous debate.

Open Source for America (OSFA) announced today the opening of its nomination period for the annual OSFA awards. Each year, the organization recognizes individuals, projects, and deployments that support its mission to encourage free and open source software adoption in the U.S. government.

Oracle is not letting go of its Java patent infringement beef against Google despite its sound drubbing last spring when U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that programming APIs were not subject to copyright protection. Last week, Oracle took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

SCALE 11X attendees have gained an added bonus to the schedule for the three-day event in Los Angeles starting on Friday..

Ubuntu spaceman Mark Shuttleworth is embracing the full horror of tablets and smartphones, calculating they’ll do little harm to his Linux distro’s PC business. Shuttleworth yesterday announced a fondleslab-friendly Ubuntu interface for tabs ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The first tabs running the UI will be the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 - the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview for the kit will be available from tomorrow, 21 February.

Red Hat to Contribute Red Hat Storage Hadoop Plug-in to Apache Hadoop Community

This series is proving a lot more popular than I'd figured. Who would have thought so many people enjoy noodling around with Web servers? By popular demand, "Web Served" now enters the bonus round with two things I didn't think I was going to be able to get to: MediaWiki in this piece, and Etherpad Lite in the next.

It bothers many of us everytime we hear about yet another non-obvious, overreaching, and abusive patent—particularly a software patent that is getting in the way of innovation and creativity. Additionally, there is an overwhelming sense of frustration when a regular citizen can't do much to change the current, sad state of affairs.

Dell has announced a higher resolution screen version of its Sputnik laptop, an Intel i7 Ultrabook supplied with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and aimed at developers, that it will be making it available outside the US and Canada. The screen on the new Sputnik 2 is 1920x1080, a far higher and more developer-friendly resolution than the Sputnik 1's 1366x768 display.

Rumors are not exactly an uncommon phenomenon here in the Linux community, but every once in a while one comes along that is so compelling, such a deliciously tantalizing prospect, that bloggers just can't leave it alone, no matter how far-fetched it may be. Case in point? Oh, it's a juicy one: "Microsoft is having a 'meaningful look' at a full Linux port of Office ... .