Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The ZE Rescue Disk is a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive. ZE Rescue Disk provides what was a missing link in permanently recovering from failed boot sequences.

Opera will slowly be moving away from its own Presto rendering engine for its closed-source multi-platform web-browser in favor of using the WebKit rendering engine and is also beginning to back Google's Chromium project.

Free software is built on a paradox. In order to give freedom to users, free software licences use something that takes away freedom – copyright, which is an intellectual monopoly based on limiting people's freedom to share, not enlarging it. That was a brilliant hack when Richard Stallman first came up with it in 1985, with the GNU Emacs General Public Licence, but maybe now it's time to move on.

There has been some debate and consideration in recent years about when the Linux gaming platform will officially gain ground. Critics and market skeptics have wondered when it will really take off and when it will be Linux’s turn to procure large portions of the market share. New games and gaming consoles geared toward this system have left many asserting that 2013 will finally be the "year of Linux." But why?

On two recent occasions I've been asked to share why the open source economic model is sound. The first was on the elevator with an academic researcher while attending a recent meeting. We talked about open source, and he asked me: "If the software is open source,how are developers suppossed to make a living?".

The annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is now preparing for the 2013 cycle of the program which sees Google offer student developers stipends to write code for a wide range of open source projects. Google is assisted by a number of mentoring organisations around the world who help the students achieve their goal of completing enhancements and improvements to open source projects. This will be the ninth year that GSoC has run; over the past eight years, six thousand students have completed the program.

The Linux desktop has long been about two key items, the actual desktop environment and the apps that run on it. This past week saw major advances in both fronts.

Modern copyright law grants copyright automatically to any creative work, including simple things like blog posts – and small pieces of code on github. This default copyright creates an assumption that for someone to do anything further with someone else's creative work requires permission from the author—what Lawrence Lessig calls "the permission culture." The open license ecosystem often takes this permission culture for granted, rather than fighting back—and that may be contributing to the proliferation of unlicensed code.

It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb's editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was "continuing its long decline" and was in""an irretrievable tailspin," based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I've relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.

eScholar's only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results. That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open source enterprise databases.

Slick, a database access library for the Scala language designed by Typesafe, has reached its 1.0 release milestone. Slick allows developers to write their database queries in Scala instead of a database native language like SQL, reaping the benefits of static checking and compile time safety afforded by the library's query compiler. The tool can be extended to interface with several different database backends and allows developers to access the data stored in it as if they were directly using Scala collections. For example, creating a table would look like:

The Cloud today seems a bit like Dawson City in 1896 when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to get underway. Everybody is talking about the Cloud, and many want a piece of the action. The Open Source world has been abuzz with OpenStack in particular, with some going so far as to call it “the new Linux”.

Printing in Linux can be a confusing territory. Many distributions don’t come with printing enabled by default, leaving it up to the user to set it up. This article will show you how to set up a standard USB printer in Linux.

Extend PostgreSQL's capabilities with PostGIS 2.0 and discover all the magic of spatial databases. Even if you're unfamiliar with GIS, I am pretty sure you know what Web mapping is. GIS stands for geographical information systems, and it originated in the early 1970s as a set of tools and techniques for scientists (cartographers, land planners and biologists). Since then, the field has been experiencing an amazing evolution, as in many other computer-related fields. One of the most revolutionary things is that now maps, and especially Web mapping, are a common experience for millions of people in everyday life. Not only in the past few years have we seen people using more and more mapping apps, there has been an explosion in personal Web mapping. Today, a lot of blogs and personal Web sites have maps.

With the publishing this morning of the article about the state of the HelenOS micro-kernel, all of my notes from this year's Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) have been published along with information on the other interesting tracks that happened during this event that brings thousands of open-source developers from around the world to Brussels, Belgium for one weekend. Here's a recap of all that happened at FOSDEM 2013.

On behalf of the Linux Foundation, kernel developer James Bottomley has released a Microsoft-signed mini bootloader whose signature is trusted by typical Windows 8 PCs and which allows such PCs to be started when Secure Boot is active. Commenting on the release, Matthew Garrett, the main developer of the Shim Secure Boot bootloader that has been available for some time, announced that he intends to integrate some of the features of the Linux Foundation's mini bootloader into Shim as well.

Aside from the GNU Hurd talk, HelenOS was the subject of another talk at FOSDEM 2013, the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting, that happened one week ago. HelenOS has been under development since 2001 and is self-described as an "open-source multiplatform microkernel multiserver general-purpose operating system written from scratch."

Users not in possession of root privileges will in future be able to set up containers in which to run software which requires them. Linux 3.8 will, under certain circumstances, use less memory and will include improvements for NUMA systems. Support for Intel 386 chips has been dropped.

While there's plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.