Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: "Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be".

Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. "Measuring Linux adoption ... has always been -- and will likely always be -- a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data," said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.

A new Ruby 1.9.3 implementation has appeared in the form of Topaz, announced by its creator Alex Gaynor. Topaz's design goals were simplicity and performance and it was written on top of the RPython translation toolchain, building on the work of the PyPy developers. RPython is a restricted implementation of Python that was developed by the PyPy developers as a route to translating RPython programs into LLVM code. Topaz inherits a high performance garbage collector and "state of the art" just-in-time compiler from RPython, making for a fast Ruby implementation.

The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Ian Romanick expressed plans to enhance the "out of the box" / automatic configuration experience for games on Linux. He wrote in his talk's abstract, "Every game for desktop PCs has the ability for the user to tune quality and performance settings. However, for the out-of-the-box experience, these games also need to detect the hardware installed in the user's system to select the initial settings. On Windows and Mac, there are a number of system interfaces provided for this purpose, but on Linux it is surprisingly difficult. This talk will cover some current best practices used by shipping Linux games. It will also introduce some interfaces under development to improve the current state of affairs."

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThe Call for Presentations for Akademy 2013 is now open. Akademy is the KDE community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, don't miss your chance to present your work and ideas at the conference from the 13th - 19th July in Bilbao. The days for the main talks are Saturday and Sunday, 13 and 14 July. The rest of the week will be unconference sessions and workshops.

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service. Cloud storage is a model of networked on-line storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage that third parties generally host. Hosting companies operate large data centers, and people who require hosting buy or lease storage capacity from them. The data-center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to their customers' requirements and expose them as storage pools, which the customers themselves can use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resources may span across multiple servers.

The city of Munich has hit back at Microsoft in a row over whether the city's plan to use open-source software is cheaper than using Microsoft's products. The city is currently migrating 13,000 computers from Windows NT 4 and Microsoft Office 97 to a custom build of Ubuntu and OpenOffice as part of its 'LiMux' project. A further 2,000 computers will stay on Windows but are being switched to OpenOffice. The move began in 2004 and will be completed in the autumn of this year.

Ubuntu-driven smartphones will be available to customers in October 2013 according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth from a presentation given in New York on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reports Shuttleworth as saying that the new phone operating system would be available in "two large geographical markets in October", but he wouldn't say where those markets were and declined to identify carrier or handset partners.

With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.

The Calligra developers have released version 2.6 of their office suite for the KDE desktop and its mobile-focused Calligra Active version, which is QML-based. Calligra 2.6 is the first production version of the modular office package that includes Calligra Author, a writing and editing tool specifically for e-book creation. With Calligra Author, the developers hope to meet the needs of groups like novel authors who want to write long texts but do not need complicated formatting. The tool is also supposed to take into account the unique aspects of e-books.

The folks over at http://www.iheartubuntu.com recently put up a challenge to the Linux community to get Netflix to work natively under our beloved OS. Thankfully, Erich Hoover stepped up to the challenge and patched the Wine Project in a way to allow Firefox/Silverlight to be installed and actually work with Netflix's DRM'd Silverlight!

Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming.

Wink, a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots, works reasonably well when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink's premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain presentation on how to do things with a computer.

Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

Berkholz, a long-time X.Org and Gentoo contributor and employee of RedMonk, also reiterated facts about the X.Org Foundation not being accepted to the Google Summer of Code project last year and other shortcomings. His development statistics on X.Org slowing down in the past few years incorporates not only code activity but also mailing list messages, contributor count, and other metrics.

If you ever find yourself in a situation in which your computer doesn’t start, and you’ve already tried the “Last Known Good Configuration” option and it doesn’t work, what else can you do? SystemDiscs has a solution that might actually take you away from your frustrations with an automatic repair application called Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE, in short). This is a great software that allows you to repair your Windows and backup your files even if you can’t boot into Windows, and we have a giveaway too. Read on for more detail.

MapBox has launched an alpha version of the new web-based map editor for the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project. The new editor is called the iD editor and is built using JavaScript and the D3.js data visualisation library. Development was funded as part of a grant by the Knight Foundation, announced in September, to develop new tools for the OpenStreetMap project. iD will eventually replace the OpenStreetMap project's current editor, Potlatch 2. In contrast to its predecessor, iD does not depend on Flash to run. The new editor was developed in conjunction with Richard Fairhurst, the original author of Potlatch 2.

Awesome Window Manager offers three simple themes for users that need a change. Here you can get a brief look at the default themes, along with instructions to sample them for yourself. Although style choices may be limited, this is one of the most efficient window managers available.

Recently, I’ve been frustrated... sad... angry. Just over a year ago, a friend and fellow member of the free culture community, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, committed suicide. He was 22. Just one week ago, an acquaintance, a friend of many close friends, and—really—a role model, just one year older than myself and networked with many institutions and individuals I have come to work with and/or admire (such as MIT, the Berkman Center, the EFF, Creative Commons; frankly, there are too many individual people to list) committed suicide. Aaron Swartz was admired for his bravery to stand up for his ideals, and the work he put into the world demonstrated no less than exactly those ideals. I followed his actions with awe and complete understanding.