Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A new distribution popped up on my radar last month when it was added to the Distrowatch.com database. It probably helped that its newest release was codenamed "GameOver" and featured lots and lots of games. Yesterday its team released 2.1 "Eris" Ultra. GameOver was a pretty cool release. It looked tough, but beyond that and its impressive list of games, it also featured Desura for Linux, Steam beta for Linux, and Wine & PlayOnLinux. It used LXDE on top of a Debian Wheezy base and shipped with codecs and plugins for full multimedia enjoyment, but opted for Nouveau NVIDIA graphics drivers.

LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

The desktop computing landscape is rapidly changing all around us. Microsoft is now pushing Windows 8, the biggest change Microsoft has made to the desktop since Windows 95. This means that whether a Windows user chooses to switch to Mac OS X, Linux, or stick with Windows, he/she is in for a new learning experience. A transition to Linux may just be more familiar than making the jump to Window 8, and there are many open source alternatives to popular Windows applications. This large list of open source alternatives could make your transition to Linux easier than you thought possible.

We are proud to announce the return of Firefox Flicks, Mozilla’s global video competition that invites Firefox fans and filmmakers to create short videos, or “Flicks,” that help tell the Firefox story. Last year was a huge success and we received more than 400 videos submission from thousands of filmmakers all over the world.

In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called "BackRub" that ran on the school's server. After one year, BackRub's bandwidth outgrew the university's needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to "googol." It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

My experience tells me there are a lot of people interested in trying open source, but they don't know where to start. And the perception that you have to write code to contribute to is a barrier to that curiosity. So, I've outlined 10 ways that anyone can get started with open source—no code writing involved. I welcome your ideas and additions, there are without a doubt more than 10 ways—let's get started.

With the release of LGPL licensed C and Java connectors for MariaDB and MySQL in November 2012, a number of questions were raised in the community over the drivers' provenance and appropriateness of the LGPL licence. The H went looking for answers...

Aaron Swartz had many causes, some of which he all but invented himself. Now he has himself become a cause — or a number of them. Sitting through a long series of previews at a movie theater last night, I realized that a movie on Aaron's life is probably inevitable. Books too. He was that interesting and important.

No server, desktop, or laptop install is complete without Vim, and yet, there are times when I still see questions pop up on IRC about how to do basic editing of config files with vi. I remember, years ago, asking some of the same questions of an older Unix guru, and asking why I should bother learning such an eccentric and “outdated” text editor. His answer has stuck with me, he said “Because it is the only text editor guaranteed to be on every server, and some day you will need it, and have no other alternatives.” Vim, short for “vi improved” is ubiquitous, but it is also so much more, and the time you spend learning it will be repaid to you tenfold in productivity.

Pick up most items, from the soup can, to the library book, and you will find a data tag. In most cases, that tag is the simple, ubiquitous bar code that seems to have been around forever. They are the lineal representation of numbers in a machine readable format that most people do not even pay attention to any more (although some of us are old enough to remember a time before they were so common place). More recently, the shippers UPS and FedEx have moved to more complex data tags to help expedite the automated sorting and shipping of the thousands of products that they handle every day.

Microsoft has released a summary of the study compiled by HP on the Linux migration in Munich. In an article, German magazine Focus Money Online had last week quoted figures from an unpublished study that Microsoft had commissioned from HP. The study concludes that at €60.6 million (approximately £51 million), the City of Munich's Linux migration was considerably more expensive than reported by its council last November. However, last week, Microsoft Germany had emphasized that the study was compiled for internal purposes.

Their findings were released today in celebration of an internationally recognized holiday that we at Mozilla look forward to as much as any bank holiday: Data Privacy Day. The study surveyed more than 100,000 consumers in the U.S., and after all the number crunching, Mozilla ranked highest in the Internet & Social Media industry. We also made it onto the top 20 list for all companies.

According to a report on the EC's open source portal, Joinup, Sweden is following the example of Norway in using the "Fix My Street" open source software that was developed in the UK. The software enables citizens to easily report problems and helps authorities identify and prioritise them. A pilot version of the national service, "Fixa Min Gata", is expected to become operational in March or April and will allow citizens to report such things as potholes, broken pavements, graffiti or non-functional street lighting.

This year I made a New Year resolution to foster a more open education at home by joining a growing subculture of society. To start, I began replacing some commercial household products, such as toothpaste, with 'open source' ones. After all, there is no patent on or trademark for baking soda (2/3 cup), salt (4 teaspoons), mint oil (1 tablespoon), or melted coconut oil (2-3 tablespoons)—what you need to make homemade toothpaste. They are readily available and accessible, except for the mint oil perhaps (but you can substitute it with cinnamon or vanilla extract, or other possibilities if you just use your creative, open mind).

LXer Feature: 27-Jan-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

We had a chance to sit down with Matthew Garrett, SCALE 11x keynote speaker, to discuss his upcoming keynote "The Secure Boot Journey" as well as a host of other topics including the future directions of Linux.

Less than one month after the release of the Rekonq 2.0 web-browser for the KDE desktop as an alternative to Konqueror, Rekonq 2.1 has surfaced and it brings more features to this open-source WebKit-powered project.

The WordPress developers have announced a maintenance update to the popular open source blogging software. WordPress 3.5.1 fixes 37 bugs and addresses three security issues, including two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Users running WordPress on IIS might run into a problem that prevents the upgrade; the developers have prepared documentation to help users work around this problem.

Normally, I shy away from reviewing elementary-stage distros. Alpha releases are often too nonfunctional to offer any real work usability. They are simply proof-of-concept versions. This is not the case with the openArtist distro, however. After hearing a few colleagues rave about openArtist, I threw caution to the wind and checked it out.

The openSUSE community has announced that the openSUSE Conference 2013 will take place from 18 to 22 July at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki in Greece. The conference, themed with the slogan "Power to the Geeko", aims to spotlight the grass-roots nature of the open source project. The fifth annual event of its kind, this year's incarnation of the conference is the first time that the organisation lies entirely in the hand of volunteers, with SUSE employees supporting the event mostly in their free time.