Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ever since it became clear that GNOME 2 would have an ongoing future in the desktop Linux world after all, flowers have been blooming unseasonably early throughout the Linux blogosphere. It all started with the appearance of MATE and Cinnamon; then it was SolusOS. Since then, Fuduntu made its official debut, as did Consort," SolusOS's brand-new GNOME Classic fork.

There's a new situation concerning another high-priority Free Software Foundation project and the unwillingness by Richard Stallman and the FSF to cooperate with real-world free software developers. For those not familiar with the Free Software Foundation's "high priority" projects list, see The Sad State Of FSF's High Priority Projects and Many FSF Priority Projects Still Not Progressing.

Top Linux kernel contributor Alan Cox has announced that he is stepping down from his position at Intel and will no longer be involved with Linux development, citing family reasons. The British-born Cox, who makes his home in Swansea, Wales, has been one of the most active developers of the Linux kernel since the early days of the project, and at one time was often described as Linus Torvalds' "second in command."

The project hosting site GitHub is currently inaccessible from China, cutting off the country's developers from the valuable resource. A ViewDNS.info check shows that the service cannot be looked up throughout China. The blocking is frustrating many Chinese developers who cannot access one of the world's major repositories of open source software. As the country's firewall controllers rarely give any information on why sites are blocked, it is suggested by some that github.com is being blocked because of a dispute over a train ticket booking plugin.

Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to New York City (Newark, to be precise) and back to LA. In other words, I had an ideal test environment for Mobiata's FlightTrack app.

A newly proposed Fedora 19 feature is to do away with MySQL and drop in MariaDB instead, per this official proposal from Red Hat's Jaroslav Reznik. In Fedora 19, MariaDB would become the default SQL database package. MySQL would still be available in the Fedora repository for at least one release as the more conservative users make the migration from MySQL to MariaDB. "We would like to replace MySQL with MariaDB in early development cycle for Fedora 19. MySQL will continue to be available for at least one release, but MariaDB will become the default."

Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government. I have discussed recently the NY State Senate progressive stance on open government and its embrace of open source. Capitol Camp 2012 was another display of the powerful benefits the adoption of open practices in government can bring to the public. The event involved an unconference-day and a hackathon-day, both of them fully open to the public.

Release early, often, and with rap music.Evan Roth is a maker of things with a specific i nterest in tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. We covered him and some of his work recently in an article about how open source is disrupting visual art. And here, we give you some insight into the guy behind open source rap, graffiti, and Brooklyn’s first and only R&D lab for the public domain: F.A.T. Lab.

I have to give Kyle Rankin all the credit for my Raspberry Pi collection. I never really felt geeky enough to do anything with an Arduino, and for some reason I mentally lumped the RPi into the same world. Boy was I short-sighted! Thankfully Kyle showed me the light, and I managed to snag some of the new 512MB model B units. You'll be hearing about the Raspberry Pi from Kyle as well, but this month, I want to introduce the RPi to those folks who have been hesitant to buy one, thinking they weren't geeky enough. I had to ask a lot of dumb questions when my Raspberry Pis arrived; hopefully, I can save you that embarrassment.

Linux now supports F2fs, a filesystem that is specially designed for storage media with flash chips. The developers say that Btrfs is now faster to complete certain tasks and that Ext4 is more efficient when handling small files.

However great the strides made by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and Mint in recent years, it seems fair to say that Linux has not yet enjoyed any sweeping successes on the desktop the way it has on the mobile side with Android. That, however, may be changing. Thanks once again to none other than Google, Linux is now appearing with increasing frequency in the PC lineups of hardware makers.

The media player can now make use of the Nepomuk semantic framework to find music and its metadata anywhere on the system. Other enhancements include statistical sync with Last.fm and the return of audio CD playback for some users.

LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2013

I need to apologize to all our readers. I have not been keeping up on the LXWR as of late and I am sorry. I could give many excuses but they would be just that, excuses. The roundup is going to get a lot better in the weeks ahead. It has yet to reach it's full potential and I know it.

On January 18th, KDE released the third release candidate (RC3) for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

Since last week when writing about the LLVM/Clang compiler being ported to GNU Hurd, readers have asked via the forums, email, etc about the state of this open-source kernel backed by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Hurd and its Mach micro-kernel continue to be developed, just not at a rapid pace like the Linux kernel.

Adam Gowniak is indefatigable: last weekend, Oracle released an emergency patch for the 0day hole in Java, and the security researcher has already found the next loophole. In a posting on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the expert has only revealed that the flawed MBeanInstantiator method inspired him to search for further holes. Brian Krebs had previously mentioned a new exploit that can't be neutralised with Oracle's patch; whether this concerns the same vulnerability remains unclear.

Mozilla has released Firefox 18.0.1, a first update to Firefox 18, which was released ten days ago. According to the release notes, and the lack of any additional entries on the security advisories page, the release is a stability update addressing three issues.

The dust is finally beginning to settle here in the Linux blogosphere following all the recent brouhaha emanating out of CES. The tents have been packed up, the jugglers have gone home, and bloggers can finally hear themselves think down at the blogosphere's Broken Windows Lounge once again. Spirits are lifting across the land, in other words, and a few choice headlines have done nothing but help.

US Representative Zoe Lofgren has proposed an amendment to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Lofgren also presented her amendment on Reddit. The amendment is called "Aaron's Law" by Lofgren and is being put forward as a response to the death of Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who killed himself while facing thirteen felony counts of computer and wire fraud after he attempted to liberate millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive.

A hole exists in primary and secondary education that open math can fill. Visual mathematics, spatial or visual reasoning, or the application of mathematics to nature is seldom included in math curriculums or public schools. This gives me math angst because spatial thinking in particular is crucial to many jobs from builders and London cabbies to astrophysists and should be more prevalent in print and online than it is, especially in our digital age. This severe lack of spatial thinking in math curriculums and public schools is detrimental to our children's futures. Both parents and policymakers have gone to dizzying lengths to improve math scores and rank. Math curriculums, video games, and tutoring centers abound. Too frequently art, music, recess, and physical education have been cut in favor of improving math scores and a school's rank. And yet despite various promises to improve math proficiency, test scores or ranking have left many children without a love of math, a level of enthusiasm for math, or much beyond basic computational math skills.