Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

2012 was another full year of major Linux distribution releases from the top vendors in the space. Though it was also a year in which at least two projects were hit with release delays.

There are three new books about free software thanks to Google's 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint's energy after the participants part company.

The FreeBSD Project has shipped the first point update to its 9.x branch of its BSD derived distribution and has blown through its target for fundraising by nearly $200,000

A look back at 2012, broken down by what The H thinks was a win, what we thought was a fail and what made us just say "Meh"

KTAP is an experimental project that's a new dynamic tracing tool for Linux. KTAP has several different design principles from SystemTap, one of the current most common dynamic instrumentation and tracing tools for Linux. This new project might satisfy some of those developers that have been wanting Sun/Oracle's DTrace to come to Linux.

The Unvanquished project laid out plans this weekend for 2013 so that their impressive cross-platform first person shooter can be done with the alphas by January of 2014...

We shared almost 600 open source stories this year—highlighting how open source is changing the world. And it's not just the technology, it's the community and their passion. The open source community is sharing their stories about how their work is making a positive impact and opensource.com is helping to amplify those messages. Let's take a look back at 2012 and see what your favorite stories were.

After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren't entirely bleak...

The developers of the toolkit for developing concurrent, distributed event-driven applications in Java or Scala, Akka, have announced the release of Akka 2.1 which adds experimental cluster support to the toolkit.

More than three years after its last major release, the developers of awesome have released version 3.5 of their dynamic tiling window manager. The new version, code-named "Last Christmas", includes a large amount of changes, many of which are internal and will not be noticed by users.

The Steam Linux client is now available to everyone and with the Linux world not beginning and ending with Ubuntu, Valve's Linux developers are working to improve support for handling other distributions. Up to this point there's been mixed results when running Steam and the Source Engine games on other distributions due to packaging problems, graphics/driver issues, and other bugs.

Kaspersky’s refreshed security solution, which serves Linux and FreeBSD mail servers, contains revamped security mechanisms that partners can use to gain ground in competitive open-source markets. One of the biggest improvements is a zero-day exploit and targeted attack shield, dubbed ZETA Shield technology, designed to detect and block unknown and increasingly sophisticated advanced persistent threats (APTs) delivered via e-mail attachments.

The latest, most expensive routers include so many facilities you'd be forgiven for thinking they're more like PCs than tools for networking. This thought should lead you to wonder if you can use a regular PC to do the same thing. The answer, thanks to Linux, is that you can - and it's very easy. There are many different Linux distributions designed specifically to turn your machine into a router or a gateway, complete with any number of enhancements. Our favourite is called ClearOS. It's a fantastic choice of router for your network because it's relatively painless to configure, but it's also extendible, taking it far beyond even the most ambitious devices from manufacturers like Netgear.

The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception. There's no doubt that there have been challenges for the free and open source operating system over the course of 2012—the Secure Boot challenge comes immediately to mind—but so, too, have there been numerous successes. All in all, I believe the good has outweighed the bad for Linux this past year. Here are five specific reasons.

Well, we're in the final countdown now as 2012 draws to a close, so you'd think all would be quiet here in the Linux blogosphere as bloggers hunker down to recover from what's been an exceptionally exhausting year. Linux Girl, for one, has been putting in extra hours on her favorite barstool down at the blogosphere's Broken Windows Lounge in an effort to recover a bit of the sanity that slipped away in 2012.

In the first of three parts, The H looks are what people were reading in 2012, month by month. From Anonymous weapons to fresh Linux kernels and from updated Ubuntu to open source hardware, it's all in The H Roundup of 2012.

Here we are again—the dawn of a new year is upon us. I really can't believe it. It is me or do the years seem to go by faster and faster? Before we close this chapter, let’s take a quick look at the ten most popular articles from opensource.com in education for 2012, starting with number ten and counting down.

It's been a great year for the open source movement in government. I feel like we've moved the needle on the transparency, collaboration, and participation fronts. More importantly, the open government movement saw a fair amount of code released under open source licenses and lots of activity in the open data space.

The latest release of the GNU C Library (glibc) supports the upcoming ARM 64-bit infrastructure (AArch64) and also includes improvements targeted at cross-compilation

The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-sized computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old. It has been used to teach programming and host servers, but above all it has provided a near-perfect platform for some of the most fun and interesting hobbyist projects in the computing world. Arcade cabinets, computing clusters housed in LEGOs, musical instruments, robots, and wearable computers are just some of the uses Pi owners have found. It turns out you can do a lot with an ARM processor, GPU, a few ports and GPIO pins, and an operating system (typically Linux-based) loaded onto an SD card. Here are 10 of the coolest Raspberry Pi creations we've been able to find.