Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The year 2012 marked the true arrival of credible open source cloud computing platforms, and the open source cloud is poised to be one of the biggest stories of 2013. Of course, OpenStack emerged as a heavily backed open platform, but it's far from the only one. We've covered CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems and other platforms and providers all year long. In this post, you'll find our complete and updated collection of stories, interviews, resource guides and more on the topic of open source cloud computing.

I recently received the Android-based Noble Nook Simple Touch ebook reader as a gift, which I enjoyed very much except for one insanely annoying issue with it: the Nook comes with two “books” on how to operate the reader which apparently cannot be removed by normal means. There is no option to delete them from the Nook itself, and going online to check my Barnes and Noble account, it isn’t listed as one of the titles I can remotely manage. Searching around online seemed to indicate that, incredibly, there was really no way to remove these annoying files on my device.

The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive. That doesn't mean we won't see Linux on a tablet, but you'll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop - clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.

Looking back over the law channel posts of 2012, I was not surprised to see that software patents were a major concern. The high volume of significant patent lawsuits of competitors and rising levels of NPE (aka patent trolls or patent assertion entities) suits has been the subject of both open source community and mainstream media interest. There were new ideas on patent reform, and an increasing recognition by the public at large that software patents can hinder innovation. We also saw interesting developments in the areas of internet privacy and freedom and copyright law. I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: there will be more to think about and write about in these areas in 2013.

I have a huge collection of NASA photos taken from the Astronomy Pic of the Day Web site (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) stored in a folder in my Dropbox. No matter what computer system I'm using, I rotate those images on my background, getting a virtual tour of the universe on every screen. Oddly enough, it can be challenging to get that image rotation to work well in Linux. I've mentioned some wallpaper-rotating applications before, but Slidewall is really pretty cool.

REAPER, short for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording, is one of the professional audio software solutions available on Windows and Mac OS X. While REAPER can work to some extent under WINE, the development studio behind this software, Cockos, is working towards a native Linux port.

Podcasts are usually the first media I consume when I wake up in the morning and the last media I consume before falling asleep. Sadly, some of my favorites have gone AWOL over the past few years, but I haven’t stopped discovering new ones to listen to. I’m now going to tell you about the top Linux – and open-source-related podcasts making the rounds in my media player.

Given that now even some small open source projects are forming their own foundations, Glynn Moody thinks that perhaps open source foundations have come of age. He suggests that the time may now be right for the formation of an umbrella foundation to help share best practices, legal advice and other information and support.

Following rapidly in the footsteps of Linux Mint 14's Xfce release, the Mint developers have now released the KDE edition of the latest version of their distribution. Based on the same Ubuntu foundation as the other Linux Mint 14 releases (with Cinnamon and MATE desktops), the KDE edition uses the KDE Software Collection 4.9, specifically 4.9.2, to provide its desktop. All four versions are available from the project's download page as 32-bit and 64-bit variants.

2012 was another busy year for Linux kernel developers as the continuous pace of evolution accelerated further. In total, seven major Linux kernels were released during the year adding a long list of new features along the way.

Highlighting the top ten projects, both followed and contributed to, the GitHub service's look back on 2012 reveals some revealing front runners and a huge increase in activity on the site

With the release of GNU sed 4.2.2, Paolo Bonzini has given up position of maintainer of the software, and the same position on GNU grep, citing differences with GNU Project leader Richard Stallman and the FSF

With the first pre-release, it is now confirmed that Linux 3.8 will include the F2FS filesystem, a graphics driver for NVIDIA Tegra, and foundations for balanced process placement in NUMA systems, and that support for Intel 386 chips has been dropped

A lot of you fine readers are already contributors to your favorite worthy Linux projects. I'll wager there are also some who would love to contribute in some way, but aren't quite sure how. So here are a few ideas to get you inspired and, hopefully, involved.

When writing a few days ago about the GemRB project as an open-source re-implementation of the Infinity Engine for Baldur's Gate and then OpenMW as an open-source re-implementation of the engine used by Morrowind, a Phoronix reader pointed out Xoreos.

Steam users, rejoice! The native Steam client for Linux (Ubuntu) is finally here. Previously, you will have to install via Wine to get it working in Linux, but with the release of the native client and is open to the public, you can now easily install it and have quick access to your Steam games. Ubuntu users, here is how you can install Steam in Ubuntu.

Red Hat has reported that its third quarter revenue is up 18% year-on-year, at $343.6 million, with subscription income rising 19% (to $294.2million). With estimates placing Red Hat at 29 cents a share, the reported earnings beat those estimates, coming in at 30 cents a share. According to Bloomberg, that was enough to see Red Hat shares rising in late trading.

The Linux Mint development team has taken exactly a month to put together the XFCE desktop version of the Ubuntu-based distribution. Other than the desktop, Linux Mint 14 XFCE sees few changes compared to the Cinnamon and Mate desktop versions released a month ago, with just a few bug fixes and a handful of updates merged shortly after the release of Linux Mint 14 in late November.

Earlier this week I shared some AMD Catalyst OpenCL benchmarks showing the performance gains made by AMD's proprietary Radeon graphics driver this year in bettering the GPGPU results. In this article is similar testing on the NVIDIA side with their binary driver.

“Commerce Kickstart 2.0 takes all of the core strengths of our flexible eCommerce framework, Drupal Commerce, and makes it easier to use and quicker to deploy for e-retailers,” said Mike O'Connor, president for North America of Commerce Guys. “Leveraging an open-source technology with an engaged community like Drupal was a huge asset when shaping the beta product into what Commerce Kickstart is today.”