Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

During a panel discussion with Intel's Dirk Hohndel, Linus Torvalds discussed the latest technical advancements and problems in kernel development. The creator of Linux and Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist took the stage on day three of the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain.

Struggling chipmaker AMD has shut down its Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC), handing pink slips to most of its Linux kernel developers in the process. Rumors of the site's closure had been bouncing around the open source community for several days, owing in part to ominous posts to Linux kernel development mailing lists. At the LinuxCon Europe conference on Wednesday, reporters for The H were able to confirm that AMD has indeed shut down OSRC and dismissed its entire staff of around 25.

It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations..

Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira's organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

The recent release of Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal, is a more palatable version of the open source OS built around the Unity desktop environment. Perhaps I am growing more accustomed to Unity, or maybe Canonical's developers are succeeding in refining the graphical user interface, so it seems less objectionable for me to use.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Okay, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but when I tweeted out a request for suggestions for an opening line, that was the most interesting response (thank you, @kantrn). I got others that were a lot more helpful (thank you, @justinlilly)—that's the power of community, right?

RISC OS, the operating system with its roots in Acorn's 1987 Archimedes micro and therefore the birth of the ARM processor architecture, has been released for the Raspberry Pi. Available as a free download, or pre-loaded onto an SD card for £10 plus postage, the release for the Pi is version 5.19 RC6. There's also a £35 software bundle on offer, dubbed NutPi, that includes all manner of useful applications to turn a RISC OS Pi into a viable everyday machine.

Brocade has announced that the company is acquiring the privately held Vyatta. Brocade produces a range of data and storage networking products, and considers the acquisition to be a good fit. Vyatta specialises in developing a software defined networking (SDN) and builds that software atop of an open source Debian-based distribution, Vyatta Core, which it commercialises as Vyatta Network OS.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsToday KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

Is Microsoft still a safe bet for the IT pro? In a word: No. As an IT worker, you have to gamble on which technology will keep you fed and housed over the coming years. For a really long time that has been Microsoft, but you don’t get paid on the past. Instead you need to peer into an uncertain future.

Linux software giant Red Hat has become the latest US technology behemoth to talk up the huge potential in the Chinese market, revealing plans to expand its footprint there as it attempts to come good on ambitious growth plans. CEO Jim Whitehurst told China Daily that he would be putting a greater focus on the People’s Republic, where next generation cloud projects are cropping up all over the place. "The open-source Linux system is the hero behind the scene. Most of the stock exchange market systems are based on the Linux system," he said.

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.

Developer Alex Gavrishev's free, widget-oriented app lets you assign home screens specifically to be used in the car, and it lets you create large, easy-to-punch buttons for six shortcuts per screen. The buttons render well at tablet-strength high resolutions, unlike other car apps I've tried.

A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.

With the introduction of virtualization, physical hosts have been freed from the bounds of single-instance operating systems. We efficiently multiplex our hosts with multiple operating systems as virtual machines (VMs). But, the density of operating systems on a host simply increases the management requirements. One solution for this management problem is the Virtual Machine Manager, or virt-manager. This article explores the use of virt-manager, illustrates its capabilities on modest hardware, and shows how to manage and monitor live VM performance.

We've been anxiously awaiting our chance to mess with a MaKey MaKey after we wrote this post, and we finally got our hands on one just in time for Halloween. MaKey MaKey's are based off Arduino, and you plug them into your computer with a USB cord. Basically you can alligator clip anything that conducts electricity and to make anything into a key.

OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition application. It is a type of software that leaves much to be desired on the Linux desktop. OCR software is a companion tool to scanning a document. The scanner software creates a photo-like image of the scanned document. The OCR component lets you edit the text and then export the edited version into a word processor or page-design program.

Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki. The case study, available since May 2011, underpins a plea to schools to increase their use of free and open source software. 

Markdown icon An effort is emerging to take the Markdown plain text formatting conventions originally developed by John Gruber in 2004 and create a standardisable specification. Markdown's syntax allows a minimal set of plain text 'markup' characters to offer useful basic formatting, for example, underlining text with "=" or "-" makes the text a heading as does preceding text with one to six "#" symbols. The apparent simplicity of the format has seen it used on many blogs, Reddit, GitHub and other sites as a way for users to present formatted text through the system. With this wide take up, developer Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has called for a standardisation of Markdown.