Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the thought police are back. For years, the open source community was torn apart by fractious debates over what "open" meant and who was open enough. As we've moved beyond name calling to focus on getting work done, the same old debate has shifted to cloud computing, with a new crop of pundits and evangelists wrangling over who is the cloudiest of them all.

In this edition: open source whiteboard software, OAuth 2.0 is accepted as a standard, KDE turns 16, two new laptops from ASUS that come with Ubuntu pre-installed and XScreenSaver 5.20 is released

Lightworks for Linux is approaching its public testing phase. Lead Developer Rob Fearnside answers questions from Red Shark News about how it got to this stage. When did you decide to make the majority of Lightworks' code OS independent and what was your approach to doing this?

Freeplane is an application for creating mind maps. A mind map is the doodling you draw with shapes and other symbols around words connected with lines to make charts representing your thoughts and ideas on a particular topic or project. I rarely find tasks that seem easier to do the old fashioned way with paper and pencil than on a computer screen. But creating a mind map with Freeplane comes close.

NetBSD 6.0 was officially released today as the fourteenth major release of the BSD operating system. NetBSD 6.0 brings better multi-core SMP support, new drivers, and more.

The path to collaboration is usually paved with the best intentions. We all know too well that this can happen when a meeting is called. A bad one can completely derail needed work, but a good one can leave a team feeling energized, even excited.  You can't control every meeting you're in, but you can improve the ones you run. Is anybody thinking about how to do this? Let's Google it: How to have a useful meeting.

Do the leaders in your organization practice openness? Yes No Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, Inc., recently shared his thoughts on leadership in business at the Marbles annual Big Idea Forum. He said, "For leaders to be truly effective, they're going to have to operate as catalysts. When you get into the details, it's subtle but it's incredibly important." 

Fedora 18 is continuing in the long-standing Fedora tradition of suffering from multiple release delays per cycle...

The latest release of Zenwalk Linux, version 7.2, is now available and focuses on further improving the Slackware-based distribution's overall performance, as well as updating its underlying components. Project founder Jean-Philippe Guillemin says that the goal of the new version was to "achieve 100% Slackware Linux compatibility," while also keeping and improving upon most of the optimisations throughout all levels of the OS, including the kernel, applications and desktop.

Herbert Lom, the actor who played the twitchy Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the old Pink Panther movies, recently passed away. Linux fans can surely feel some sympathy with Lom's character. We may not have Clouseau to grate on our nerves here in the Linux community, but we certainly have something with the potential to be equally annoying: Windows 8 Secure Boot.

Gunnar Hellekson, Technology Strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector Group, presents a timeline created by tying together data about software the government has released as open source.

The first release candidate of the Linux 3.7 kernel was released on Sunday...

So you have installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal. Canonical offers a number of new features in Ubuntu 12.10 which we have already talked about. This post is to help an Ubuntu newbie to get a more comfortable Ubuntu experience. Because you do need to configure few things or install some applications to get the seamless and pleasant computing experience with Ubuntu. The post is actually a checklist of the stuff which I mostly do every time I install Ubuntu. Lets see the must to-do stuff after installing Ubuntu 12.10..

Jim Whitehurst presented on Saturday morning at the 2012 installment of TEDxRaleigh, speaking to a sold-out crowd in Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre. Now in its third year, TEDxRaleigh has brought together local innovators, researchers and thought leaders to give local flair to a wildly successful national event.

Lightweight Linux distro usually comes in the file size ranging from 20MB to 50MB and they are best suited to use on a old computer. Recently, I come across this tiny Linux distro that weighs only 12MB and it boots up really fast. I am referring to Tiny Core Linux. Weighing at 12 MB, Tiny Core Linux is one of the tiniest Linux distro I have ever seen. Being a barebone distro, it only comes with a few essential applications that are required for it to boot up and run properly. It also comes with a graphical desktop, but if you are looking for a turnkey solution, this is not the one for you.

In mid-September, the 3.6 kernel appeared to be stabilizing nicely. Most of the known regressions had been fixed, the patch volume was dropping, and Linus was relatively happy. Then Nikolay Ulyanitsky showed up with a problem: the pgbench PostgreSQL benchmark ran 20% slower than under 3.5. The resulting discussion shows just how hard scalability can be on contemporary hardware and how hard scheduling can be in general. Borislav Petkov was able to reproduce the problem; a dozen or so bisection iterations later he narrowed down the problem to this patch, which was duly reverted. There is just one little problem left: the offending patch was, itself, meant to improve scheduler performance. Reverting it fixed the PostgreSQL regression, but at the cost of losing an optimization that improves things for many (arguably most) other workloads. Naturally, that led to a search to figure out what the real problem was so that the optimization could be restored without harmful effects on PostgreSQL.

Following its acquisition of Clutch.io in August, Twitter has made the Clutch A/B testing service and Clutch framework for writing native mobile apps available as open source.

The Bank of New Zealand was founded in 1861 and, on the verge of bankruptcy, purchased by the National Australia Bank Group in 1992. The acquisition was completed in 2003. It was rebranded BNZ, with a new logo and colors in 2008, to better align with its parent company, now known as NAB. BNZ promised its individual, agricultural and business customers positive, flexible and efficient service; access to a network of specialist expertise; and ongoing innovation.

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM Manager Premium app that you can use to automate and streamline maintenance and other tasks.

After having their project rejected by Kickstarter, the designers of the wireless lock system Lockitron went away and wrote their own crowdfunding platform, which they have now open sourced. Apigy Inc's Selfstarter enables companies to set up their own crowdfunding site, similar to Kickstarter, to host financing campaigns for their products. The very successful funding drive for Lockitron is already being run using the software.