Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Trinity, the fork of the classic version of the KDE desktop which appeared in wake of the backlash against KDE 4.0, is still being developed and, after a year of work, a new stable release, version 3.5.13.1, of the desktop environment is now available. Trinity is a fork that continues development of the old 3.x branch of the KDE desktop and which has been enhanced with additional features but is also designed to be both compatible with newer hardware and responsive on older systems.

Clay Shirky has done it again. In a fascinating TED Talk, Shirky examines the impact that collaboration tools developed for and by open source communities will have on the way citizens participate in public life and how they can steer the political processes.

Dot Categories: Sprints“From the hacking rooms, we hear the whistle of the train as it travels up and down the Matter Valley. Most of us arrived on that train, and soon will be leaving. Another amazing mass KDE sprint is coming to an end, and again a lot has been accomplished.”

TruthLogik, a New York based hip hop artist, says that in a million years he could not have imagined he would be recording an album using entirely free software. When he first stumbled on open source music-making tools, he thought about the computer classes he took in school. He had never been exposed to the idea that free software could be so well-made and uniquely useful. Making music using open source tools and software has been gaining some traction, so we sat down with TruthLogik and asked how he created a hip hop album solely using open source software.

The Linux Foundation and its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) have presented a plan to provide an easy way to start Linux systems where UEFI Secure Boot is active. The plan involves the very simple "loader" pre-bootloader that will be signed with a key from Microsoft. Typical Secure Boot PCs will come with the corresponding public verification key that allows them to start Windows 8 in Secure Boot mode – they should, therefore, also be able to start the mini-bootloader for Linux when Secure Boot is active, unless the Loader is included on the DBX blacklist that is maintained by the UEFI firmware.

OpenNebula, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud project, sees the majority of its deployment in industry, according to C12G's latest Cloud Architecture Survey. The survey, conducted by the commercial company behind OpenNebula over the second and third quarters of 2012, polled 2,500 users of OpenNebula and only analyses the responses from the 820 who reported having OpenNebula up and running.

As the latest AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU benchmarks under Linux, here's a quick look at the impact that Turbo Core Technology has under Linux. AMD Turbo Core is the technology that's been around for about two years going back to the AMD Phenom II CPUs that automatically shift the CPU frequency to a higher state when greater performance is desirable. Similar to Intel's Turbo Boost, it's basically the reverse of Cool 'n' Quiet and Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology.

Here's a look at how the open-source Intel Linux graphics performance has changed in Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing benchmarks results of Ubuntu Quantal development snapshots from the end of August to the beginning of October.

Our Beat Making Lab is applying for an Open Art grant, which would allow us to start development on our dream: open source beat making software we are calling PAMOJA, which means oneness or solidarity. The grant is sponsored by Mozilla and Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and would invest $15,000 towards development of the software. This would help us foster music creation in communities internationally.

Most everyone on the Internet reads Wikipedia, whether they rely on it or not, but few understand how wikis work or who owns the content. Understanding content ownership is important, because so many people freely contribute to wikis. If the wiki's owner or contributors decide to revise or move the content, that could lead to a lawsuit.

Dot Categories: Applications The Amarok music player is ten years old! The Amarok team members are enthusiastic about sharing their plans for a bright future and accomplishments over the past year. This month they are celebrating 10 years of Amarok and asking for financial assistance to continue their great work.

Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. For many years, it was regarded as the breadbasket of Africa. But since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, Robert Mugabe has been the leader, and the fate of the country has largely been tied to him and his policies.

Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus sent out his famous "Hello everybody out there using minix" message that invited people to join in. As I noted last month, that open, collaborative approach was really quite new and proved key to the uptake and development of Linux.

Machine learning lies at the intersection of IT, mathematics, and natural language and is typically used in big-data applications. This article discusses the Python programming language and its NLTK library, then applies them to a machine learning project.

Every year, Marbles in downtown Raleigh holds their annual Big Idea Forum. The lunchtime discussion aims to highlight ways corporate and community leaders shape organizations and people through inspiration and innovation. Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat, Inc., opened up to Ron Wilder, a business author and executive coach, this past Wednesday, October 3rd, to talk about his big idea.

Red Hat is still only previewing its OpenShift platform cloud, and one of the reasons why is because it had not yet inked a deal with Zend Technologies, the commercial entity that is to the PHP programming language as Linux Torvalds and Red Hat together are to the Linux operating system.

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth the linkage. This edition looks at a JVM in CoffeeScript, OpenStreetMaps on Craigslist, Red Hat crop circles, UEFI Secure Boot for smaller distros, HP hiring new WebOS employees and a new release of the PortableApps.com Platform.

It's been a momentous few weeks for FOSS fans, not least because LibreOffice -- one of the most popular exemplars of free and open source software today -- celebrated its second anniversary late last month. Indeed, with 325 active committers over the last 12 months, LibreOffice is now the third-largest free software project listed on Ohloh focused on the development of a desktop application.

A new installation image for Arch Linux is now available that sees the distribution's default boot process switch from the previous System V implementation to systemd for booting the live system. Because of the change, initscripts are no longer available on the live system. However, the developers note that they are still installed by default, but this "is likely to change in the near future".

Scratch is a free educational programming language for kids, available in 50 different languages and runs on just about any modern computer: Linux, Macintosh, or Windows. The new guide book, Super Scratch Programming Adventure!, was authored by The LEAD Project (Learning through Engineering, Art, and Design), in Hong Kong, to make Scratch more accessible to children around the world by teaching them how to use it.