Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The X.org Foundation has confirmed that it has now reached 501(c)(3) status; this means that the organisation is now considered to be a non-profit charity in the United States.

The times, they are a-changin', as the old song goes, and nowhere is that more evident today than in perceptions of our old friend Microsoft. In fact, after years of being viewed by many as an unconquerable leader in the world of desktop software, Microsoft's armor is apparently beginning to chip. Exhibit A: "Microsoft's Lost Decade," a recent article in Vanity Fair that paints a damaging picture of how the software behemoth has declined in recent years.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal expands the capabilities of Phoronix Media's leading open-source, multi-platform testing software to advance the areas of standardized automated benchmarking, per-commit regression testing, and performance efficiency monitoring.

LXer Feature: 23-Jul-2012

In this week's Roundup we have Richard Stallman speaking out against UEFI, 5 things about Linux virtualization you might not know, Apple gets spanked in court, a revamped Nautilus for Ubuntu 12.10, Cinnamon comes to Fedora, and how free is your phone? Enjoy!

Black Duck Software has made data from Ohloh, its directory of nearly 500,000 open source projects, available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. The company also made a RESTful API available that allows information about the projects to be queried. Ohloh analyses projects from around 5,000 repositories, including GitHub, SourceForge, Google Code, kernel.org, Eclipse, Mozilla and Apache.

Having tried, and failed, to kill Red Hat Linux with Unbreakable Linux, Oracle is now sneaking up on CentOS. Larry Ellison's database giant is now touting a piece of code it claims will let you convert your CentOS machine into Oracle Linux systems with no strings attached.

One of the best things about being part of the Linux community is that life is absolutely never boring around here. Take MeeGo, for instance. First, it came, as a result of the merger between Maemo and Moblin. Then, it went -- namely, when Tizen arrived. Now? You guessed it: It's back!

Portland, OR: There was a time that everyone in the Linux and open-source world knew about the Open Source Initiative (OSI). It was, and still is, the group which manages the Open Source Definition. This is the core open-source defining document for developers, governments, and businesses. All the other open-source licensees—Apache, BSD, GPL—all some of their legitimately to the OSI. In recent years, though, the OSI has laid fallow. Now, it wants to change that and once more become a vital part of the open-source community.

Aside from how Valve can better embrace Linux and open-source, another thing to ponder with Valve officially writing about Steam/Source on Linux, is the future of Linux Game Publishing. Linux Game Publishing got a new CEO in January and aside from a brief company update in February, nothing new has come out since. The company hasn't released any new Linux game ports in years, their blog has been silent, and there hasn't been any rumblings of new projects to be announced soon.

Part of what makes TreeLine such an easy information organization tool is its tree structure. It lets you configure the note-entering process to fit a variety of informational types. So you do not have to shoehorn information into a make-do mess. TreeLine may take some effort to learn to use at 100 percent effectiveness, but once you do, it will be worth the effort.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the release of Raspbian, its own custom Debian-based distribution for the mini-computer. The SD-card-sized image replaces the current recommended install option which is also Debian-based.

Wednesday, July 17, at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced a new initiative to open up the organization to individual members. Historically, the organization was open only to affiliate members, so this announcement marks a significant new direction for the open-source advocate. The shift represents a move from a governance model of volunteer and self-appointed directors to one driven by members.

One could write thousands of pages about all the features PostgreSQL offers. Instead, let's take a look at five features that are particularly interesting and find out where PostgreSQL sits in relation to other open source and proprietary database systems. PostgreSQL has a lot more to offer than might be immediately obvious.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that the Call For Papers for this year's upcoming ApacheCon Europe event is now open. The ASF's official European user conference will take place from 5 to 9 November at the Rhein-Neckar Arena in Sinsheim, Germany.

After many rumours, Valve has now officially confirmed that it is porting its Steam game distribution platform to Linux. A port of the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is also being worked on. The announcement coincides with the launch of a new Valve Linux Team blog, which will provide a first hand account of future Linux developments at the company.

What do Bill Reynolds, Fabio Erculiani, and Clement Lefebvre have in common? They spearheaded new distributions that have become staples in Linux desktop computing. Beginning new projects is particularly difficult and not all who try succeed. So, that's why Todd Robinson might sound a little nuts with his newest experiment. He's going to attempt to create and release a complete Linux operating system each and every day for a whole month.

Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has released an overview of Android's security features. The document explains concepts such as the application sandbox, the permission management framework and inter-process communication.

Like Ubuntu's Unity interface? Great. If not, you can easily change it to look and act like Ubuntu used to. This tutorial shows how. I won't debate whether Unity is an improvement. This article is simply a "How To" for those who want to alter it. We'll start by customizing Unity. We'll add and delete icons from the applications Launcher on the left-hand side of the screen, then we'll add icons and folders to the desktop. I'll introduce some Unity tweaking tools.

Finally some non-Phoronix exclusive information about Steam/Source Engine on Linux ;) Valve Software has begun to write about their Steam Linux client initiatives on their public blog. Over at blogs.valvesoftware.com/Linux is the start of the Linux blog! This should be linked to from the main Valve Software blog in the near future, I'm told (I was just pinged by them this evening about the soon-to-go-live blog post). The first post is entitled "Steam’d Penguins"; the post's author isn't displayed but I would assume it was written by Mike Sartain.

Some Linux kernels require more release candidates than others, no matter what Linus Torvalds wants.