Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There may be no end in sight to the ongoing Secure Boot Saga in the Windows 8 world, but the same, alas, cannot be said for Mozilla's Thunderbird. No, as was apparently prematurely revealed by a leaked email earlier this month, the "end" for the desktop email client may be all too near now that it's no longer "a priority for Mozilla's product efforts."

LXer Feature: 16-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXWR of the weeks big stories for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

The DebConf 12 developer summit ended on Saturday in Managua. Here is a recap of the prominent Debian Linux and open-source discussions that took place in Nicaragua's capitol for the past week.

Earlier this week at DebConf there was a discussion about Debian derivatives so that Debian's offspring could share their experiences and also for the Debian developers to share various derivative-related initiatives. Some friction between Debian and distributions based upon it (namely Ubuntu) were exposed.

On Wednesday, the Italian region of Puglia passed a law requiring the public sector to utilise more open source software and to make more data freely available to the public. The law consists of 21 articles setting out a series of rules aimed at fundamentally changing the relationship between the citizens and the regional government. The law gives the region's citizens the right to access all information and services provided by the public sector in digital form. Digital diversity is also to be encouraged through the use and dissemination of open source software.

What do the Energizer Bunny and the ongoing Windows 8 Secure Boot Saga have in common? Yes, that's right: They both just keep going. Scarcely a week goes by these days, in fact, without some fresh proclamation to fan the flames of UEFI controversy here in the Linux blogosphere.

Windows may still be the default operating system on the vast majority of mainstream PCs thanks to Microsoft's many longstanding OEM partnerships, but that's not to say it hasn't been possible for some time to buy desktop machines with Linux preloaded.

Do you ever have that moment when someone asks you for a recommendation on a book, and when put on the spot you spin around in your office chair, scan your ever-growing library of books that you bought over the years of IT experience but either:A. Never read? B. Flipped through but never finished? C.Passed out halfway through the first chapter? 

While I've never been giddy with praise over a project-planning application, GanttProject has enough going for it for me to consider using as a regular go-to planning tool. Its user interface is structured clearly so it is easy to understand. GanttProject lets you break down a project into a tree of tasks and assign available human resources to work on each.

With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 "Squeeze" to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

While it isn't the first inexpensive gaming console and open gaming platform to test the market, the open source Ouya gaming platform is generating buzz. A Los Angeles-based project, Ouya is billed as "a new kind of video game console" on Kickstarter, the open crowd funding online site dedicated to giving innovative ideas a chance in the market. As CNet notes, it only took about eight hours of crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter for Ouya's $950,000 startup goal to be met. Can this open, hackable game platform do as well in the actual market?

The inventor of object-orientation, co-designer of Smalltalk, and UI luminary opines on programming, browsers, objects, the illusion of patterns, and how Socrates could still make it to heaven.

Ouya might have assembled the right ingredients to make its open source entry into the video game console competition a success. "It is a good time, and I'm glad to see it start," said M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon. "This is one area where third parties can easily build on top of Android and do so freely."

Andreessen Horowitz is investing $100 million in GitHub, the San Francisco startup that provides online resources for software programmers. It's the largest investment the venture capital firm has ever made. Github's acceptance of the cash is notable. Unlike many startups, the company has been profitable since its 2008 beginnings, and it's turned down investment offers in the past.

This news is a few days tardy, but the videos from the 2012 Red Hat Summit are now available...

Mozilla will be announcing Monday that they will be basically stripping away their resources towards the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client. In a private email sent to Mozilla employees today, Mozilla shared that on Monday they will be announcing their plans to restructure Thunderbird. Mozilla Thunderbird isn't being killed, but they will basically be making it more community-based with Mozilla employees being re-tasked to other projects.

If you've gone the custom ROM route, ROM Manager Premium is a fabulous product that automates and streamlines maintenance. It is ideal for those who don't eat, sleep and breathe code, and file naming conventions -- or don't choose to be around the command line.

Since I want to get this out of my system: here's a set of proposals to fix (okay, replace) the current failing patent system. No lengthy diatribe or introduction, just a raw list. Let me begin by saying that I, by no means, am claiming this set of proposals is perfect, watertight, coherent, legally feasible, or workable. It's just a number of of things that I, as a layman, think will benefit society and progress.

Whether or not you are going on a vacation this summer, it is always good to take a break. And if you are using Linux, what is better than playing video games under the sun? (Except going out, of course.) So, in continuation with Travis’ work, let me present you five more games to distract yourself during the summer. From action to reflection, and through racing, these games are assured to bring you the fun that you deserve. And to add to the cocktail, all of them are completely free!

Since last year when spotting a major Linux kernel power regression and subsequently finding the cause of the power problem that affected a large number of mobile Linux users, plus other regressions, it's been fun to look at the Linux power performance situation. How though is the latest Ubuntu Linux code performing when it comes to power efficiency? Here are some early tests of Ubuntu 12.10.