Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Frank Reininghaus, the new maintainer of KDE's Dolphin file manager has put out a call for contributors to the project. The original creator of Dolphin, Peter Penz, stepped down from leadership of the project last month and Reininghaus sees involving new developers with the project as one of his most important tasks.

The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun. Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it's been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.

Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli has announced a plan that aims to get the project included in the FSF's list of free software distributions. To that end, Zacchiroli wants to set up a team within Debian that is actively working to resolve the remaining issues which prevent Debian's inclusion in the list.

Malware targeting Google's open source Android mobile operating system continues to rise – according to a new report, hundreds of thousands of devices have already been infected via applications from the official Google Play store. Security specialist Trend Micro says that, in the past quarter, the number of malicious apps doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 in a single month – a big increase from the 5,000 malicious apps it identified from January to March of this year.

Well it's been a few years since Linux Girl has had the pleasure of writing about dating in the Linux world -- always one of her favorite topics! -- but recently the topic came up again, albeit with a slight twist. Specifically, in a recent article over at Datamation, is wasn't so much human-to-human matchmaking being discussed as it was pairing of the human-to-desktop kind.

Charles H Schulz has announced the opening of voting to select a new name for the Mandriva community distribution that will emerge from the current work on creating a new Mandriva foundation. Mandriva is currently in the process of reorganising, and part of the plan involves handing the development of the distribution to the community.

Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one's keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

Will Schroeder is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a company that builds open source scientific software that also depends on open source. He suggested that open source is the most effective way to get things done through agile, collaborative innovation. Traditionally science was open, critically reviewed and widely available. Results were shared and new innovations could build on previous discoveries. It is now largely closed and largely protected by patents.

The presentations and videos from Red Hat's in-house conference provide information on current and forthcoming products from the open source specialist, including version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

When it comes to operating systems for the TI OMAP4 PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES, Ubuntu Linux is usually the winner for several reasons. However, with last month's release of Fedora 17 for ARM, how is the Red Hat sponsored distribution running on these ARM development boards? Here's an overview of my experiences when running the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases on the ARM Cortex A9 development hardware along with Arch Linux. There are also benchmarks comparing the ARM Linux performance.

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention. That lesson proved true with this youngster of an app.

Linux 3.5 is now capable of the "FireWire Target Disk Mode", which is a familiar Mac feature. Btrfs logs data errors, allowing unreliable storage media to be detected. Checksums have been implemented to ensure that Ext4 metadata is consistent

LXer Feature: 02-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXWR of the weeks big stories for your reading pleasure. Sorry its a day late. Enjoy!

If you are disgruntled by the new interfaces provided by recent distribution releases, namely GNOME 3 and Unity, you might want to take a look at Cinnamon. With its traditional feel and extreme theme-ability, Cinnamon is a desktop interface bound to spice up anyone's computer. The general feel is that of GNOME 2, or perhaps XFCE, but its polished look and downloadable themes make it truly exciting to behold.

Whether for a word processor, an image editor, or a Web browser, plugins have become a common characteristic of modern application software design. An audio plugin functions generally in the same manner as any other kind of plugin: it extends the capabilities of the host application in some way. For example, a DAW (digital audio workstation) may have its own reverberation effect, but if the workstation supports plugins I can substitute a 3rd-party reverb plugin with preferable features and sound quality.

The most commonly used command in Ubuntu is “apt-get“. You can use it to install software, updatethe repository and upgrade the software. Without a doubt, “Apt-get” is a pretty handy tool and is very useful and good for what it supposed to do, but “good” can always be enhanced into “better” and this can be easily achieved with “apt-fast”.

Mathbuntu brings a nice batch of math and science software, textbooks, and other goodies to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Let's try it out and see if it makes us smarter.

With new major releases of Ubuntu and Fedora out the door in the past quarter, the developers at these and other community distributions are now hard at work on future versions of their respective Linux-based operating systems. Smaller, more specialised distributions have also been publishing new versions at a rapid pace.

Qualcomm has taken the unusual step of restructuring its organization in order to better protect its patent portfolio. There are other reasons for the move as well, the company said Thursday, including the ability to more quickly deliver products to customers. However, it emphasized the patent protection element in particular.

E-books are currently quite a hot topic in the publishing world. Heck, for the past few months, it's been quite a hot topic here as well! Thankfully, digital publication doesn't have to mean proprietary formats and DRM-laden files.