Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A full desktop environment is the lazy man's approach to Linux. Most popular Linux distributions today employ a full desktop environment, while hand selecting each component for specific purposes.

For those of you playing along at home, you'll recall that our intrepid hero is working on a shell script that can tell you the most recent year that a specific date occurred on a specified day of the week—for example, the most recent year when Christmas occurred on a Thursday.

Back in April I wrote about an open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon. This reverse-engineered driver project was actually started by an employee of Texas Instruments -- a competitor to Qualcomm -- but was being done since it was some of the only ARM hardware out there where the developer wasn't tainted by NDAs. Since Phoronix delivered the announcement of this Snapdragon GPU driver, there hasn't been much news to report.

As open source software continues to proliferate in businesses and large enterprises, it gets ever harder to track exactly which components are being used and whether they're being used in compliance with licenses. This is no small issue. Only a couple of years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that soon 100 percent of significant software platforms and applications will contain open source components. With a nod to tracking and compliance of installed open source software, The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of The Linux Foundation FOSS Bar Code Tracker. Here is how it works.

The Samba Team and seven kernel hackers have come together with Software Freedom Conservancy to help efforts to ensure compliance with the GPL by those who implement Linux and other GPL software. Richard Hillesley talked to Bradley Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy, Jeremy Allison of Samba, and Matthew Garrett, who works in his spare time with the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

Few things scare me more than disk partitioning and GRUB configuration software. Both of those chores involve knowledge about hard drive operations and a good slice of luck. And both can render a computer unbootalbe with one slight user error. So discovering the latest version of Grub Customizer helped lower my anxiety levels considerably.

For more than a decade, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, but they've also been fragmented, with software and hardware designs produced all around the world that have little to do with each other. That's why it's so promising that the folks behind Willow Garage--a robotics project that originated at Stanford University--have announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). We covered the initial details surrounding the foundation here, and now more information is beginning to appear at the OSRF site.

Most of HP's webOS team, including Matt McNulty, head of the project, is moving to Google according to a report by The Verge citing several unnamed sources. The departing team is said to be almost wholly responsible for Enyo's code. Enyo replaced Mojo as webOS's software development kit in 2011.

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AMD admits it has had some Linux support problems with its graphics drivers and they'll be working to improve the situation. In particular, AMD concedes it has the most problems with OpenCL support on Linux. They attribute their Linux problems to the fact that there's many Linux distributions out there rather than just a single platform like Microsoft Windows.

Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals. EFF supports Wozniak's position: while Apple's products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them. This is most especially true of iOS, though other Apple products sometimes suffer in the same way. In this article we will delve into the kinds of restrictions that Apple, phone companies, and Microsoft have been imposing on mobile computers; the excuses these companies make when they impose these restrictions; the dangers this is creating for open innovation; why Apple in particular should lead the way in fixing this mess. We also propose a bill of rights that need to be secured for people who are purchasing smartphones and other pocket computers.

While there is no word from Facebook yet confirming the rumors, there are multiple reports going around the web saying that Facebook may be looking to acquire the Opera browser. According to English site Pocket-lint, "Pocket-lint has heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser." This, would, of course, put Facebook squarely in the browser game along with Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla and Google. But would the move make sense for Facebook?

It's been an eventful year already here in the Linux blogosphere, but it seems fair to say few events have drawn as much attention as the Oracle v. Google trial. Bloggers have been discussing it for weeks already, of course, but developments last week brought forth nothing less than dancing in the streets of the Linux blogosphere.

Last week I wrote that the open-source graphics card is dead. The developer behind Project VGA has now written a lengthy email to me to explain why the open-source graphics card is no more.

The 2012 Libre Software Meeting will be in Geneva, Switzerland July 7 through July 12 of 2012. Dr. Bowen, the executive director of OEMR, will be speaking about using OpenEMR to improve accessibility to health care worldwide. The presentation will be at 10:40 AM on Wednesday, July 11th, 2012. This will be a 20 minute presentation on the internationalization of OpenEMR and how it has been put to use by International Planned Parenthood Federation in a growing number of countries.

I've got fond memories of physical keyboards embedded in smartphones. My Palm Treos -- I had three -- were superb at composing email and SMS text responses. I even made notes for a book I was writing on one Treo. I speculate that the hardware keyboard is the principal differentiator keeping BlackBerry's brand alive, along with its super-secure, cheapo messaging system that was used to organize riots in the UK last year, of course.

Besides the Fedora hot dog marketing strategy going on at LinuxTag in Berlin, another interesting aspect of this leading German Linux conference is the sponsors for this year's event. Microsoft and Nokia are among the leading sponsors.

At this year's IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, security researchers from North Carolina State University (NCSU) announced the launch of the Android Malware Genome Project. The goal of the new initiative is to find, collect and analyse Android malware and share it with other researchers around the world.

Regularly, we at OStatic compile documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. For example, you can find our latest collection of free, online books on open source tools here, including guides that can get you started with Blender, Audacity and more. It's worth remembering that one of the most common critcisms of open source platforms and applications is the lack of official documentation. One of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. Now, the site has added an interesting new type of guide to its mix: workbooks.

This time we will look at the Xfce 4 dictionary which is naturally included with the Xfce 4 desktop. Use this tool to find detailed information about any words you specify.