Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It can sometimes feel like there's a surprise around every corner here in the Linux blogosphere, but it's not often we get to see a company the size of Google make a dramatic shift. That, however, is just what last week afforded when reports emerged that Google would take a markedly different approach to the launch this fall of Android 5.0, or "Jelly Bean."

The Linux desktop has long had most of the apps anyone could ever really need. Sure, it doesn’t have some specific applications, like Adobe Photoshop or Quicken, but it had other apps. Such as Gimp for Photoshop and GNUCash for Quicken and QuickBooks that can do the job. Lately, however, companies that have supported Linux are moving away from the Linux desktop and that worries me. These companies and groups are: Adobe, Google, and Mozilla.

Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year's Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.

Owners of Android handsets can be forgiven for feeling frustration over how long it took to get an update from the 2.3 "gingerbread" release. Google's flat-out effort to improve tablet support led to a 3.0 ("honeycomb") release that was not deemed suitable for handset use—or for open-source release. It was only with the 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" (ICS) cycle that all that new code became available for handsets—sort of. Six months after the 4.0 release, your editor finally got his hands on a device that can run it; what follows is a review of sorts.

Directory services is one of the most interesting and crucial parts of computing today. They provide our account management, basic authentication, address books and a back-end repository for the configuration of many other important applications.

Whether you are writing code or creating editorial content, a noisy computing environment often can silence your productivity. The Pyroom Text Editor gives you a quiet environment where computing noise cannot distract you from your creativity. Computing noise -- that is, computing distractions from the task at hand -- comes from all the media outlets your computer provides.

Red Hat has lured two of the brains behind JRuby, Charles Nutter and Thomas Ebeno, who once worked at Sun Microsystems. The duo are joining the Linux distro shop to expand their work on JRuby, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages and OpenJDK, Nutter tweeted.

Open source continues to make big strides, and leads in key growth segments including cloud, big data, mobile applications and enterprise mobility, according to a survey published yesterday. At the launch of the Open Source Business Conference, two key backers in the open source space, Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, issued their sixth annual survey results including key findings and challenges for open source in 2012.

here are plenty of email desktop clients for Linux. Some are being integrated into the distro (such as Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail) and used as the default email client while others require you to install manually. Geary belongs to the latter.

The Open Source Initiative has announced that the Board has chosen new officers for a one year term and that Simon Phipps is the new President of the organisation. The appointment was made at the OSI meeting in Chicago over the weekend. Phipps told The H that his "focus for the year is to enable that transformation into an organisation fulfilling the first paragraph of OSI's mission and led by those it seeks to represent".

In the wake of the announcement of the first ever KDE powered tablet, quite a few interesting things are happening in the background. One of them is the formation of a professional Partner Network for devices such as the Vivaldi tablet. Let's look at this Partner Network in more detail.

If you're new or relatively new to Linux, you may be looking around for good Linux resources and perhaps some tutorials. Whether you're new to Linux or looking to become a more advanced user, there are a lot of free online books and tutorials that can give you guidance. In this post, you'll find our updated collection of many good Linux reference guides online--all available at no cost.

China's antitrust authorities have approved Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, on the condition that the Android operating system remains open source and its code is made freely available to original equipment manufacturers. Android devices had nearly 74 percent of the Chinese market in Q4, 2011, and that means Android is in a dominant position, China's Commerce Department said.

In many ways, Scott Widdowson is your typical electrical engineer. Most days, when the weather’s good, he bikes the 15 miles along the Ottawa River to his company’s offices in the west end of the Canadian capital. Once there, he settles in for a day of reading technical specifications, poring over computer textbooks, or prying apart consumer electronics — logic probe in one hand and a soldering iron in the other.

Google has announced it has completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. The company began the acquisition process in August 2011, paying $12.5 billion for the mobile phone and tablet maker; with over 17,000 wireless related patents and 7,500 pending patents, Google's acquisition is widely believed to be about that patent portfolio.

If there's anything important in this competitive world, it's the ability to tell one's friends from one's enemies. We here in the Linux blogosphere tend to be pretty good at that, but recently a surprising turn of events left us befuddled. Namely: Mozilla's decision to leave Linux support out of the initial release of its upcoming Web Apps marketplace.

Have you ever found yourself scrolling endlessly around your phone's chronologically arranged photograph album -- called "Gallery" in Android -- looking for a photograph you've captured? If you can remember the specific place but not the date, then Scalado Album may be for you. I say "may be" because there are some downsides to using it over the stock "Gallery" app, which I'll get to.

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model. Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, OpenSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface level, meaning the Android version, has also become more fragmented over time.

Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process, which in turn is at the heart of a key situation today. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we still need OpenOffice as well? In the wake of Apache OpenOffice's new update, that's been the question du jour down at the Linux blogosphere's Punchy Penguin Cafe.

The Xfce 4 desktop offers a vast array of customization options that will leave your desktop looking nothing like the default. Take advantage of all the excellent graphical user interfaces offered for all of your options, settings, and preferences.