Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Qt development toolkit is undergoing a major overhaul. The developers behind the project announced the availability of the Qt 5 alpha release this week. It's a key milestone on the path to the official launch of Qt 5, expected to occur later this year.

A 15 month study of 319 primary schools in rural Peru by the Inter-American Development bank (IDB) has concluded that the One Laptop per Child project is not enough, at least on its own, to improve educational outcomes. This is believed to be the first evaluation of OLPC that looks at student learning and was performed by taking 320 schools of which 210 were randomly selected to get OLPC-XO laptops.

Two years ago, Rackspace went after Amazon in a big way, launching an open-source cloud initiative called OpenStack. Since that time, more than 150 companies have signed up to the anti-Amazon party. Last week, however, one big participant decided to leave OpenStack to create an after-party that by many accounts fixes a slew of problems inherent in OpenStack's design-by-committee approach.

Yes, it's another huge sale of patents to an already huge IP behemoth. Microsoft is buying 800 of AOL's 1100 or so patents for a little over $1 billion, while also taking up a license for the remainder 300 AOL patents. In addition, Microsoft is buying all the patents owned by AOL subsidiary Netscape.

And Netscape's patents too? My gut tells me this is bad.. - Scott

The beauty of Linux lies in the fact that there is a distro for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are a geek, beginner, Apple fan, Windows fan, gamer or developer, there’s surely one distro for you. And yes, if you are a Chinese, there is this distro just for you, and it is elegant and well-polished. Deepin is a Ubuntu-based distro for the Chinese and it is heavily modified to include plenty of useful stuff and rid of less useless/seldom used packages. After booting up Deepin, the first impression is that it is beautiful. The custom theme used is bright, elegant and refreshing.

While recent testing has shown how Ubuntu 12.04 LTS KVM/Xen/VirtualBox virtualization compares between Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer platforms, in this article is a different look at the KVM virtualization performance of the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system. In this review is a look at the KVM virtualization performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS compared to the earlier Ubuntu 10.04.4 and Ubuntu 8.04.4 Long-Term Support releases.

Just in time for some Easter weekend testing, Linus Torvalds has released the second RC of the Linux 3.4 kernel...

There are a great number of Linux users who dual boot their computer with Windows. And in situation like this, one has to make different partitions to separate Windows and Linux partition. Windows usually (not always) uses NTFS file format while Linux is usually (again, not always) installed in Ext3 or Ext4 file format. While using Linux, one has to manually mount the drives. It doesn’t take time in mounting but in some situation you might prefer to have it automatically mounted at each start-up for e.g., if your Music files are on the NTFS partition and you want to use the same directory in Linux it is advisable to auto mount that drive. In this tutorial I will show you the easiest way to mount Windows NTFS partition at each start-up.

Bug trackers are great. They are a critical tool for open source development – as a collaboration medium for teams, as a way for projects to communicate back-and-forth with users, and as an organizational tools for individual developers. But as open source software spreads further and further, one inevitably finds oneself with a bit of a Web 2.0 problem – every major project uses its own, separate bug tracker. The more projects you're involved with, the easier it is for information to get lost among all the clutter and noise. That's where Entomologist comes in, providing one interface for multiple bug-tracking systems, whether you are a developer managing your code or a user following progress.

How successful is the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal? Well, in a recent interview, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert noted that nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to the platform, and it powers more than a million online sites. The White House, NASA and Twitter use it, and OStatic is also built on Drupal. In an interview we did with Buytaert, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." Getting started with Drupal can be daunting at first, but there are a lot of free resources for it. Here several good ways to get going with this powerful CMS.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers. MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

In the latest study by the Linux Foundation, Microsoft only just misses out on a spot among the top 20 groups and companies contributing to the Linux kernel. It has, however, achieved this only by dint of delivering bad code and then slowly improving it.

Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer who's the lead developer of the Btrfs, just finished a session at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about his promising and feature-rich file-system.

The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor applications deal with the kernel directly. Instead, almost all interactions with the kernel are moderated through the C library, which is charged with providing a standards-compliant interface to the kernel's functionality. There are a number of C library implementations available, but, outside of the embedded sphere, most Linux systems use the GNU C library, often just called "glibc." The development project behind glibc has a long and interesting history which took a new turn with the dissolution of its steering committee on March 26.

Almost two years ago, The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program to help companies manage their end-to-end open source license compliance processes. We have continually added papers, training, tutorials, and dedicated Legal/Compliance session tracks at conferences like Collaboration Summit to help make compliance processes easier to understand, and more cost-effective to implement.

- OpenStack®, the open source cloud operating system, today released “Essex”, the fifth version of its community-driven software, with a focus on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments. OpenStack Essex allows users across the globe to leverage pools of on-demand, self-managed compute, storage and networking resources to build efficient, automated private and public cloud infrastructures.

With the help of its embedded farm, set up in November 2010, the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) has tested and analysed Linux's experimental real-time (RT) capabilities. The OSADL analysed a total of 73 billion automated test cycles recorded over the last 12 months on more than 50 computers running mainline RT kernels on a range of CPUs.

When you work for the Linux Foundation you get a lot of questions on just how Linux is built. Given the massive scale of the development and ubiquity of Linux today, some of us in the community might think everyone understands how the largest collaborative project in computing works. How you submit a patch. How maintainers work with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. But because of Linux's unprecedented growth in mobile, embedded and cloud computing, among other areas, new companies and developers are looking to participate. More than ever before, actually.

Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of Wikimedia, has announced the launch of a new project called Wikidata. According to the non-profit organisation, Wikidata – the first new Wikimedia project since 2006 – will "provide a collaboratively edited database of the world's knowledge" and, once completed, will be used by its other projects including the free Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.

Gentoo released 12.1 on April Fool's Day. I included it in my jokes roundup. But the Gentoo announcement has added a message to users and jokesters today: The installer is real. I said in that post that the best jokes are the ones you almost believe. But perhaps that wasn't quite accurate. Maybe the most crafty of all are those that are real but seem like a joke. That's the sum of the Gentoo installer. A Gentoo installer is a difficult beast to construct, I understand that. At one time the very nature of Gentoo conflicted with the traditional binary installer. However, the Gentoo team has been promoting Stage 3 installs for quite some time. What is a Stage 3 install? It's the nearly complete install of a binary system from a tarball that needs to be rebuilt before adding all your goodies. So, why not have an install wizard like Sabayon?