Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This is the Doro 740, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week and expected to ship in the summer. While other Android phone manufacturers are struggling to differentiate their phones, this one has no problems: it’s aimed at older folk.

The new Unity Launcher is a new and very significant part of the desktop environment. After logging into your system the Launcher will automatically appear along the left edge of your screen. The Launcher can be used to store and run all of your favorite applications.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: In Calligra: Kexi's welcome status bar fetches GUI updates from the server if available; WPS file support; updates and fixes in the text undo/redo framework Improved synchronization view in Lokalize Improvements in C++ and C++11 in KDevelop More configurable tab and window title in Konsole read more

The Linux 3.3 kernel release might be imminent. In releasing the Linux 3.3-rc6 kernel, which Linus says is just made up of small fixes and clean-ups, he says this could be the last release candidate...

Hewlett-Packard continues to dismantle its webOS engineering team by handing nearly half of the remaining 600 techies their pink slips. The cuts began in September when HP's axe fell on 525 webOS employees following the decision to shutter the hardware unit that designed the now defunct TouchPad and Pre3 devices.

For some results that are more interesting than the recent RHEL / Oracle / CentOS / Scientific Linux comparison, here are some benchmarks pitting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 against a development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on three different systems.

Apache Pig is a high-level procedural language for querying large semi-structured data sets using Hadoop and the MapReduce Platform. Pig simplifies the use of Hadoop by allowing SQL-like queries to a distributed dataset. Explore the language behind Pig and discover its use in a simple Hadoop cluster.

At the beginning of this year a DMCA takedown notice was used, almost certainly for the the first time, against an open source project: OpenDDR. Glyn Moody looks at the background to this story and the issues that it raises.

FXI is preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

Coverity's latest Coverity Scan Open Source Report has found that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software. This is the third open source report from Coverity since it took over producing the report in 2009. The project was originally founded by the US Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with Coverity in 2006. Coverity's conclusion is that the assumption that open source software is of lower quality should not be considered a valid reason for avoiding open source.

For a long time now, Mozilla has been talking up its plans to become a serious player in the mobile operating system and smartphone arenas. We've covered the company's Boot to Gecko platform, an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine, and Mozilla is slated to show off its new app store at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. Now, Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm that could make its smartphone ambitions reality.

While this weekend saw the release of the Linux 3.3-rc5 kernel, which Linus Torvalds self-admitted was pretty boring, also hitting the mailing list this past week were new kernel patches to implement auto-sleep and "wake locks" support.

For everyone that wants to know more about the application finder for the Xfce4 desktop here it is. The coming 4.10 release is expected to bring some big changes to the application finder. They are planning to merge the xfce4-appfinder with xfrun4. You can use the Xfce4 application finder to find and launch installed applications on your system. This is a very convenient little tool for finding lost applications. You can open the application finder by selecting run program from the main menu, or using the Alt + F2 keyboard shortcut.

Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper. According to an editorial in Nature, this hinders reproducibility, a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

LXer Feature: 26-Feb-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading enjoyment.

The recently released Open Advice has much to offer those who are new to free software and its communities, but there is plenty of interest to veterans as well. It is a collection of essays from an auspicious number of contributors (42) to free and open source software (FOSS) that centers around the idea of "what we wish we had known when we started". As might be guessed, the book encompasses more than that—it ranges all over the FOSS map—including recollections, war stories, philosophical musings, academic research, and good advice.

Very few in Linuxland haven't heard of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, one of the scariest video games every built. It scored high on many lists of favorite games in large part because this independent gaming house chose to release their high quality games for Linux as well as the more lucrative Windows market. Well, these talented young developers are now planning a sequel of sorts. Joystiq.com has been following all the developments and even scored exclusive interviews with key participants. Xav de Matos describes the excitement in Thomas Grip's voice as his team can talk about the upcoming Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.

Coverity's 2011 Open Source Integrity Report gives kudos to Linux for its high-quality code. Coverity, a development testing product provider, has been kicking the code tires on open source projects since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security initiated the project in 2006. Now Coverity owns and manages the Scan program, which is the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source code integrity in the world. The latest integrity report doesn't call Linux "perfect," but "model citizen of good quality" is pretty darn close. With the Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report, Coverity started releasing details on specific open source projects. The Android kernel 2.6.32 (Froyo) got called out for having 359 software defects, with 25% of them considered high risk with potential security and stability problems.

Oracle has reaffirmed that it's in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system. While the extended lifecycle may provide enough reassurance to win over a few customers, Oracle hopes the 30-day free trial of Ksplice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (release 5.4 on) and Linux 6 users will prove more of an enticement. Ksplice, which Oracle bought last year, allows Linux kernel patching without the tiresome necessity of a reboot. Oracle Linux Premier Support customers will now get Ksplice as a standard part of their packages, and Fedora and Ubuntu Linux users get it for free.

Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop might be remembered as the Thomas Watson of our time, based on his remark you don't need quad-core processors for smartphones. "You don't need a quad-core phone unless you want to keep your hands warm in your pocket,” said the Yankee CEO brought in to re-float the Finnish ship.