Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The past week on the LinuxPlanet saw the return of SCO, a company most of us have long ago written off a footnote in the history of Linux's success. It also saw a new study from Ubuntu showing how broad and diverse its base of Linux users have become.

The legal process of incorporating The Document Foundation as a German Stiftung (foundation) has been completed in Berlin, Germany. The creation of a legally based foundation was part of the founding plan of the organisation when it forked from OpenOffice in September 2010. The foundation, which will be the legal entity managing the development of LibreOffice, now has a set of legally binding statutes that define the foundation's objectives, the use of its assets and its management structure.

No matter where you look these days, there's a profound sense here in the west that the people no longer having any tangible control over what our governments do. Sure, we are allowed to vote every once in a while, but effectively, most of our countries are governed by backroom deals and corporate interests. If matters really do get out of hand, how do we fight this? Well, with technology of course!

"M$ does what it always has done, and that is borrow other people's ideas for software," asserted blogger Robert Pogson. "There's nothing wrong with that -- it is normal in the world of software ... ." What's wrong is when "M$ calls it innovating and applies for software patents on other people's ideas and sues people over them. ... May M$ rot in Hell for that."

The lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, has released version 1.3 of the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is the first major update of the user interface based on code from the GNOME shell and which was first considered "stable" with version 1.2. In Cinnamon 1.3, all panel components are applets which means, for example, that users can remove a menu or window list and replace it with alternative third-party applets. All applets can also be moved using drag & drop so that users have even more control over where to position them.

One of the talks at this year's linux.conf.au that really seems to have struck a chord with people is the keynote by Karen Sandler, the current executive director of the GNOME Foundation. That's probably in part because it came from the heart – literally, in the sense that she spoke about her own heart condition, and issues that implanting a pacemaker device raised. These were principally to do with the fact that the software running the devices was closed source.

LXer Feature: 19-Feb-2012

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

NautilusNav-icon With the ever-changing world of Linux, you can expect things to be different for no apparent reason. Some changes are good, and some just cause trouble for users. In this case, it can just flat-out be annoying. Most people will instinctively look to the left of the file manager for navigation links, such as back and forward. In Nautilus 3+, that’s not where you will find them. Instead, they were moved to the right side of the address bar. That’s not a very natural place for them to be, so today, I’ll show you one way to move them back to the left.

The European parliament is currently consulting on a wide-ranging draft European Commission regulation on European standardisation. Voting in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, which is spearheading the legislation, is set to take place in March. The initiative is intended to create a comprehensive, effective, broadly applicable standardisation system. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has criticised the proposal as paving the way for standards which are poorly compatible with open source software.

The proper fsck utility for the Btrfs file-system remains M.I.A. while a contribution from an independent developer introduces LZ4 compression support to this next-generation Linux file-system.

Over the last several months, we’ve seen indications of a good faith effort by Hewlett-Packard to become a positive contributor to the open source software development community, in the form of a commitment by the company to release their webOS operating system as open source under the Apache license.

XBMC, the open source media center, has steadily grown from its humble origins as an X-Box only replacement environment into the cross-platform, de facto playback front-end for multimedia content. It merges the file-centric approach taken by traditional video players with an add-on scripting environment that handles remote web content. The project is currently finalizing its next major release, version 11.0 (codenamed Eden), which includes updates to the networking and video acceleration subsystems, broader hardware support, and numerous changes to the APIs available to add-on developers.

While there's still two months left until Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" will be officially released, here are the first benchmarks of this forthcoming long-term support release. Included are desktop and workstation benchmarks along with a look at the boot performance and power consumption. The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS releases are compared to earlier Ubuntu Linux releases going back to the 10.10 release.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2012

Its been quite the week, Canonical pulls the funding for Kubuntu, Jared Smith steps down as the Fedora project leader and then Robyn Bergeron is named as his successor, unsung heroes of Linux, Is Linux still cool? Is is fractured? and Why The Linux Desktop Matters More Than Ever, This Time? All these questions and more in this week's Roundup. Enjoy!

If you're coming from FreeNAS 7 to Ubuntu, you remember the very handy torrent server that was built in. Well we can exactly replicate that with Transmission's and its WebGUI. A torrent server provides you a great way to download torrents directly to your server. It also allows you to constantly seed torrents, even when your main computers are off. I use this to host copies of OS's (such as Ubuntu!) so other people can download them faster.

As an intern with the Monty Program AB, Vangelis Katsikaros recently had an opportunity to ask the project founder and MariaDB creator, Michael Widenius (aka "Monty"), a variety of interesting questions. Vangelis generously offered to share that conversation exclusively with Linux.com readers. Here is the transcript from that interview.

gnome-shell-logoEver since Gnome started the extensions site where developers can submit their extensions to the library, there have been a great number of useful extensions that appear in the list. With the new extension site, installation of extensions is simply a mouse click. Gone are the days where we still need to add a custom repository just to install an extension. Below are 10 of the best Gnome Shell extensions that we uncovered from the library.

After trying the openSUSE beer at FOSDEM, which is specially brewed at a small Bavarian brewery near the Nürnberg SUSE office and where many of their developers reside, I began wondering if other Linux distributions were represented by beer, what beers would they be? Continue on for this enjoyable weekend article where the leading Linux distributions are described in terms of beer.

Because of the way many Linux distributions make their way into the wild unfettered by commercial overlords, it's sometimes hard to draw a precise bead on who is using what flavor of Linux. In the world of commercial operating systems, by contrast, it's easy as pie to identify Microsoft Windows and Mac OS as the most widely used platforms.

Expanded open source adoption across industries spurs demand for scanning and cloud tools. A testament to the ever-growing popularity of open source, OpenLogic continues to be successful across a wide variety of industries. While technology and financial services companies continue to be OpenLogic’s top two customer verticals, 2011 was marked by rapid growth in three new industries: manufacturing, government, and media.