Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Usually when we discuss the ways to clean up your Ubuntu system, it will always involve command lines like “autoremove“, “autoclean“, “clean” etc. For those who are not used to the command line, an alternative is to use GUI software to get the things done. One such software is 2ClickUpdate, which we have reviewed earlier. Another such software is Mechanig, which we are discussing today

Things are not what they once were for Adobe. There was a time when Flash’s hegemony on the Web was virtually unchallenged. It was also once common to hear people refer to PDF documents as “Adobe files,” signaling the ubiquity of Adobe Reader. Now, times have changed.

Tablets have caught the interest of browser maker Mozilla, which is polishing up a new version of its Firefox browser for Android tablets. Previews show a tablet browser with many elements that will be familiar to users of the company's desktop version. However, users generally don't yet seem to be as choosy about the browsers on their mobile devices as they are about the browsers on their desktops.

Ever had a Web project in mind, but got stalled at the prospect of having to worry about the site design? If code, and not design, is your strong point you'll want to take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. This weekend, you can prettify an existing Web site or start a Web project you've been putting off with a full design toolkit. Like many folks in the Linux community, I've been creating Web sites since the 90s. My first site was hosted in the generous 10MB of space granted by my ISP in Kirksville, Missouri. It consisted of a tribute to Charles Bukowski, and was as homely a site as you've ever seen. Well, it was better than pages on MySpace, but it wasn't terribly pretty.

On a recent visit back to the UK, lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison met up with Richard Hillesley. Here, Richard Allison's description of the history of his involvement with open source, Linux and Samba.

The Canonical-backed Ubuntu project released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 (& Oneiric Ocelot& ), featuring both an improved Dash interface for the Unity desktop and a makeover for the Ubuntu Software Center that resembles the Mac App Store. Ubuntu 11.10 moves up to Linux 3.0.3, the Firefox 7.0 browser, and a Thunderbird 7.0 beta email client, among other changes.

Dan Paoletti, Interim CEO at Ohio Health Information Partnership, and Vice President, Data Services, The Ohio Hospital Association, will be speaking at Ohio LinuxFest on September 9 at 3pm at the Gr4eater Columbus Convention Center. His talk will be titled "The Vision: By 2015 the Spotlight is on Ohio for the Meaningful Use of Health Information Technology."

While Hewlett-Packard recently announced they will be killing off their webOS devices, just days prior to that I had ordered an HP TouchPad 16GB to carry out some additional ARM-based Linux benchmarks. Although HP's devices may be going away, I am still fond of webOS and it's a fair environment to carry out performance tests.

Attackers compromised several servers at kernel.org using an off-the-shelf Trojan that appears to have entered via a compromised user credential. However, the source code for the Linux kernel does not appear to have been altered thanks to its & git& distributed revision control system, say kernel maintainers.

If you want to go back to those great old days of really lightweight Linux, give Tiny Core Linux a try and relive the joy of a bare-bones system. Several projects exist that purport to be small, run-in-memory distributions. The most popular probably is Puppy Linux. Puppy has spawned several variations, and I have used it several times myself on older machines. But, I have discovered one that bowled me over completely—Tiny Core Linux. This distribution is a totally different beast and fills what I think is as of yet an unfilled category.

If you look back at the defining device of the 20th century – the automobile – it’s easy to compare its growth and impact over the last 100 years to the transformational shift we’re witnessing in the software industry. Think about it. Produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from 1908 through 1927, the Model T was generally regarded as the first affordable automobile. It was immensely popular, despite the fact that consumers had few features to choose from. The car came with one type of engine and a limited number of body styles. And Ford’s “any color as long as it is black" policy was famously implemented in 1914, limiting the color option to just one. You paid for your car with cash, and you got what you paid for. Period.

Like many of you, I occasionally come into possession of an older laptop. Usually, it’s something that used to run Windows XP, sometimes even older. You always hear that Linux is supposed to be so great for resurrecting old hardware, but many modern desktop distributions with all their bells and whistles end up chugging along just as slowly as Windows did. In those circumstances, you can either throw the machine away, or build your own custom install tailored toward the needs of the machine. Today we’re going to put together a Debian installation tailored specifically toward the needs of an older laptop.

As has recently been announced on the main kernel.org page, the main kernel.org server (known as “hera”) was recently compromised by an unknown intruder. This person was able to gain “root” access, meaning they had the full run of the system. Speaking as just one of many members of the kernel development community, I can say that this episode is disturbing and embarrassing. But I can also say that there is no need to worry about the integrity of the kernel source or of any other software hosted on the kernel.org systems.

Red Hat, the world’s leading Linux company, is asking its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users to help set the features for its next release RHEL 7. Of course, Red Hat is based on open-source Linux, and, in particular it’s Fedora community Linux operating system. There, the developers call the shots. Now the company is seeking the active help of its RHEL users as well.

For data sensitive enough to warrant encryption, a tool like TrueCrypt is a great solution. The app creates and encrypted file container of any size on your hard drive or on an external drive. Once mounted using a super-strong password of your own choosing, files can come and go as you please. Once dismounted, they're locked behind a virtually impenetrable wall of encryption.

Finally, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled [PDF] on SCO's appeal of its loss to Novell in the second jury/bench trial. The appeals court affirms in all respects. So, SCO loses again, and likely this is as far as it will go. Technically, SCO can ask the US Supreme Court to hear a further appeal, but that is very unlikely to happen and even less likely to be granted were it to happen. SCO has fallen downstairs, hitting its head on every step, to the very bottom, just like I told you in May of 2003, in the first article I ever wrote about SCO.

Besides a 40-way graphics card comparison between the open and closed-source Linux drivers for both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD graphics processors, there's also a number of other interesting articles coming up on Phoronix. Here's some of what you can expect to see next month on Phoronix.

The IBM Software Development Kit for Linux on POWER (SDK) is a free, Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The SDK integrates C/C++ source development with the Advance Toolchain, Post-Link Optimization, and classic Linux performance analysis tools, including OProfile and Valgrind. The IBM SDK for Linux on POWER provides you with an all-in-one solution for developing software on Linux on POWER platforms. This demo shows you how to access the SDK using a technique called X-Forwarding, which allows you to integrate the SDK interface to an interface running on your Linux desktop.

Martin Gräßlin has successfully boosted the performance of KDE's KWin for the upcoming 4.7.2 point release and more so for the KDE SC 4.8 release. This is an attempt to make the KWin compositing window manager handle rendering at sixty frames per second, which it hasn't been able to scale to that frame-rate due to deficiencies in the project's code-paths.

Freescale Semiconductor has begun sampling the first system on chips (SoCs) built on its Linux-ready QorIQ Qonverge architecture for femtocell and picocell 4G base stations. The QorIQ Qonverge PSC9130/31 (femotecells) and PSC9132 (picocells) SoCs support up to 16 and 64 simultaneous users respectively, and simultaneously support multiple air interfaces, including LTE, WiMAX UMTS , WCDMA (HSPA+), and CDMA, says the company.