Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Let’s play a game. Who do you think Red Hat’s biggest enemy will be in a few years? Will it be Microsoft, Linux’s traditional enemy? Could SUSE, the number two business Linux distributor, make a try for the top? Might Ubuntu’s Canonical make its big break into corporate Linux? All good guesses, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, is pretty sure that Red Hat’s biggest competitor in 2016 will be VMware.

Microsoft released on August 29 an integrated environment for developing in Python using Visual Studio 2010. Known as Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS), the new, free tools are available under the Apache 2.0 license, and available for download from Microsoft’s CodePlex site. PTVS came out of the Technical Computing Group unit at Microsoft.

With a brief news item, Oracle has retired the "Operating System Distributor License for Java" (DLJ) that was created by Sun in 2006. The non-free licence had allowed Linux distributors to package and distribute Sun's, and later Oracle's, Java versions in their Linux distributions. Sun made this licence available after releasing Java as open source at the JavaOne conference in 2006. It was designed to ensure that users had easy access to packages containing the well-tested Sun Java during the development of the free OpenJDK.

Columbus, Ohio - August 27. Ohio Linuxfest is proud to announce that we will be celebrating 20 years of Linux on September 9-11 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio.

Samsung has published the code to a new open-source DRM driver for its EXYNOS4210 System-On-a-Chip. The EXYNOS4210 has impressive 3D graphics capabilities, uses the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and is used in various smart-phones. The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the smart-phones using the Exynos 4210 SoC. Samsung is hoping to push this DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel.

Fresh doubts have been cast over the Romanian government's position with regard to open source. The minister for Communication and Information Society, Valerian Vreme, announced back in May that the government would recommend open source "wherever appropriate"; however, a tender from the government emerged in August that specifically prohibited the use of open source software in any offer made in response. Now, a report from OSOR.EU quotes several authoritative sources doubting the validity of the prohibition and whether "it would stand in court".

The SCALE Call For Papers opens as of today August 25, 2011. Submittals for a wide range of topics around Open Source software will be considered. If you have an idea or subject pertaining to FOSS, submit your proposal to http://cfp.socallinuxexpo.org

If I had a single wish for Linux," said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet, "it would be that a Gates or Jobs would come along and just take it away from the hackers and trolls and give us a true third way where the user was No. 1 and everything was so simple and intuitive both Apple and MSFT were left thinking, 'How did that happen?'"

Google Chrome is not only the fastest loading and rendering browser available, it's also grabbing market share the fastest. And like all good browsers, Chrome offers thousands upon thousands of extensions that can be added to expand the functionality and fun of the browsing experience. Problem is, with so many extensions available, it's hard to know which ones are of the most interest to certain user groups. So, I took the time to dig through the piles to find what I thought to be the best collection of available Chrome extensions for Linux users. So, without further ado, let's get on with the list.

Lessfs offers a flexible solution to utilize data deduplication on affordable commodity hardware. In recent years, the storage industry has been busy providing some of the most advanced features to its customers, including data deduplication. Data deduplication is a unique data compression technique used to eliminate redundant data and decrease the total capacities consumed on an enabled storage volume. A volume can refer to a disk device, a partition or a grouped set of disk devices all represented as single device. During the process of deduplication, redundant data is deleted, leaving a single copy of the data to be stored on the storage volume.

Today, the Linux kernel is the most pervasive piece of software in all of computing. It runs the world’s stock exchanges, transportation systems, consumer devices, smart grid technologies, 90 percent of the world’s supercomputers and much, much more..

Following the recent fire sale of HP's TouchPad tablet, members of the Hack N Mod hacker and modder community have setup a cash bounty for the first functional port of Google's Android OS to replace the default Linux-based webOS mobile operating system. The Hack N Mod prize is intended to "speed up the porting process" and is currently valued at a total of $1,500.

When thinking about user interface design, many will focus on the application itself, but Claire Rowland, an interaction designer and researcher, looks at things a bit differently. She came to the Desktop Summit in Berlin to describe "service design", which encompasses more than just the interface for a particular application. Looking at the service that is being provided, and focusing on the "touchpoints" for that service, makes for a more holistic view of interface design. That will become increasingly important as we move into a world where more and more "ordinary" devices become connected to the internet.

In 2005, after just two weeks, Linus Torvalds completed the first version of Git, an open-source version control system. Unlike typical centralized systems, Git is based on a distributed model. It is extremely flexible and guarantees data integrity while being powerful, fast and efficient. With widespread and growing rates of adoption, and the increasing popularity of services like GitHub, many consider Git to be the best version control tool ever created.

Poseidon Linux is designed for the international scientific community, bundling a big batch of science-oriented software into a single live DVD, plus a batch of desktop productivity and multimedia applications. Poseidon 4.0 was just released with significant changes, so let's take it for a test drive.

Microsoft has signed a “legal covenant agreement” with Linux operating system provider China Standard Software Co. Ltd. (CS2C), and will be jointly developing, marketing and selling solutions for the Chinese cloud-computing market with that company, the pair announced on August 22.

The Minority Report has been in rotation on cable lately, and you've probably seen the futuristic vision of Tom Cruise standing in front of a large screen, manipulating information with waves of his hands. That vision is a bit closer to reality, thanks in part to the economies of scale of the game industry. I don't often have reason to sing the praises of Microsoft, particularly not in a magazine devoted to Linux and all things open. But one thing our friends in Redmond do very well is to commoditize hardware. They've done just that with the Kinect by creating it as a natural interface for the Xbox 360 game console. What's more, they've allowed open-source developers to create drivers for the device, and they've even allowed the third party who developed the technology, PrimeSense, Inc., to release its own device drivers for Linux, Windows and OS X.

The Free Software Foundation reckons its new version of the General Public Licence removes the problems bedevilling version two, but not everyone is convinced the problem even exists. The FSF reckons that Linux developers need to move quickly to GPLv3 if they're to avoid Android (and similar Linux-based platforms) getting tied up in legal battles, despite the fact that many are claiming such battles are no more than figments in the eyes of publicity-hungry bloggers.

For those that have long sought after a single-window mode for the GIMP graphics application, the wait is over. The GIMP 2.7.3 development snapshot and it finally has a working single-window mode. The news announcement for GIMP 2.7.3 states, "The most visible changes in 2.7.3 are the fully working single-window mode, including working session management, and the introduction of a new hybrid spinbutton/scale widget which takes less space in dockable dialogs."

According to WordPress founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites in the world are now powered by the open source blogging and publishing platform, up from just 8.5 per cent a year ago. The project's latest data also shows that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the United States are running WordPress.