Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Have Android OEMs violated the GPL and now forfeited the right to distribute Linux? Does section 4 of the GPL version 2 mean that many (if not all) Android vendors have already lost their rights to distribute Linux? According to an IP litigator, the answer is yes. Edward Naughton, litigator and partner with the lawfirm Brown Rudnick believes that by refusing to make freely available the GPL’d portions of Honeycomb, Google is forcing its OEM partners into a situation of non-compliance with the GPL.

LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2011

"It really seems that OS designers in general, and window manager designers especially, have forgotten what an OS is for: to allow me to get work done," said Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. "Fancy 3D spinning cubes to change virtual desktops might amaze other people, but they are actually SLOWER than just having the desktop switcher on the bar. Xfce seems to get this."

One question we get a lot: What are the best community server distributions? That question isn't as simple as it sounds. What makes a distro "the best"? Why community distributions, specifically? It's not a simple question — but read on and we'll point you to six distros that will help you reach a satisfying answer.

AMD announced an updated SDK (software development kit) allowing programmers to tap into the GPUs (graphics processing units) of its A-Series (& Llano& ) processors. Meanwhile, the Khronos Group released version 4.2 of its OpenGL specification, and AMD and Nvidia have both pledged support for it.

Expected to be released in about two months, the next kernel version will offer optimised virtualisation, add bad block management components to the software RAID code and include an extended Nouveau driver for NVIDIA's Fermi graphics chips. Several developers have been criticised for their clumsy use of Git in this development cycle.

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed boot into a highly secure desktop environment. You may remember that we looked at a US government distro with similar aims a few months ago, but Tails is different because it is aimed at the privacy conscious “normal user” rather than government workers.

Usually I try not to overdo the Linux evangelism. I'd rather Linux succeeded on its own merits than from the fumbling insights that come from the mouths of believers. But last month I read an article and it left me feeling a little down. It was titled Is Linux Finished? and the author outlined what he thought were the reasons for the distinct lack of success Linux has had on the desktop.

The trouble with FUD is at first it sounds correct, or at least plausible. So when Google complained about the Apple-Microsoft partnership and the deliberate patent policy against Google, Microsoft's first response sounded like a killer blow. It said it had asked Google to join them. But… let's take a little bit closer look, because in doing so, it let slip a fact that we did not know until now -- that Google tried to get the 800 or so Novell patents that CPTN, an entity Microsoft set up with Oracle, Apple and EMC, eventually won.

Version 6.7.0 of the Knoppix Live Linux distribution is now available to download free of charge from the project's download server or via BitTorrent. As usual there are English and German versions for CD or DVD.

We are witnessing a new wave of open source use, driven primarily by innovation rather than cost, flexibility, or other advantages. With this new wave, there is a danger that the ease of commercialization ushered in by wider use, greater credibility and, again, innovation means the all-important community piece -- often the free and open source or community version as well -- becomes an afterthought.

One of the keys to using GNU sed successfully is knowing how to use its regular expressions. If you look over sed scripts without knowing regular expressions, the effect can be pretty disconcerting. Don't worry — it's not as confusing as it looks. This weekend, spend some time with GNU sed's regular expressions and put some real power into your text processing.

So let me get this straight. To get the HP TouchPad to perform as well as its main competitor, I have to hack the WebOS operating system? My ZDNet blogging colleague James Kendrick has written an excellent piece for HP TouchPad owners on how to dramatically improve performance by using a WebOS community-supported software stack called Preware that is written by a team of community software developers over at WebOS Internals.

QuakeCon, the annual gaming event and massive LAN party hosted by id Software, is about to get started in Dallas, Texas and run through Sunday. At this free public event, there's usually a variety of interesting announcements made, some of which can impact Linux gamers.

It is summer on the northern hemisphere, and I've decided to target a smaller system than I've been used to in the last couple of years. In particular, I've decided to finally open my dear old PICkit II. The goal is to be able to work with this board from within a Linux environment.

Should free and open source projects and companies require developers to sign community agreements in order to contribute, possibly signing over their copyrights? Some do, some don't, others have mixed policy. Canonical is leading an effort, called "Harmony", to create standardized community agreement documents, an effort they compare with the license standardization work of Creative Commons. Of course, developers want to keep the rights to their creations. On the other hand, some project and business leaders say that they must have copyright assignments to be successful. Is there a middle ground?

July saw the release of KDE SC 4.7. Like all recent KDE releases, this is a combination of updates to the bundled applications, underlying desktop and associated technologies. Canonical have already pushed 4.7 through to Kubuntu desktops. If you are a 4.6 user who has just upgraded, don’t expect to be aware of major changes the first time you reboot. Some of the core applications have been updated, but most of the work has gone into improving the underlying frameworks. The applications themselves have been shifted to a greater reliance on Akonadi, the PIM storage framework and NEPOMUK, the semantic information database.

It's all Hugh's fault. Linus was all set to release the final 3.0 kernel when Hugh Dickins showed up on the list with a little problem: occasionally a full copy of the kernel source tree fails because one of the files found therein vanishes temporarily. What followed was a determined bug-chasing exercise which demonstrates how subtle and tricky some of our core code has become. The problem has been found and squashed, but there may be more.

Writing and running your first app with code executing on the CPU and the GPU

If you're an e-book reader, chances are you already use the wonderful Calibre software. If not, see Dan Sawyer's article in the April 2011 issue. Like many avid readers, however, I still find something soothing about a book made from dead trees. Unfortunately, it's easy to lose track of all the books I own. If you're the type of person who lends books out, it can become even more complicated. Enter Alexandria.