Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Of all the companies that support OpenOffice, there were only two that didn’t support the LibreOffice fork: Oracle and IBM. I could understand Oracle. While Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, didn’t really care about OpenOffice–after all Oracle essentially gave OpenOffice away to The Apache Foundation–I also know that Ellison wasn’t going to let The Document Foundation, LibreOffice’s parent organization, dictate terms to him. But, I’ve never quite understood why IBM didn’t help create LibreOffice. Be that as it may, IBM will be announcing tomorrow that it’s donating essentially all its IBM Lotus Symphony source code and resources to Apache’s OpenOffice project.

Though netbooks have waned a bit in favor of tablet devices, there's still a lot of demand for netbooks and netbook-friendly Linux distros in certain circles. Whether you're looking for a brand-new netbook or to keep an older device current, there's plenty of options for the Linux crowd. Let's take a look at the top five netbook Linux distros.

We have been focusing a great deal on patent infringement controversies lately, so its time to step back into that pleasant world of free and open source software for a visit. And there is some significant news on that front. First, Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its contributor agreement templates. Version 1.0 includes a rather nifty Agreement Selector tool that generates both individual and entity agreements for your project. Project Harmony does not come down on the side of license-in versus assignment-in; its primary benefit is to assure standardization of language regardless of approach. Check it out.

SAP is joining the OpenJDK project which develops the official open source implementation of Java. SAP's Volker Simonis announced on the OpenJDK mailing list that the company had signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement. This means SAP employees can officially engage in discussions on the OpenJDK mailing lists and contribute patches and enhancements.

Some days, it’s just not fair. You know you’re going to post something that’s going to have the fanboys heads spinning, you don’t want to hurt their precious necks, but true journalistic integrity requires you light a flame and watch it burn. This is one of those days. Apparently, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, just gave a speech Down Under. In it, he compared Linux with Windows and OS X. The phrase you’re all going to enjoy is this one: “I don’t think they’re equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system,” he said. “(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”

Adobe has released a beta of Flash Player 11, touting 64-bit support across Windows, Mac OS, and -- after a year-long hiatus -- Linux. The software includes a new set of low-level APIs for GPU (graphical processing unit) acceleration, H.264/AVC and H/264 compression technologies, cross-platform vector printing, a secure random number generator, according to the company.

Canonical has announced today that their next Ubuntu Developer Summit, for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release, will take place from the 31st of October to the 2nd of November. Like last year's Ubuntu 11.04 summit, this UDS will again be taking place in Orlando, Florida.

Adobe has resuscitated Flash Player for 64-bit Linux, drawing cheers from penguins across the planet. On Wednesday, the company released a beta version of Flash Player 11 for the desktop, and this included a 64-bit Linux beta. In June of last year, Adobe murdered an experimental version of Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux, but it promised the penguin population it would revive the 64-bit Linux player in a future Flash release.

Will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation spur it to contribute to FOSS? Thoughts on Technology blogger Jeff Hoogland hopes so. "At the very least I think it is a sign that Meego will be appearing at some point as an in-car operating system," he said. "Here is to hoping Meego can eventually give the pseudo-Linux Android a run for its money."

As we’ve mentioned several times before, a few of us here at MakeTechEasier are big fans of Gnome 3. Sadly, since the project is still fairly young, it’s not nearly as configurable or feature-rich as its 2.x cousins. At the moment, the standard install provides no quick and obvious way to change many of the settings, so applications like the Gnome Tweak Tool have been created to give users a few more options. Even those tools, however, still leave many desirable options out – such as the ability to manage your workspaces by hand. Initial builds of Gnome Shell showed a linear or grid-based approach that this author, for one, prefers to the current automatic approach. Here’s how to get some of that back.

Along with better support for new chipsets and graphics cores from AMD and Intel, not to mention drivers for Microsoft's Kinect and DVB-T2, Linux 3.0 once again offers a number of workarounds for a wide range of hardware problems.

Many Open Source advocates have turned into Open Source pragmatists. That doesn’t mean we’ve surrendered. We’ve evolved. It came to my surprise last week when a fellow Open Source advocate and DATAMATION contributor, Bruce Byfield, called yours truly and my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes out in his piece Tech Pundits Surrender: The Retreat from Free Software and Open Standards. What set Bruce off? Well, he seems to think that as a group, “Tech Pundits” are collectively giving up on Open Source and Open Standards under the auspices of pragmatism and convenience.

French Linux provider, Mandriva, has announced that it has joined the industry consortium CompatibleOne – a research project working on the development of a free cloud infrastructure using open standards and interoperable open source technologies. Its members include companies such as Bull and Inria.

Google has filed a motion [PDF] asking leave of the court to supplement its invalidity contentions regarding Oracle's patents, invalidity contentions it claims "it has now determined are among its strongest in the case". It has found prior art, in one instance going all the way back to Multics..

Google announced that iRiver's Story HD e-reader will be available July 17 at Target, and will be the first device to offer Google eBooks support via Wi-Fi. In related e-reader news, the Philadelphia Media Network will offer deeply discounted Android tablets to Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News subscribers, and e-reader/tablet vendor Augen appears to have gone under....

Unix systems may not be all the rage that they were two decades ago, but in nearly eight out of 10 data centers based on them, their use is either holding steady or increasing. That's the assessment of a recent survey of the HP, IBM, and Oracle Unix customer bases by Gabriel Consulting Group, which has just finished up its fifth annual slicing and dicing of Unix customer sentiments.

Journalist, FOSS advocate, feminist - Carla Schroder is all these and more. But more than anything it is her straight talking that marks her out - when she takes a stand on issues she is driven by conviction. This means that often she is at the receiving end but it is something that she can more than handle. The good thing about dealing with her is that she never allows her personal and professional worlds to mix - even her worst enemy will be allowed to have his/her say on a site which she edits. This is indeed a rare trait..

The CentOS community released its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 clone, promising continuous release updates to support RHEL 6.1 security features. In addition to supporting RHEL 6.0 improvements such as faster virtualization, and better scalability, power efficiency, and resource management, CentOS 6.0 is said to offer a completely rebuilt build system and library checks to confirm upstream binary compatibility.

The GPL "needs to be replaced with 'free for noncommercial use' so that the hackers can still have a 'free as in beer' OS to hack on, the poor can also have a free OS, but those corps that are actually making money on Linux will HAVE TO contribute some of their profits back into the community," opined Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "... Many of these companies wouldn't be enjoying their massive profits if it wasn't for Linux."

Until recently, I had presumed that a Clonk was the sound that my hard drive made just before I realized that I hadn't backed it up properly. However, in this case, a Clonk is a tiny chap who can jump, climb and fire weapons in the service of reaching his goal. OpenClonk runs on Linux and is the latest in a series of side-view platform games that started life as a DOS shareware series.