Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It seems that Google is working with carriers that are requesting the removal of third-party tethering apps from the Android Market. If you ask me, having to pay an extra monthly fee for that service isn't very fair, considering customers already pay a data plan fee for either unlimited data access, or limited access with an extra per-MB fee after the limit is met. Why should it matter how they're using the data?

In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List today regarding the shortened merge window for the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, Linus Torvalds brings up that there's already been many Linux 2.6 kernel releases and that he could end up tagging this as the Linux 2.8.0 kernel.

App store licensing models that are not compatible with open source ones, resulting in apps being taken down from the marketplace, are causing confusion among developers and will likely inhibit open source development within the mobile computing space.

MeeGo, the Linux-based open source operating system born from the February 2010 shotgun marriage of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin and left at the altar when Nokia hooked up with Windows Phone 7, is an "unstoppable force" that speeds device-developers' time-to-market, and it stands for "love, courage, and change." That was the message delivered at the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco on Monday by the executive director of The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin and his supporting keynote cast.

As the World IPv6 Day approaches, recent research reports show that a majority of organizations are still postponing migration to the IPv6 networking protocol. Despite the growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses, due in large part to the growth of mobile and embedded devices, a British Telecom Diamond IP survey says that only 35 percent of respondents considered IPv6 a "huge concern."

The Calligra project has announced the first snapshot release of the Calligra suite, five months after Calligra and KOffice split ways. During that time, the Calligra team has improved the core libraries and all the applications.

By calling the open source industry "nascent," North Bridge's Skok is "either engaging in revisionist history or being incredibly ignorant," asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. After all, "back in 2004 Microsoft told the SEC that open source was a serious threat to its business," she pointed out. "Open source was already making serious inroads into some of Microsoft's key markets, such as servers."

Terracotta, home of open source projects such as the Ehcache Java cache and Quartz scheduler, has been acquired by Software AG. The acquisition will, says the German company, act as a foundation for its in-memory and cloud offerings, allowing it to run business processes which use in-memory cached data access at "up to a thousand times faster than database access"; it expects to offer the first combined products in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Attachmate’s purchase of Novell is done, and now we’re beginning to see it plans develop for the open-source power. First, and foremost, Attachmate is dividing up Novell’s programs into three nominally independent divisions. These are NetIQ, which gets Novell identity and security programs and some of Novell data center solutions; Novell, which will manage the company’s older technologies such as NetWare; and SUSE, which will produce SUSE Linux and oversee the openSUSE community Linux distribution.

For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.

LXer Feature: 22-May-2011

In the LXWR this week we have PJ officially handing over the daily operations of Groklaw to Mark Webbink, Graham Morrison thinks Linux needs rebranding, Miguel de Icaza starts up a company to keep Mono going while almost simultaneously Attachmate names a new head for SUSE. Ever wanted to run Linux in a web browser using a JavaScript emulator? Well now you can. Enjoy!

The MeeGo conference is running from tomorrow through Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the first conference for the Moblin-Maemo-mix since Nokia parted ways to team up with Microsoft and ship Windows Phone 7 on their future devices, but there's interesting work still going on in the MeeGo world. In particular, of interest to many Phoronix readers will be the fact that it sounds like the adoption of the Wayland Display Server is going quite well within the MeeGo world. It appears that there's already an experimental version of MeeGo Tablet UX working atop Wayland.

Converting videos on the Linux desktop isn’t exactly difficult, but it can be tricky. There aren’t all that many conversion tools out there, and some of them aren’t all that easy to use. Take, for example, ffmpeg. It’s pretty much the top of the heap when it comes to video and audio conversion. But it’s a command line tool that requires you to remember a number of options. Even WinFF, a graphical front end for ffmpeg, isn’t all that user friendly. But what can you do if you want to convert a video to, say, upload to a video sharing site or to fit on to a mobile device? And do it quickly and easily? Give Arista a look.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is creating a process for wider participation through working groups and new affiliate programmes which will influence its thinking on its future mission. The programme was unveiled at last week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco by OSI board member Simon Phipps. The plans are the result of the OSI's planning for reformation announced in March.

Map-based navigation: it's one of the killer apps for any mobile platform. The only sticking point is getting the maps. Downloading map tiles on the fly is the default solution for most navigation apps, but pre-loading makes more sense when it's possible. Unfortunately, open source navigation apps have earned a reputation for clunky and awkward map-loading interfaces. This weekend, let's look at a simpler method, so you can get on the road quicker.

The Linux Foundation's MeeGo project announced the final release of the open source Linux-based MeeGo 1.2, including the first finished version of its tablet UX (user experience), plus updated netbook and in-vehicle infotainment UXes. MeeGo 1.2 features new telephony and wireless communications features, as well as location and sensor/haptic capabilities, says the project.

The Desktop Summit is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities, the two dominant forces behind modern graphical software on free platforms. Over a thousand international participants are expected to attend. The main conference takes place from 6-8 August. The annual membership meetings of GNOME and KDE are scheduled for 9 August, followed by workshops and coding sessions on 10-12 August.

Sometimes in the world of free software, you have to make the best of what’s available. Sometimes what’s available isn’t all that great. When I suddenly lost some critical data as a result of a corrupted drive, I thought I’d have to shell out some potentially serious cash for a high-quality recovery utility. In my research to find the right program, I came across mention of TestDisk, an amazingly handy free utility which has saved me from the loss of a lot of data (not to mention a rather angry spouse). It’s a command line tool so there’s no fancy GUI, but the menu-driven interface makes the recovery process quite simple, and it can handle FAT, NTFS, ext2-4, and more.

All in all, "between Android/Linux, the rise of thin clients and Chrome OS, M$ is surrounded by competitive solutions it cannot mess with as it did with the 'PC,'" blogger Robert Pogson said. Microsoft, in fact, "will eventually become just another IT provider. After this year, the monopoly will be gone."

One of the mailing list messages making the rounds on the Internet today is concerning the GNOME project and whether they should no longer concern themselves with supporting non-Linux operating systems.