Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

US market researcher comScore reports that 69.5 million US citizens own a smartphone, and that one third of these phones run Google's open source Android mobile operating system. On the popularity scale, RIM and Apple are next with 29% and 25% of users, leaving Microsoft (8%) and Palm (3%) far behind. According to market researcher Nielsen, the US sales figures for Android phones have already been above those for RIM and Apple since July 2010, but this is the first time that Android is also leading in terms of devices in use. comScore said that last November, RIM was in the lead with 34%, followed by Android and Apple with an almost identical share each of 25% of users.

Booting a computer is always more complex than one wants to think. On the PC side, it looks as if BIOS finally is retired and replaced by EFI (I wonder which was the last OS to use BIOS for anything that just loading a secondary bootloader). On Mac, EFI has been around for a while. On embedded Linux systems, however, u-boot has been a big player for a long time.

The Arduino has become a white-hot topic these days by granting the ability to allow anyone with a computer, a 30-dollar Arduino, and an incentive to route electrons through sensors and actuators and make them do interesting things. The latest book to make it to this topical pile-on is technologist Michael Margolis' Arduino Cookbook. Does it have the essential recipes to satisfy the discerning palettes of Arduino enthusiasts? Read on to find out.

The SUSE family of distributions has the motto "have a lot of fun," but it's Slackware that really pushes that philosophy to its limit. While most of the major Linux distributions are shaped by corporate influence, community politics, and pursuit of mainstream success, Patrick Volkerding has taken a much different path with Slackware, which is readily apparent in the release candidate of Slackware 13.37.

Google has placed a $900 million bid on Nortel's patent portfolio in an attempt to build a "formidable patent portfolio" to defend the company from other company's patent related law suits. The bid from Google has been selected by Nortel as the "stalking horse" bid making its $900M offer a starting point for other bidders. The company said that protecting the open source communities around Android and Chrome was one of the reasons it was bidding. Google is still a relatively young company and has not applied for that many patents.

With Linux comes great power — and great control. When you're running Linux, you have thousands of applications, utilities, and commands at your fingertips — and ultimate control over those applications as well. When they start, how they start, and (more importantly) how they stop. Let's take a look at some of the commands and utilities you have to master your Linux systems.

Google's reported decision to more tightly police its Android platform could improve overall quality, but runs the risk of losing vendors to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, say analysts. Meanwhile, despite the release of the iPhone 4 on Verizon, Android kept building U.S. market share in February, growing to a leading 33 percent, says ComScore.

LXer Feature: 04-Apr-2011

Forgive my lateness in getting the Roundup to you. This past week we had Jeff Hoogland recounting his girlfriend's first year using Linux, James Mundu submits a feature on his KMail frustrations, our own Hans Kwint shares some of his bash scripting chops with readers and has Lady Gaga gone gaga for Linux or is it just a good April Fools joke? Enjoy!

Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.

Mentor Graphics released an "OpenMCAPI" open source implementation of the Multicore Association (MCA) MCAPI (Multicore Communications Application Program Interface) specification for inter-process communications. The announcement comes two weeks after the MCA released the MCAPI 2.0 spec, adding a new "domain" layer touted for improving messaging routing and security.

Mozilla, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser, has announced that it's proposed "Do Not Track" (DNT) header is gaining industry support. In a post on the Mozilla Blog, Alex Fowler, Technology and Privacy Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, says that "Two developments bring it closer to being respected by industry".

Last year, Mark Shuttleworth christened Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", saying the disto would be stylish and create a good, lasting first impression. While its debut in beta form is smart looking and definitely chases the fashion in operating-system design it's also the single worst beta release of Ubuntu I've ever tested.

The paperless office: whether to combat clutter or save the forests, it has been the dream of many a computer user ever since the first electronic record of, well, probably anything. But it remains elusive, in no small part because whatever your personal intentions, you just cannot control the actions of other people, and many businesses today still insist on sending you printed bills and receipts. You can at least dispense with the filing cabinets, however, by scanning in the documents you need as searchable, full-text PDFs. Fire up the scanner and the weekend.

We popped along to Google's London HQ this week to talk Chrome OS, Google's new low-resource Linux-based operating system for netbooks and notebooks. Chrome OS product marketing manager, Eli Lassman, took us through the features of the CR-48 prototype portable which TechRadar saw last week and gave us some background on the imminent launch of notebooks featuring Chrome OS.

Google has not only decided to keep the Android Honeycomb source code closed for the foreseeable future, preventing all but a few select partners from using the latest version of its mobile OS, it has also clamped down even harder on those select partners, telling them they can't make changes to the platform or form partnerships of their own without the approval of head Android man Andy Rubin, according to a report citing close to a dozen executives with knowledge of the situation.

Rather than doing any April Fools' Jokes around here (the GNOME project is claiming GNOME 3.0 has been delayed to September), yesterday and today we're looking at a few different headlines that would cause great impact for Linux. Yesterday was looking at what announcements would greatly benefit Linux along with the community's response, but today we're looking at what would cause great harm and be disastrous to Linux and open-source software.

Novell says it is relaxed about Red Hat's changes to how it distributes the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was recently revealed that Red Hat had switched to distributing kernel source code with patches pre-applied and not publishing a manifest of just what patches had been applied. The move was, said Red Hat, in response to competitors offering to support RHEL as part of their own service offerings. Novell and Oracle both offer that service, with Novell's offering being billed as "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support" and claiming to be up to 50 per cent cheaper than Red Hat. Novell though does not see Red Hat's changes as a problem.

With tight budgets ahead as far as the eye can see, NASA is increasingly looking toward open source technology and the help of a volunteer community to help out. The U.S. space agency hosted its first Open Source Summit this week to reach out to the open source community and explain its often confusing and incompatible open source license.

The international KDE community today announced that it will offer itself up in an exciting lottery. Even though the prize is far more substantial than that offered in El Gordo, the entry fee is a mere €100, which can be spread over a year (equating to less that €2 per week). Enter now and Join the Game or read on for more details and community reaction.

Ever so often, I take a stroll over to KDE-Apps.org and look at some of the fantastic creations people from the KDE community develop. There are a wide range of apps in nearly every category, but I have selected 5 that stand out and would be very useful additions to my desktop and hopefully yours too. All of these apps are either new or have been recently updated within the past few months.