Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Right now, someone, somewhere is developing the killer operating system feature of the future - a feature that will change computing and make us wonder how we lived without it. However, the person responsible probably isn't grafting away in the labs of Microsoft, Apple or Red Hat - he or she is more likely to be working in a bedroom or loft.

Apple's share of the media tablet market fell to 73 percent in 4Q 2010, due to the arrival of Android tablets led by the Samsung Galaxy Tab, says IDC. Still, the iPad will maintain a 70-80 percent share in 2011, the research firm adds, while Forrester puts the figure at 80 percent, and projects that only Amazon.com could mount significant competition via a color Kindle.

The OpenSUSE project released OpenSUSE 11.4, and launched an optional rolling release repository called "Tumbleweed." OpenSUSE 1.4 is built on Linux 2.6.37, offers improved performance, scalability, and boot time, and provides a faster the ZYpp package management system, LibreOffice 3.31, and Firefox 4.0, says the project.

With the Firefox 4.0 release right around the corner, the big question for a lot of users is how fast is Firefox 4.0? How does the new Moz compare with Google Chrome, Opera, and the rest? If you're curious, take some time this weekend to perform your own benchmarks and see for yourself. Consider this an audience participation article: We're looking for your feedback as well.

Reports have suggested that the Google I/O developer conference scheduled for May 10-11 in San Francisco sold out in just 59 minutes. Further reports have also suggest implied that some tickets have even surfaced on eBay for as much as $2000. A few lucky developers may still yet get the chance to attend though, but they'll need to show that they are worthy enough of a place in the Moscone Center this year. The 'Last Call for Google I/O' competition is a series of 10 developer challenges that will provide tickets to 100 winners.

Announced today at conf.kde.in in Bengaluru, Project Neon is back, new and ambitious. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old incarnation, which provided nightly builds of Amarok. Now the new generation of talented young Kubuntu developers announce that Project Neon is open for business! read more

Summer is quickly approaching in the northern hemisphere so that means it's time for yet another year of Google's Summer of Code. Once again, X.Org / Mesa should be participating, so it's now time to submit ideas for areas where potential student developers could focus their summer work. Here's a few of the possibilities.

First announced in November of last year and previously only available by invitation-only, the RockMelt team has announced that its social web browser is now in open beta. In development for more than two years, RockMelt is based on Google's Chromium browser, the open source project behind Google's Chrome web browser.

Ever come across an old family photo that would really look great if it had some color? Or perhaps you found a gorgeous wallpaper online but the monochromatic color scheme just doesn’t fit with the desktop of your dreams. Thanks to modern photo editing programs like the Gimp, this process is a lot easier than you may be thinking. To get the obvious out of the way – no, we can’t magically recover the color of flowers at your grandmother’s wedding, but we can give color to those flowers to make them look however you’d like. All it takes is a good eye for color and some careful clicking.

Continuing from last week’s introduction to Audacity, this week you’ll take a deeper dive into some of Audacity’s advanced editing features by learning how to create a professional sounding introduction for your audio projects. These are the exact techniques I used to create the introduction music and voice-over for the Frugal Tech Show podcasts.

Many analysts are applauding HP's decision to place its Linux-based WebOS on all of its Windows-based PCs in 2012 as an alternative fast-boot distro, but some caution it could alienate Microsoft. The deployment will represent a huge leap forward for Linux on the desktop, albeit in a limited capacity -- and HP may be grooming WebOS for a bigger desktop role.

Some Linux server admins are comfortable with wading through text logfiles, but why wade when you can create beautiful charts and graphs that highlight trouble spots? Try the excellent CairoPlot for beautiful, informative visual server log analysis.

There have been a flurry of comments this week following my post why software defaults are important and why in the Linux benchmarks at Phoronix.com the tests are most often carried out in their default/stock configurations: it's what most everyone uses. There have been comments by Ted Ts'o on file-system default mount options and whether they are sane or not in the non-enterprise distributions and others have questioned if defaults like Compiz on in Ubuntu by default makes sense. Does using Compiz still hurt your graphics performance?

The newest release of Novell's openSUSE Linux debuts with LibreOffice, KDE 4.6, a zippy package management system and a new rolling release system that could eliminate the need for future big releases.

If you work for a company with an online presence long enough, you'll deal with it eventually. Someone, out of malice, boredom, pathology, or some combination of all three, will target your company's online presence and resources for attack. If you are lucky, it will be a run of the mill Denial of Service (DoS) attack from a single or limited range of IP addresses that can be easily blocked at your outermost point, and the responsible parties will lack the necessary expertise to overcome this relatively simple countermeasure. Your usual script kiddie attack against a site with competent network and server administration is fairly short. If you are unlucky, you'll experience something worse: A small percentage of attacks is from a higher caliber of black hat, and while more difficult to deal with, the individual generally bores easily and moves on.

There are a lot of mobile apps that use open source software, but how many of them are in compliance with open source licensing rules? As it turns out, not very many. A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance. OpenLogic scanned 635 apps, including both free and paid on the Apple App store and Google Android Marketplace. Of those 635 scanned apps, 52 apps include Apache licensed code while 16 included GPL/LGPL licensed code.

Google has released a new SDK for its open source and royalty-free VP8 video codec, promising faster encoding and improved video quality. Mountain View has not changed the VP8 format, merely the software around the format. The new SDK is known as "Bali", and it's the second major update to the platform. According to a Google blog post, on x86 processors, Bali encodes 4.5 times faster than the initial V8 SDK release in "best" mode and 1.35 times faster than previous release, known as Aylesbury. Google likes to name its V8 SDKs after ducks.

The Linux Foundation announced keynotes and programming for its Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco. The event will also kick off the year's Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to the official celebration in August.

LXer Feature: 09-Mar-2011

This is an addition to the series that was never at first envisaged. Indeed, within a recent thread (shown immediately below) and in my response to “hkwint”, I stated very clearly that I had absolutely no intention of writing further on KDE4, but this situation almost developed with a life of its own and I now think it needs to be brought out into the open for the LXer readers.

In certain situations, a small patch for 2.6.38 perceivably improves the response time of desktop environments. Transparent Huge Pages, on the other hand, simplify memory management, which is particularly relevant in terms of virtualisation and server software.