Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April. The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world feedback to the project before the final code gets released into the wild.

A consultant hired by SCO in 2004 to compare UNIX and Linux, with the thought he could be used as an expert at trial, says that, after days and days, his comparison tool found "very little correlation". When he told that to SCO, it paid him and he never heard from SCO again. Interesting, huh? And how odd that SCO went on to sue folks for alleged copyright infringement even after that happened, don't you think?

Thus far we have talked about single-level RAID configurations and Nested RAID configurations. But we've artificially restricted ourselves to only two levels in Nested RAID. Couldn't we have three RAID levels or more? The answer is yes, and in this article we'll talk about three levels (the proverbial "Triple Lindy") and have some fun with a couple of examples.

At last we come to the end of this series and put all the pieces together, and put our fabulous unattended automatic backup scheme to work. You need never lift a finger except to run periodic checks to make sure everything is working correctly.

Offering real-time collaboration tools within a company is becoming a must-have if a company is serious about getting their employees to work as efficiently as possible. Having the ability to instant message fellow employees cuts time down by making communication more efficient. Instead of picking up the phone or walking to someone's office, all that is necessary is to send a message. Don't want to rely on a public service? Check out OpenFire.

China Unicom announced its own Linux-based, Android-like WoPhone operating system, with initial phones to be offered by Huawei and Beijing Tianyu Communication Equipment. The WoPhone announcement follows last week's news that China Unicom rival China Mobile will offer four Asus smartphones and a tablet running the carrier's new OMS 2.0 (OPhone) Android variant on a new TD-CDMA-ready Marvell PXA920 processor.

Google has released version 9.0.597.107 of its Chrome browser, which fixes a total of 19 security vulnerabilities, 16 of them rated as high risk. It was, for example, possible to crash the browser using JavaScript dialogues and SVG files, or to use the address bar for URL spoofing. Also fixed is an integer overflow when handling textareas. As ever, Google is keeping full details of the vulnerabilities under wraps until the bulk of users have switched to the new version.

Cedric Bosdonnat has been tracking contributions to LibreOffice since its announced fork from OpenOffice.org. He uses Git Data Miner to gleen results from the main branch of LibreOffice Git repositories. Git Data Miner is more commonly known as the tool used by Jonathan Corbet in his periodic kernel code reports.

At last here are the final two parts of this series. Today we learn how to tell rsync which files to include or exclude, set up passwordless login on the backup server, and safely test everything. Tomorrow we put it all together and completely automate wakeup, backup, and shutdown.

Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform sound recorder and editor program that allows you to perform simple and advanced sound recording and editing tasks. If you’re into recording, sound effects, mixing, or editing, Audacity takes you there and beyond. Audacity offers a huge (and growing) list of features found in expensive and proprietary sound software. Can you imagine the audacity of developers who would create and maintain software of this caliber? Alas, that is but one of free software’s primary pillars.

In last month's Ask the Experts column, we talked to insiders about how to get paid to work on Linux. The experts replied with a variety of useful tips but one piece of advice was common among all of their comments: get involved in the community. So, this month we've reached out to another group of experts to learn what exactly are the best ways to contribute and/or participate in the Linux and open source software communities.

This news is a few days old, but not many people seem to have caught it while I was busy finishing up Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org: Btrfs may be the default file-system in Fedora 16.

Motorola's Atrix 4G smartphone provides a solid AT T answer to Verizon Wireless' Droid lineup and the various Samsung Galaxy S Android handsets, says this eWEEK review. With features like a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and HSPA+ support, the Atrix 4G is dubbed the best Android phone from AT T yet.

More than three months after the GNOME edition of Linux Mint 10 arrived, the Linux Mint development team has released the KDE edition of version 10 of its Linux Mint operating system, code named "Julia". Linux Mint aims to be user friendly and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media codecs.

One of the greatest benefits of open source software is associated with the concept of ownership. When considering your datacenter, or, for that matter, your own computer, the software that brings the machines to life must be understood in the light of who makes the decisions for how that software performs, when it is updated, and what function the software is used for. Using open source software guarantees that you will be able to own the entire system from the ground up, and put the software to work for you, and not the other way around.

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2011

Due to some family issues I was unable to spend nearly as much time at SCALE 9x as I wanted too but from what I did get to see it was bigger and better than ever before. Kudos to the organizers and volunteers for putting on the best FOSS trade show in existence. I hope to make up for it next year.

The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo started its second day on Saturday with a keynote by Leigh Honeywell as the attendance numbers showed a significant increase over last year. Honeywell, who spoke on the topic “Hackerspaces and Free Software,” headlined a wide variety of sessions that included a standing-room only crowd for Owen De Long’s “IPv6 Basics for Linux Adminstrators” and various education-related talks in the Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) track.

Yesterday marked the opening of the Southern California Linux Expo, otherwise known as SCALE. SCALE's venue this year is the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, just a stone's throw from LAX Airport. SCALE opened strong with lots of technical content, much of it about the "DevOps" movement and how you can bring its benefits to your place of business.

VLC, without a doubt, is the best media player around. Not only is it able to play almost any file format, it is also able to stream audio/video from the Web and transcode on the fly. VLC-share is a web implementation of VLC streaming and transcoding that allows you to stream (and transcode) your videos to your WII Media Center (WIIMC) or Android phone. Just think of airplay for Android and you get VLC-Shares. In this tutorial, we will show you how to get VLC-shares up and running in your Ubuntu machine. VLC-shares is available for Windows as well and the installation and configuration instruction is pretty easy and straightforward, so we will not touch on that.

The Southern California Linux Expo is taking place this weekend in Los Angeles. Matthew Tippett and myself will be speaking there tomorrow on Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. This is also from which we will be launching Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org.