Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linus Torvalds has probably done more for the world than many know, and his influence stretches far and wide throughout all corners of the globe with a variety of amazing implementations of his original vision that started almost two decades ago.

Google announced a Feb. 2 unveiling of Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") at its Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Meanwhile, Dell tweets that it will soon offer a 10-inch Honeycomb tablet, and hackers have ported Android 3.0 to Barnes & Nobles's Nook Color e-reader device.

Started by one of our readers more than a week ago was a compiler deathmatch for comparing the performance of GCC, LLVM Clang, PCC (the Portable C Compiler), TCC (Tiny C Compiler), and Intel's C Compiler under Arch Linux. This user did not stop there with compiling these different x86_64 code compilers, but he also went on to look at the compiler performance with different compiler flags, among other options. The results are definitely worth looking at and here are some more.

In an overwhelming vote for renaming, the Hudson project is to become Jenkins. A vote was announced and held on the Hudson developers mailing list after the breakdown of discussions with Oracle over the governance and management of the CI (continuous integration) software. Oracle claims to own the Hudson trademark and believes that this ownership should give it control over the project.

LXer Feature: 31-Jan-2011

In the LXWR this week it is all about the desktop environments. Bruce Byfield makes a case for running Xfce, Dr. Tony Young wrangles KDE4's window manager into shape and Carla Schroder wants to punt KDE altogether. The Fedora servers get hacked, Python for newbies, LibreOffice 3.3 hits the streets and Glyn Moody states why Android will win the tablet wars. Enjoy!

If you've been wanting to get involved in supporting Linux and other open-source projects with or without a programming background, or you have creative ideas how to get involved, see this thread.

Next weekend (5-6 February 2011) is FOSDEM, one of the largest gatherings of Free Software developers in the world. KDE will be in Brussels with a stall and as part of the crossdesktop devroom. KDE talks will cover: education, an introduction to Qt and Qt Quick, Phonon, KDE on Windows and mentoring. In the crossdesktop devroom, there will be other talks on topics such as application distribution and games development, which will be interesting to KDE developers too.

Do you see what I see? Maybe, if you have taken the time to tackle color management on your machine. The major desktop environments for Linux give 90 percent of users all the tools they need to see all of their images in device-independent accuracy. You don't even need to buy special hardware. This weekend, pull up a monitor and see what all the technicolor fuss is about.

The openSUSE community is celebrating the end of January by releasing openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6. This new development snapshot brings several prominent changes, including the final removal of HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer), the migration to systemd from SysVInit has been pushed back to the next openSUSE release, and it now incorporates support for Novell's WebYaST.

The idea of one universal package format for all distributions has been batted around a few times over the years. One of the most notable was Ryan C. Gordon's idea of FatELF files. Reactions varied from supportive to skeptical to down right opposed. Well, it seems a new team from major distributions is coming together to implement a "common application installer API and infrastructure."

In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.

The Apple iPad is a huge hit: 7.33 million of them were sold in the quarter ending in December. That's a pretty amazing achievement. But despite that, there are good reasons to believe that 2011 will mark the start of the ascent of Android as king of the tablet world.

The fourth day of the conference opened with a keynote by Eric P Allman, author of a little MTA some people may have heard of called Sendmail - an "... old program that has changed the world."

If you’re a Linux (or even Mac) user, and you’ve never toyed with your shell prompt, you might not realize just how useful a good prompt can be. Sure, it can show your user and host names, and perhaps the current directory, but a really good prompt can do a whole lot more. Those who spend a LOT of time in the terminal might even want to take it a step further and move into a custom semi-graphical shell with all kinds of bells and whistles. If you’re one such shell enthusiast, then check out Bashish – a way to theme your command prompt. Yep, you read that right.

Google has released an early preview of the Android 3.0 software development kit (SDK). Android 3.0—codenamed Honeycomb—introduces Android's new tablet user interface, which is expected to officially debut next month on Motorola's Xoom tablet. Developers will be able to use the SDK preview to get a head start on updating their applications to support the tablet form factor.

The Sabayon Linux developers have announced the availability of the GNOME and KDE variants of version 5.5 of their Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert (also known as zabaglione) is derived from Gentoo Linux and is intended to provide a "complete out-of-the-box experience" while being both stable and versatile.

Puppy Linux began life as a really cool small-sized Linux distribution designed primarily for lower specification hardware while still providing most of the amenities that make Linux fun and usable. It included lots of original utilities and tools for completing tasks and configurations without a lot of resource overhead. Best of all, it was blazing fast. Well, the little puppy has grown up some and branched out, but is still that same light-weight wonder in spirit.

An attacker stole the account credentials of a contributor to the Fedora Linux project and accessed Fedora servers on Jan. 22. The attack follows other recent cyber-invasions of open source projects, including hacks reported on the Free Software Foundation and ProFTPD.

Ever wish you could set up a small, efficient server? Maybe you're setting up a mail server for a couple of people, or something to hand out music files over a home network. Do you really need a full-fledged PC with a noisy fan, sucking down 100 watts and heating up the room?

Over the past few years the use of JavaScript has grown from a form validation helper to a field-leveler as the user experience of web applications has begun to rival traditional “smart client” applications in some arenas. Clever CSS skinning has not done this alone — another key ingredient is event handling. JQuery Mobile introduces mobile-oriented events to browser based programming. Let’s have a look.