Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Foundation announced its 2011 event schedule, plus a new open-invitation conference called LinuxCon Europe, scheduled for Oct. 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the Linux.conf.au conference is still set to go off Jan. 24-29 in Brisbane, Australia -- despite expectations of historic flooding.

Cisco Systems unveiled a suite of Linux-based & Videoscape& IPTV hardware and software that blends TV and web content a la Google TV. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless plans to ship 4G LTE versions of Cisco's Android-based, enterprise-focused Cius tablet and Linux-based ISR routers.

Two and a half months after VLC core developer Rémi Denis-Courmont submitted an infringement of copyright complaint, Apple has removed the iOS version of VLC Media Player from its App Store. Apple is now reported to have told Applidium, the team responsible for porting the open source media player to iOS, that the application was removed because the dispute between the parties involved could not be amicably resolved.

We are excited to announce that ActiveState is the proud recipient of an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award! Komodo IDE has been named Best Python IDE, coming out on top against nine other Python IDEs tested. Komodo specifically got top points for ease of installation, documentation and ease of use--things that we pride ourselves on as well.

Recently, there has been some discussion about a 1000 core processor or as I like to call them many-core processors. Indeed, a research group has proclaimed they have created a 1000 core processor using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Such discussions and research stunts are good as they generate ideas, discussions and set milestones, or in this case Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). The reality of a 1000 core processor, however, is going to take a huge fundamental (and probably painful) change in the way computing is done.

If you're looking to setup video surveillance, Linux can help! ZoneMinder is the most popular open source video surveillance server. It runs on any Linux distribution and supports USB and network cameras. Remote pan/tilt/zoom controls are even supported. It features a web-based GUI and mobile phone access for configuring, viewing, and replaying video feeds. It supports multiple users and user access levels, along with several different languages.

The price of hardware has reached a point where extra drives (or single, massive drives) is not an issue for desktop users. But when you have multiple users using a single machine, keeping their usage down is imperative. The last thing you want is to find yourself with a full partition. One way to guard against this is to enable per-user quotas.

For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel's new processors.

There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE. You can't blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.

If you ask some Linux purists whether they use Linux in conjunction with other operating systems, lots of them will say no. At the same time, many of these same users will happily report that they use a broad, diversified set of applications. Why is diversity in applications embraced by almost everyone, while diversity in operating system usage isn't so common?

GIMP is perhaps one of the most well known imaging apps available in Libre software. Its virtues are endorsed by many in the Libre software community. In a practical sense however, within North American art and design circles, its uptake is effectively zero. There are reasons behind this, although any attempts to tackle the issues have a tendency to erupt into nothing more than hyperbole and animosity, leaving behind the core issues at hand. This is an attempt to outline three key reasons why some graphic artists and designers perceive GIMP as inadequate when it comes to its suitability in their imaging pipelines.

Thanks for the link Herschel

The GTVHacker dev team has won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device before Google – Google will reportedly be bringing support for Android applications to the platform some time later this year. According to developer Howard Harte, who originally announced the bounty at the end of November last year, the GTVHacker team used a hardware hack, adding serial console support to the UART1 header on the Logitech Revue, to enable root and install third-party apps on Google TV.

The XBMC project released version 10.0 of its integrated media center software just before the holidays, and if you haven't test-driven it in a while, do yourself a favor and grab the new build now. 10.0 is a substantial improvement in media playback capabilities, including hardware video acceleration, and there is a long list of other improvements and new features — but one in particular stands out: the ability to add and remove plugins on the fly, from within the GUI. It's as close as I've seen to a point-and-click "plays anything" open source media center solution.

This past weekend I unsubscribed from my last opensolaris mailing list. While reflecting on where technology is heading, I had to take a few minutes to reflect on where things were just a few years back. I remember vividly the day that the opensolaris.org website came online. After the announcement came out, I spent 24 straight hours signing up for mailing lists, reading documentation and reviewing the source code for a number of utilities. This had been all too easy with Linux, since all of the code and documentation was available in the public domain. But when the Solaris source came online, I felt like a 4-year old in a HUGE candy store.

SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Beta 1 was released last week, but again is plagued by start problems for many people. All during this SimplyMEPIS 11 development cycle boot problems have stopped many users from testing. Unfortunately, and probably the root of problem, is that this occurs for only some of the users with little hardware in common. To compound the issue, the boot issues haven't been caused by the same reason to the same people each release either. With so much variation, it can be very difficult to nail down corrections.

It's official: the iOS version of VLC has been yanked from the App Store. Though Apple didn't offer any reasons for its removal, the media player is believed to have been pulled thanks to a licensing dispute that started more than two months ago.

Wireless chipset maker Broadcom joined the Linux Foundation, suggesting that it will release more open source drivers for Linux. Over the last month, Timesys, Protecode, and Mentor Graphics have also joined the nonprofit Linux advocacy organization.

As Linux adoption grows, so too does the Linux Foundation as it continues to add new members to its ranks. So far in 2011, the Linux Foundation has added at least three new members companies including Broadcom, Timesys and Protecode.

Also known as GeoHot, George Hotz, familiar to many from his iPhone and Playstation 3 hacks, has released source code for a piece of software which can allegedly be used to sign homebrew programs so that they will run on Sony's Playstation 3. The code is reported to run under the current PS3 firmware version, version 3.55, modified using jailbreak software (direct download), also released by Hotz.

Behind KDE is our site for interviews with KDE contributors and a new series is being started by Pau Garcia i Quiles. The theme of the series is the different platforms that KDE is available for. The first interview is with Patrick Spendrin. Patrick works on the KDE on Windows project and tells us how the project works, what can be done with it, how he got involved and how you can get involved. Future articles in this series will talk about Mac, BSD, Solaris and other platforms.