Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After about eleven weeks of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 2.6.37. The new version of the main development line has many improvements. Advances in the Ext4 file system mean it should be able to compete with XFS on larger systems and new discard functions can inform slow SSDs of vacant areas, without negatively affecting performance.

For those of you who don’t follow tech news, here’s a brief summary: OpenOffice, supported by Sun, has long been known as a excellent free alternative to MS Office. When Oracle bought Sun, many feared that Oracle’s control might not necessarily be a good thing for the project. Some members of the OpenOffice team decided to create The Document Foundation as a central place for the work to continue in an open community fashion, and even invited Oracle along in the hopes that “we can all just get along”. Well Oracle declined, and the result is that The Document Foundation will soon release LibreOffice, a community-based fork of OpenOffice which has already received backing from the likes of Canonical, Red Hat, and Google. While the final release is not yet available, we can get our hands on the release candidate which should tell us what kind of changes we’re in for.

For those that were hoping that VIA Technologies would pull through in providing their open-source graphics driver support like they had promised with kernel mode-setting, a Gallium3D driver, and being Linux friendly, kiss those thoughts goodbye as they've been basically thrown out the window. Sadly, it's not happening. I had a very productive conversation with VIA's Stewart Haston, who is their international marketing specialist, and their Linux outlook is extremely dark.

Learn to shut down or reboot your Linux system, warn users that the system is going down, and switch to a more or less restrictive runlevel. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about shutting down, rebooting, and changing runlevels.

Dell announced a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet called the Streak 7, featuring a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, and compatibility with T-Mobile's 4G-like HSPA+ network. The company also announced an unlocked, GSM-ready "Dell Venue" smartphone that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, with a 4.1-inch AMOLED display and eight-megapixel camera.

Google released a video overview of Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb"), confirming that it is designed for tablets while hinting at exclusivity for tablets. Honeycomb enhancements include a revamped, "virtual and holographic user interface," improved multitasking, drag and drop widgets, video chat with Google Talk, Google eBooks integration, and tablet-oriented overhauls for the browser, Gmail, and YouTube.

Why are you using Linux on your desktop? Before answering this question, consider the advantages and disadvantages and then come back full circle to your own motivation for using Linux. Nearly every week, I find my news feeds filled with the usual generic articles describing rather vanilla reasons for using Linux on the desktop. Why do I have a problem with this? Perhaps because the reasons often being shared are just echoes of other opinions that clearly aren't that of the author. Instead, we are reading the thoughts and ideas of many articles since past.

Linus Torvalds is starting 2011 off with a bang with the release of the 2.6.37 Linux kernel. The new kernel is the first release since 2.6.36 debuted in October. The goal of the new 2.6.37 kernel is to provide developers with improved Linux performance, security and scalability.

It's official: Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org will be launching next month at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, California. In the talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices by Matthew Tippett and myself, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org will be officially unveiled and launched.

It’s a few days in to 2011, which means most of us have made (and broken) a set of resolutions for the New Year. While I may not drop all the pounds I want in 2011, I have already shed some baggage: Newfangled apps that don’t measure up to the old school Linux utilities.

The long-awaited new version of the popular web content management system and platform was released today. It represents the hard work of almost 1000 developers (by Greg Knaddison's count) and countless other Drupal community members contributing their time and effort to testing and providing feedback.

Like many people, I have an HDTV in my house that supports HDMI input devices, such as Blu-ray players. I also like to watch streaming content over the Internet, downloaded videos, and listen to music all from my TV and home theater system. Unfortunately, I do not have a Boxee box or a Roku box. All I have is a Blu-ray player that supports very few video formats and only offers a few streaming options, such as Netflix.

Asus unveiled three Android based tablet devices running Android 3.0, due to ship this spring. The tablets include a Snapdragon-based, 7.1-inch & Eee Pad MeMo& tablet, and two 10.1-inch keyboard convertible tablets running on dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processors: the Eee Pad Slider, which offers a slide up design, and an Eee Pad Transformer with a fold-up, detachable design.

Sometimes, the naivety in the free and open source software (FOSS) community seems willful. How else to explain the outrage in some circles when another company is caught fulfilling its natural function of maximizing its profits at the expense of FOSS ideals? Too often, FOSS supporters fail to understand corporations -- and, consequently, they are unable to deal effectively with them.

Stephen Walli, now technical director of the Outercurve Foundation, has written a guest post for OStatic, The Rise of Open Source Software Foundations. I guess he thinks Outercurve is one. He explains why Microsoft set up the foundation in the first place, which I have wondered about for quite a while. His article also reminded me that I promised to explain what bothered me so much about the recent OpenSUSE Project meeting on December 15th. We're still working on the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits, but I need to take a break. So here goes. I will use the OpenSUSE Foundation discussion to show you why it's so important, if you are setting up a foundation, to set it up right in the beginning, and why you absolutely must have a lawyer to protect your interests. It's not good if only the corporate entity's guys know what bylaws are and how to set up corporate structures, and the community is relying on them to explain it. Your interests are not identical. Not by a long shot.

The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011. One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments.

Google is allegedly mulling a periodical publication push for Android smartphones and tablets to challenge Apple's iTunes store for its iPad magazine and newspaper apps. The planned digital newsstand for Android, which follows up on Google's recently announced Google eBookstore, will offer more favorable terms to publishers than does Apple, says an industry report.

For the first time in a decade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is no longer the leading Web browser in Europe, ceding the top position to Mozilla’s Firefox, an Irish research firm that tracks Web-surfing activity said Tuesday. While three other research firms also active in the field disputed the finding, StatCounter, a company in Dublin, said Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer as the top European browser in December, with a 38.1 percent share, compared with Explorer’s 37.5 percent.

Thanks for the link Herschel - Scott

Cloud computing is the hot buzz phrase. But as both Shawn Powers and I have pointed out, cloud computing is not a new technology, or even a new implementation of new technology. But that does not mean it is well understood, either by those who are designing or those who are crying out for it as they follow the yellow-brick road (or the latest issue of PC Week). As several Anonymous (and not so anonymous) commentators have said, there is a lot more to cloud computing then just hardware, some good data links and some smart coding.

In a seemingly short period of time, JavaScript has gone from a form-validation tool to a game changer. Having my head buried into SDK development for a number of years, I have taken relatively small notice of JavaScript until this past 18 months. It’s no longer just a scripting language for pulling off Web2.0 tricks but a mainstream language for building full-blown applications.