Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Android phones may boast more features than you can shake a stick at, plus a wide range of exciting software, but they're still a serious investment. If you get one and subsequently find that you don't get on with the operating system, it could be a costly mistake. It would therefore be a good idea to experiment with and learn to use Android in a safe environment first, rather than messing up the configuration of an expensive smartphone. The solution is to run Android on your PC.

The nice people behind the popular WordPress blogging and publishing platform have released the 3.1 beta. Should you upgrade? Joe Brockmeier counsels caution.

O'Reilly has opened up a call for participation for its Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2011, to be held on July 25-29 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation's Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced that its Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) will be held April 11-13 in San Francisco.

Packetfence is a very powerful Network Access Control tool. Using Packetfence you can control and block unwanted traffic on your network. Want to block P2P services like BitTorrent, or keep mobile devices like iPhones and Android phones off your wireless network? Packetfence gives you the kind of fine-grained control you're looking for.

Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations. Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations' WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler tools to the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation. According to Google, the code and IP is worth more than $5m.

There’s a Linux distribution for every occasion and the main purpose of Jolicloud is to present a web enabled GUI for netbooks and similar devices. I’m going to take a look at a preview release of the forthcoming 1.1 version. Under the hood, it’s based on the Ubuntu long term service release (10.04), and the front end is handled by a combination of the Chromium web browser and a full screen user interface that eschews overlapping windows.

Where will KDE be in five years? To answer this question, we plan to bring together visionaries, strategists, planners, out-of-the-box-thinkers, realists, dreamers, doers, creators, leaders, coders from the KDE community and everybody else who is interested in discussing the future of KDE and picturing what it will be.

Linux gaming has a bright future ahead with the forthcoming Unigine games, successful indie campaigns, and many other Linux-native game titles being just out on the horizon. Right now though if you are a dedicated PC gamer looking to satisfy your entertainment appetite under Linux, more than likely you find yourself using the Wine program so that you can run many Windows programs under Linux. What is the performance impact though of using this method? In this article, we have a couple benchmarks comparing the performance of Wine, native Linux game binaries, and the native Microsoft Windows 7 Professional performance.

Linux offers multiple remote graphical desktop options for other Linux hosts, but what if you run a mixed Linux-Windows shop? Eric Geier shows how to run remote Windows desktops on Linux.

Ms. Carla Schroder shared a list of her "bestest distros" recently, so I thought I might follow suit. She called hers "not-usual" and looking at her list, I'd say my choices are probably a little more usual. In any case, here are my top five favorite Linux distributions for 2010, in no real order.

The GRUB bootloader is widely used to get Linux (and other) systems running. Its flexibility and configurability make it a logical choice for many types of computers, as does its "just works" factor: your editor cannot be the only one to smile when he realizes how long it has been since the last "I forgot to run LILO and my new kernel won't boot" episode. One of GRUB's nice features is its ability to understand filesystem structures and find bootable kernels on the fly. So the addition of support for another filesystem type would not normally be a noteworthy event. When that filesystem is ZFS, though, people will pay attention.

The Google Android development team has released the source code for version 2.3 of its open source Android mobile operating system, code named "Gingerbread". Originally announced earlier this month, Gingerbread is the eighth platform release since version 1.0 and is the latest major update for Google's mobile OS.

LXer Feature: 19-Dec-2010

In the Roundup this week we have a open source driver for Kinect hitting the streets, SJVN gives his take on who is Google's target audience for Chrome OS, more information on where the Novell patents are going and why Mozilla doesn't back a FOSS flash player. Enjoy!

Most modern computers are powerful enough to run entire operating systems within your main operating systems, which means virtual machines are more commonplace today than ever. Here's a look at the five most popular virtual machine applications. Virtual machines allow you to run one operating system emulated within another operating system. Your primary OS can be Windows 7 64-bit, for example, but with enough memory and processing power, you can run Ubuntu and OS X side-by-side within it. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite virtual machine application, and now we're back to highlight the five most popular picks.

Earlier this week there was the release of a new open-source Linux driver by an engineer at Texas Instruments. The TI DMM-TILER is this new driver and its for the dynamic memory manager block on Texas Instruments hardware. "Its purpose is to organize video/image memory in a 2-dimensional fashion to limit memory bandwidth and facilitate 0 effort rotation and mirroring. The TILER driver facilitates allocating, freeing, as well as mapping 2D blocks (areas) in the TILER container(s). It also facilitates rotating and mirroring the allocated blocks or its rectangular subsections."

The Dropbox team has recently updated its popular Dropbox software to version 1.0 and shedded its beta tag. This newest version comes with selective sync (choosing which folders to sync on each computer), better bandwidth utilization and memory usage. In Windows/Mac, you just have to download the respective software and uninstall it in your system (Be sure to uninstall the older version first). In Ubuntu, if you have installed Dropbox via PPA or deb file, you will find that it your Dropbox does not get updated with the system upgrade.

We're big fans of Amarok music player at OStatic. It's a powerful open source application that lets you play music you have and find music you don't, thanks to it's integration with notable music services like Last.fm, Magnatune, and Librivox.

These days, a lot of Linux users have one distro on their main machines and do everything they can to boot into a usable desktop as fast as possible. Those of us who dual-boot multiple distros — or even OSes — though, still have to stare at the bootloader screen for a few seconds every time we power-cycle. So why not put a new coat a paint on that tired, old text-based menu? Pull up a terminal, and we'll make booting something to look forward to.

Yes, "my bestest distros!" is a overworked topic, but it's fun and Ubuntu is not on this list. So perhaps this will introduce you to something new and interesting.

While the best cards have not yet been dealt, for those hoping to see Valve's "Alien Swarm" game supported on Linux upon the Steam / Source Engine Linux release, you may be in luck. Windowing code within the Alien Swarm SDK is signalling that there may be support for this game coming to Linux.