Showing headlines posted by caitlyn

There should be no expectation that a 'yum' upgrade to SL 6.3 will work. A new install is the recommended method to move from 'sl6rolling'(this alpha release) and the released 'SL 6.3'.

Sputnik started, Barton George, Dell's project Sputnik lead and director of web vertical marketing, told me at OSCon as a six-month exploratory pilot to create an Ubuntu Linux-based developer laptop, It's not just an idea now. Dell is taking Project Sputnik from pilot to product this fall. This official developer laptop is based on the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) This PC will offer developers a complete client-to-cloud solution. The Sputnik will allow developers to create “microclouds” on their laptops, simulating a proper, at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.

Developer Liam McLoughlin is still working on porting the Chromium OS operating system to run on the Raspberry Pi $35 mini-computer. But today he’s released the next best thing – a beta version of the Chromium web browser designed to run on the Raspbian Linux operating system. Raspbian is a version of Debian Linux optimized to run up to 40 percent faster on the Raspberry Pi’s hardware, and Chromium is the open source version of Google’s Chrome web browser.

ClockworkMod Recovery is a tool that lets users of rooted Android devices create a complete backup of their device, restore from previous backups, wipe all data, or install new operating systems or other software updates. It can run on dozens of phones and tablets, and now you can also install ClockworkMod Recovery on an MK802 Android 4.0 Mini PC.

Dell plans to start selling a limited number of laptops running Ubuntu Linux this fall. The first will be a Dell XPS 13 ultrabook aimed at developers and running Ubuntu 12.04. For the past few months the company has been running an exploratory project based on the idea. It’s called Project Sputnik, and Dell already offers a disk image that you can download and install on an XPS 13 laptop. Dell also recently announced a beta program that would allow developers to sign up for an opportunity to purchase discounted XPS 13 models with Ubuntu pre-loaded.

ARM-based processors may dominate the Android space right now. But Google’s mobile operating system can also run on phones, tablets, and other devices with x86 or MIPS-based processors. We’ve seen a number of low-cost MIPs-based products running Android 4.0 including the iPPea $50 PC-on-a-stick and $100 Ainol Novo 7 tablet.

The MK802 is a tiny computer that looks like a USB flash drive, and which ships with Google Android 4.0 and sells for around $80 or less. It’s designed to be something you can plug into a TV to surf the web, watch video, and play games on the big screen.

But over the past few weeks, we’ve also seen a number of Linux-based operating systems ported to the MK802. That’s because it’s very easy to load an operating system onto a microSD card and boot from that card. Pop it out and the MK802 will run Android again.

But with F17 comes gnome3. And I knew I'd have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst cr@p could be fixed with extensions, and I'd used 3.4 on my laptop enough to know it should be all somewhat usable. But christ, it's a "one step forward, one step back" kind of thing. Change the font sizes? No can do - until you install the tweak tool, because the standard settings panel still doesn't do something as fundamental as that. Ok, I knew it used to be broken, I knew the work-around, but it's still broken?

I got burned by Ubuntu again this morning - as if I needed to be reminded why I dislike it so much. I have a number of computers around here, and they all have a moderately complicated multi-boot configuration. Each of them has multiple Linux distributions installed, and most of them have some sort of Windows as well. I always use the openSuSE Legacy GRUB bootloader. The overall result is that it does what I want, and it's reliable. At least, it was reliable until I installed some Ubuntu updates this morning.

When Fedora 17 released GNOME 3.4, I found I could deal with it. I still didn’t like it much, and I prefer both Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity and Linux Mint 13’s Cinnamon interfaces, but if I had to, I could live with the GNOME 3.4 desktop. But for Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, GNOME 3.4 is ”a total UX (user experience design) failure.”

Thousands of UK websites are now in breach of a law that dictates what they can log about visitors.

European laws that define what details sites can record in text files called cookies came into force on 26 May.

Cookies are widely used to customise what repeat visitors see on a site and by advertisers to track users online.

Companies can and do put out long wish lists of skills and experience to reduce the number of applicants to those who most closely match the position and related positions within their I.T. departments. That's all well and good. However, sometimes those desired or required skills effectively reduce the pool of qualified people to zero.

Since Microsoft wants to force a radical change on you, why not really make a change and move to Linux or a Mac? The Linux desktop is great for both power users and for users who just need a computer for the basics. Specifically, I think XP users will find Linux Mint with the Cinnamon interface to be inviting. And, Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity interface is much easier to use than Metro.

ROSA Labs has forked the Mandriva distribution, creating a distribution that, while still resembling Mandriva 2011 at first glance, actually has gone its own way in many important respects. The first post-Mandriva release, ROSA 2012 Marathon, was officially unveiled last Monday. This is also the first ROSA LTS (long term support) release, offering security and software updates for five years.

ROSA company is pleased to inform that it has completed the work on ROSA Marathon 2012 operating system - a Linux distribution with extended 5-year technical support with a focus on enterprise customers. We have optimized the package base of the officially supported main repository of the distribution by selecting the most stable and important components necessary for Enterprise, though still providing desktop users with possibility to install large variety of applications from our extended repositories.

NOTE: Release notes for ROSA Marathon 2012 are at http://wiki.rosalab.ru/en/index.php/Release_notes_ROSA_Marat...

If you’ve ever used Linux, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of hardware works straight out of the box, no questions asked. No motherboard drivers need to be installed, no ethernet drivers, in most cases no wireless drivers, and not even graphics drivers (depending on your stance on open source vs. proprietary). In this sense, Linux definitely offers a plug-and-play experience above Windows, and (as far as I know) it challenges Mac OS X‘s capabilities as well.

Salix MATE 13.37 is now officially released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, this release introduces the MATE Desktop Environment. For anyone not familiar with MATE, it's a GNOME2 fork, that continues development of the GNOME 2.x branch. MATE uses the traditional desktop metaphor that was abandoned for newer GNOME 3.x releases. All of the GNOME parts that have been forked have been renamed, so that they don't conflict with GNOME 3.x applications, but otherwise the functionality and behavior is exactly the same as it was in GNOME 2.32.x.

With a new major Windows release just around the corner we are being treated to an onslaught of articles proclaiming the failings of Linux on the desktop. You'd think that such articles wouldn't be necessary if the Linux desktop had indeed failed. One recurring theme is the idea that Linux has terrible hardware support. The premise is always that Linux is impossibly difficult to install and that lots of hardware just doesn't work with Linux.

I had an old Mac Mini that simply absolutely would not install any of the newer Linux distributions, because they now support that abomination called EFI - and while EFI tries to be a "better BIOS", it's actually worse in just about all respects.

The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET.

The Bureau has been quietly meeting with representatives of these companies, as well as Microsoft (which owns Hotmail and Skype), Facebook and others to argue for a legislative proposal, drafted by the FBI, that would require social-networking sites and VoIP, instant messaging and e-mail providers to alter their code to make their products wiretap-friendly.