Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The "Unity" user interface that debuted in Ubuntu 10.10's Netbook Edition will be standard on the next version of the Ubuntu Desktop Edition, as well. Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will replace the Linux distribution's default GNOME environment in favor of the multitouch-enabled Unity user interface, says Canonical. Making the announcement at a keynote Oct. 25 at Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will swap out the GNOME user interface in favor of the Unity interface that is now available on UNE.

I’ve said before that I love what Ubuntu is doing with design, but the recent announcement to ship Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity as the default desktop is going to make things a bit rocky for the next couple of years. The Unity interface, while beautiful, still has quite a few bugs to work out, which will make it rocky for Ubuntu developers. Adoption of Unity probably means that the GNOME Shell is not going to be used in Ubuntu, which makes relations between the GNOME and Ubuntu developers a little more rocky. Right in the middle of all this are Ubuntu’s users who might be left wondering what their place in all of this is.

Compact Flash and SD storage cards are everywhere; gigabytes for cheap in a tiny form factor. Most come formatted with VFAT. So what is the fastest Linux filesystem for these little devices? Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They're not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they're backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion ... you name it.

The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here's a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

One of the reasons Ubuntu developers gather at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is to figure out what the next version of their Linux distribution should be about. At the Natty UDS currently underway in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has provided a new desktop direction with a move to the Unity shell, instead of the GNOME Shell. Moving beyond just the user interface, Shuttleworth has also shared some insight into where he sees Ubuntu headed in the next five years.

Oracle continues to be at the center of controversy despite their press release stating they will continue to support and release OpenOffice.org as an open source project. Most recently Oracle was vilified by bloggers and the press for asking members of The Document Foundation to resign from OpenOffice.org due to potential conflicts of interest.

Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins. KDevelop 4.1 is more stable and polished than 4.0; we suggest everyone should update to this new version.

MontaVista Software announced the availability of an Android reference platform for the Econa CNS3xxx ARM11-based processors manufactured by its parent company Cavium Networks. The reference platform offers support for on-chip hardware acceleration blocks, and integrates drivers for peripherals including Bluetooth, 802.11n, and touchscreens, says MontaVista.

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company. In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change. In the wake of that memo, the last five years has been a time of great transformation for Microsoft. At this point we’re truly all in with regard to services. I’m incredibly proud of the people and the work that has been done across the company, and of the way that we’ve turned this services transformation into opportunities that will pay off for years to come.

Android has just rocketed past a major milestone: 100,000 applications available in the Android Marketplace. The announcement was made with just a tweet from the Android Dev Twitter account. “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market,” was all the tweet needed to say to spread the news. The search giant recently expanded the Android Marketplace to 20+ countries in an effort to kick its developer ecosystem in high gear.

A mere four months since the 0.9.0 release, which was the first release in quite a while, Compiz developers brought out version 0.9.2. Sam Spilsbury, developer of Compiz, announced this release on the Compiz mailing list as well as his personal blog on Sunday, October 24. This release brought a few new features and lots of stability and performance fixes. Splisbury says it should be ready for general usage.

From KDE's Plasma Netbook to EasyPeasy, every Linux desktop for netbooks that I’ve seen are designed with the same assumptions. Each assumes that, because of the smaller screen, the desktop must be simpler than a workstation's, and will be used mainly for light computing in general and social networking in particular.

Most free software accumulates myths. Most people only know about it second hand (if at all), but few are slowed by the fact that they don't know what they are talking about. As a large desktop application that is also cross-platform, OpenOffice.org (or should I say LibreOffice?) seems to have attracted more myths than most. Here are the top five that I have kept stumbling across in eight years of advocacy..

What goes inside a computer case matters more than the case-- but a nice case is a pleasure to use, and it runs quieter and cooler. Here's a quick look at the excellent Antec 300.

The big news at the Ubuntu Developer Summit? Moving to Unity as the default interface for Ubuntu Desktop with Natty Narwhal (11.04), rather than GNOME Shell. Earlier this year, Canonical representatives had to deny that they were forking GNOME with the work on the Unity interface. (Quick disclaimer, I'm a GNOME Member and help out with GNOME PR.) Unity is a Canonical-sponsored project that was initially delivered for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. GNOME Shell is the interface being developed for GNOME 3.0, which was delayed to spring 2011. Apparently, Canonical were being asked the wrong question. During the opening keynote, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical is committing to making Unity the default desktop experience "for users that have the appropriate software and hardware." Unity requires compositing to work properly, which means users need functioning 3D support to use the interface.

Earlier this month we delivered Ubuntu 10.10 benchmarks from some different hardware comparing the performance of this "Maverick Meerkat" release to that of Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04.1 LTS. The results were interesting, but since then we have had the time to complete additional tests. In this benchmarking roundabout, we decided to see how the performance of every release from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS through the new Ubuntu Linux release performs when tested in a virtualized environment using Linux's KVM virtualization. Here are the virtualized guest results for Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04.1 LTS, and 10.10.

Adobe Systems is targeting mobiles, TVs, and app-stores with new editions of various Flash-centric tools and its Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework. The company has unveiled preview editions of the next Flex Framework, its Flash Builder design and development environment, the Flash Catalyst design tool, and version 2.5 of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Previews are due at Adobe's annual MAX conference in Los Angeles, California, with final code promised for sometime in 2011.

LXer Feature: 24-Oct-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Canonical going on record about open core, Eight reasons to give the E17 a try, Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council, The London Stock Exchange smashes the world record trade speed using Linux and with Ray Ozzie just the latest to walk out of Redmond, is this the beginning of the end for Microsoft? Enjoy!

Assuming you have one, take a look in your Mac's Applications folder. If you're anything like me, you've got an overwhelming number of amazing free or open source apps (Chrome, Adium, Quicksilver, Handbrake), a bunch of great clients to various (sometimes paid) web services (see: Dropbox, Hulu Desktop, Flickr Uploadr, TweetDeck, etc.), and Apple's own suite of pretty damned decent bundled apps (Mail, iCal, iPhoto, etc.). That isn't to imply that the Mac App Store can't spur a new wave of sales of desktop software, but even if the desktop software business is ripe for disruption or revival (and I'm not sure that it is), the space is nothing like mobile apps prior to 2008, where distribution was the primary problem.

Managing storage isn’t easy but Openfiler makes it less painful. You can create NFS and CIFS shares, iSCSI targets, web services, LDAP authentication, FTP services and Rsync services with Openfiler. You can setup quotas to limit those annoying space hogs and limit renegade connections with network security settings. For universal access to network attached storage, there may be no easier answer than Openfiler.