Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In previous posts, I have highlighted some of the outstanding new native Linux games that are coming out soon or have been out but may not be well known. For many Linux gamers, however, the pool of native Linux games is still too small. As most already know, it is possible to play some Windows games in Linux using Wine. Additionally, there are two prominent commercial spin-offs of Wine that are both designed specifically for gaming: Cedega and CrossOver Games. At one time, there was little difference between the three, other than the graphical configuration interfaces. But over time, each has developed its own feature set and, in some cases, support for Windows functionality that the others do not possess.

Acer announced a dual-boot Windows 7/Android netbook, featuring Intel's dual-core Atom D550 or single-core Atom N450 processors. The Acer Aspire One Happy offers a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, up to 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive (HDD), plus 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB ports, and eight hours of battery life, says the company.

Despite respectable download numbers from AppWorld and other markets, BlackBerry applications have been a second class citizen for some time. Hiding beyond the ubiquitous email, calendar, and contacts, the application environment sits — often unknown and unseen.

In the Free Software ecosystem, nearly everybody has heard about KDE. People associate us with a great desktop environment and some interesting applications. On other desktops there may be installations of KDE software, but those people may not know a single KDE application. This is why Torsten Rahn and Bastian Holst went to INTERGEO this year to present Marble.

Last month we carried out our fourth annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we sought feedback from the Linux community about the most common graphics drivers and hardware in use, what display/GPU-related features desktop users are most interested in, and collect other metrics to aide developers. Here are the results from this year's survey.

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0), BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions as feasible under current laws. I believe that better communities for software development are enabled by these liberal licensing situations. Rather than creating a single power with significantly more rights, as seen in the “open core” movement, liberal open source development encourages real, dedicated and sustainable contributions, made by companies with business models other than selling support and ‘enterprise features’.

How will GNOME 3 compare to KDE 4? The picture is still emerging, since GNOME 3's official release is still months away. However, with GNOME Shell available as a preview in the latest GNOME releases, a general outline is starting to be visible. Of course, some elements cannot be compared yet. It would be unfair, for instance, to compare panels in any detail, because in the previews GNOME Shell's panel has neither applets nor configurations. Nor, for that matter, can much be said yet about the upcoming KDE 4.6, which should be the latest version when GNOME 3.0 is released.

There is now a legal publication with the goal of explaining FOSS issues to lawyers. It's the first peer-reviewed law review entirely devoted just to the legal issues of FOSS. It's called The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, or IFOSSLR, and it's "a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues," as they describe it. If this is an area of law that interests you, X marks the spot.

Here's some fun news: "Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014." I moved to a smart phone within the last year. In the past I hadn't really needed one. When I went somewhere I typically had my laptop with me, so I usually hid behind that. However, as my role became more and more driven by general email and Internet access rather than specific proprietary programs I realized that I wanted to have more access and functionality without lugging the computer around all the time. If you know me at all, you know I'm a Linux nut, so I naturally gravitated toward an Android phone. I love it. The openness suits me and I get to use my curiosity and ability to tinker to my advantage.

The survey, entitled “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” and published in partnership with Yeoman Technologies, asked nearly 2,000 selected users if they thought that the use of Linux within their organisations would increase within the next five years. Almost 80% of respondents said they felt it would. According to the survey, in the last two years, 66% of new Linux deployments have been green-field deployments, while 36.6% have been migrations from Microsoft Windows. Over 60% of respondents said that they would use Linux for more mission critical workloads within the next twelve months.

Policy group New America has written a scathing blog entry that criticizes the HTC G2 for including a "hardware rootkit" that prevents users from installing custom firmware on the device. The report appears, however, to be based on a misunderstanding of technical issues raised in an XDA discussion thread. The G2 isn't unique in blocking third-party firmware, and it doesn't come with anything that could correctly be described as a rootkit.

Linux server deployments are expected to take slightly more business from Microsoft than Unix in the next year, according to latest data. A Linux Foundation poll of major public and private sector organizations using Linux has found that 76.4 per cent plan to add more Linux servers during the next year, with just 41.2 per cent planning to add more Windows servers to their IT infrastructure's mix.

I finally became fed up with this one little idiosyncrasy that my KDE-based home entertainment center kept exhibiting -- it would not let me specify VLC as the action handler when I inserted a DVD in the drive. Instead, it was most insistent that I use the KDE default DragonPlayer, which had somehow gotten confused about where the drive was and could no longer start the DVD. That was all it took for me decide to to take the time to rebuild the home entertainment system last weekend. You may recall from a previous article, I discovered Linux Mint 9 not too long ago, and really liked it.

The Linux Foundation says Linux is poised for significant growth in the enterprise, some of it at the expense of Windows servers. 76.4% of companies surveyed are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months. 41.2% are increasing their Windows servers, while 43.6% will decrease or stay the same. Over the next five years 79.4% of businesses surveyed plan to add more Linux servers compared to other operating systems, while only 21.3% plan to add more Windows servers.

Oracle and IBM have unveiled a new collaboration which will allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) reference implementation. According to a joint statement issued by Oracle, the two partners will make the OpenJDK community the primary location to facilitate open source Java SE (Standard Edition) development. The new collaboration will also center on the Java language, JDK and Java Runtime Environment.

A trojan recently analysed by Webroot is said to rely on retrieving web page passwords from a browser's password storage, rather than logging a user's keyboard inputs. To make sure it will find all the interesting passwords in Firefox, the malware, called PWS-Nslog, makes some changes to jog the browser's memory. A few manipulations in a JavaScript file prompt Firefox to store log-in information automatically and without requesting the user's consent.

I found a computing treasure in a local Goodwill store three weeks ago: a book about System/360 assembly language. (Assembly language is the human-readable form of the concrete instructions carried out by the computer.) In earlier years, this would have been a wonderful surprise, but a previous find precludes that from happening... Last year, I found a special treat in the discount bin of a local grocery store: a movie, in Mongolian. In the rural Midwest USA, that is difficult to surpass that for surprise finds.

There are all kinds of fancy backup applications, from free to complicated and expensive. But it's still hard to beat the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of the old standbys.

Thank you Mr Chairman. We should like to thank you for the opportunity to take the floor during this very important meeting. The agenda includes several items of great interest to the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the Free Software or open source community at large. Free Software relies on licenses to give users the freedom to use, study, share and improve a program. These licences in turn rely on copyright. Free Software is, however, fundamentally incompatible with patents on software.

Oracle is no longer totally isolated on Java — IBM now stands with the giant, in a move that potentially stymies Google's Android. IBM said Monday that it's putting its efforts into the OpenJDK project, run by Oracle, and switching away from the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) Project Harmony on Java Standard Edition (Java SE).