Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Yesterday's Kubuntu 10.10 release features new KDE software for your phone. Working with KDE's Plasma Mobile team, Kubuntu have created Kubuntu Mobile, suitable for smart phones and available for i386 and ARM platforms. This is a technology preview of the upcoming Plasma Mobile workspace and is not ready for day to day use.

Dalibor Topic was the one to give me this idea, though I’m not sure if he’d remember the tweet. He was, however, the one who pointed me at MarkMail‘s archive of open source list traffic, which I’d seen before, using a by domain constraint, which I hadn’t. The idea is simple: MarkMail maintains a searchable index of the mailing lists for a number of open source projects (these, specifically). As a means of demonstrating the value of its MarkLogic Server, it parses the individual messages into XML and renders them queryable according to specific dimensions.

In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu's kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.

Today is 10/11/10 on the US calendar, mm/dd/yy. Happy binary day! Today is binary day in the US, 10/11/10. European calendars put the day first, 11/10/10, which is still binary. Yesterday was binary day too, 10/10/10. It might seem like cheating a little bit to use a two-digit year, but I'll worry about Y3k later.

What you do with your disks after you're done with them does matter. Find out how to properly prepare them for the next owner. Listed at number ten in Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools a few weeks ago, you had what was perhaps your first glimpse of Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disk wiping utility. Today, you have it in glorious 3D* action that’s sure to convince you to add DBAN to your utility belt as you head to the inner sanctum of your local data center.

eyeOS is a web based desktop operating system. Despite its unusual deployment orientation, in many ways, it's a full desktop operating system, complete with file management and full applications that operate within draggable, resizable windows. As well as an overview of what the eyeOS 1.9 branch has to offer, I'll take you through what I did to install it on a Debian type operating system. Overall, I felt that it was a usable system and perhaps even a glimpse at what most computing is going to be like in the future.

LXer Feature: 11-Oct-2010

Some of the big stories this week included Steve Ballmer saying Android isn't free, Bruce Byfield talks about Ubuntu's real contribution to FOSS, Google makes aggressive counterclaims in the Oracle suit, Glyn Moody asks; Is Microsoft running out of steam? and last but not least Scott Charney, a Microsoft VP says that infected PCs should be banned from the internet. You have to read it to believe it. Enjoy!

It's been quite a while since having anything to report on with the LM_Sensors project, which is the free software project to provide user-space utilities and kernel drivers for various hardware sensors to be supported under Linux. LM_Sensors makes it possible to monitor the CPU/system temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, and other metrics for many systems and motherboards. The last time though we brought up LM_Sensors was in May when it received some better Intel CPU support, but the last major release (LM_Sensors 3.1.0) happened in March of 2009. Today though, LM_Sensors 3.2.0 has been released.

Sunday is the first KWin Bug Day (10th day of the 10th month 2010 - easy to remember!). KWin is a vital part of the KDE Platform and used by all software running in a Plasma Workspace. However, with the latest influx of bug reports it is becoming increasingly difficult for regular contributors like Martin Grässlin and the KWin team to keep up. This is where you can help with squashing those bugs!

After two years of development, version 3 of the popular Gallery online album software, code named "Santa Fe", has now been completed. Compared with its predecessor, the new version is said to offer improved performance and stability and require fewer resources. The developers have also drastically trimmed down the program package: instead of the previous 14 Mbytes, the standard installation is now only about 4 Mbytes in size.

The Mono project, which produces an open source implementation of the .NET runtime, has released version 2.8. The update brings full support for version 4.0 of the C# programming language, substantial improvements to the optional LLVM-based Mono backend, and a new garbage collection implementation that is more efficient.

Takashi Iwai of Novell/SuSE has just published a series of 18 patches for the X.Org Synaptics input driver that primarily provides multi-touch support. There's also some fixes and other changes to this Synaptics driver for X, but the primary feature is the addition of multi-touch support under Linux (and other X.Org-using operating systems) for supported hardware.

Mozilla announced a beta release of the Firefox 4 for Mobile ("Fennec") web browser, initially supporting Android and Maemo Linux (Nokia N900). The Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile aims to increase performance, adding a new "Layers" technology claimed to streamline scrolling, zooming and animations, but an early review says it still needs to get faster.

If you happen to think, as I do, that Google Chrome is emerging as the very best browser available, it's worth noting a point that we've made many times on OStatic: Chrome's evolution will have everything to do with the ongoing development of Google's upcoming Chrome OS. Chrome OS, Google's first operating system aimed squarely at computing desktops, is an ambitious project for Google, and, from the outset, it's been clear that because the Chrome browser interface--and much of its plumbing--form the UI and guts of Chrome OS, the fate of the operating system and its sibling browser are inextricably tied. As glimpses of version 8 of the Chrome browser appear, this seems more true than ever.

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks. We had the good fortune to discuss the LibreOffice effort with Michael; read on for his comments on this new initiative

Canonical's Ubuntu project announced the release candidate for Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat"), with the final version ready on 10/10/10. In addition to a revamped Software Centre, a new sound app, and a Netbook Edition overhauled with Canonical's "Unity" UI stack, Meerkat's final will feature new fonts.

Where do all good ideas go? Into the CPU of course. Back in the the day, we used processors that did not have floating point hardware. You may find it hard to believe, but the first micro-processors did not have on-board floating point units. Floating point was possible, but it was done in software. When the Intel 8086 hit the market there was an option to add a math co-processor called the i8087. If you included this co-processor, floating point calculations got much faster, provided you had software that could use it. Almost all systems had an empty socket for the i8087. It could purchased with the system or added later. Back then, processors came in a 40 pin DIP (Dual In-line Package). The trick was to push the rather large chip into a socket without bending or breaking the pins.

The economy, as everyone is well aware, stinks. Yet the one factor that isn't being discussed enough in the media is how different technologies will likely evolve due to these new economic conditions. One major change: while the days of costly software and expensive licensing is not likely to come to a complete end, I suspect we will see a sharp decrease in this area.

The Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Linux distribution is set to debut on Sunday (fittingly: 10/10/10), and with it will come a renewed vision for the idea of the personal cloud. In contrast to the public cloud, where applications are served, the personal cloud is all about user data, content and synchronization. With Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Linux distribution will also take aim at improving the way users view their desktops and acquire new software.

Oracle has lost a MySQL veteran who helped the plucky database start-up sink permanent roots in the developer and services communities. Kaj Arnö has left Oracle quietly, having submitted his resignation in June two days before Sun Microsystems' legal entity in Germany ceased to operate. Arnö was based in Munich.