Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ari Jaaksi, vice president of MeeGo devices and operations at Nokia, told Finnish newspaper Talous Sanomat that he resigned from the company last week. Nokia Communications Manager Tapani Kaskinen confirmed the news, adding that a replacement for Jaaksi has already been found and that his resignation will not affect MeeGo’s development schedule.

Amazon S3 is an useful web service that provides unlimited storage at a very cheap rate. It is a good place for people to backup their files to and also for webmasters to offload their images/scripts to reduce their server load. In Windows and Mac, there are several applications that allow you to access Amazon S3 from the desktop. To name a few – CloudBerry S3 Explorer, Cybderduck and S3Hub. In Linux, there are very few S3 desktop clients available and the only way out (for me) is to use S3Fox extension for Firefox. That is until I found DragonDisk.

As usual, the Free/Open Source software world provides the best security utilities for Windows, and for Linux and Mac as well. Eric Geier rounds up four encryption utilities for both local and network storage. Though disk encryption has been around for many years, many of us don't take advantage of it. The basic concept is that your documents, files, and data are scrambled until you provide a password to unlock them. Therefore if your PC or laptop is stolen, the thief won't be able to read your data, protecting any sensitive information you might be storing.

AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.

It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it. When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they'd place LibreOffice in next spring's update of Ubuntu.

Google responded to Microsoft's patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola over Android smartphones, saying the legal action "threatens innovation." Meanwhile, analysts speculate on the timing and target of the lawsuit, with one analyst calling it payback against Motorola for abandoning Windows Mobile, and another suggesting the lawsuit is covering fire for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 release.

Goldman Sachs is downgrading Microsoft from "buy" to "neutral," lowering its earnings estimates for the current fiscal year by 4 percent, and dropping its price target for the stock from $32 to $28. The reductions come in an extensive, strongly worded report on the Redmond company, released by the firm tonight. "We believe the intrinsic value of shares cannot be unlocked if the status quo remains, and we have increased caution near term on a more elongated PC refresh cycle, combined with the newer threat of notebook cannibalization from tablets, where Windows does not yet have a presence," write Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar and associates in the introduction to the report.

OpenOffice.org Draw is all about objects -- items inserted into a document, each of which can be edited independently. In fact, whether you insert a picture from a file or create an object selected from the primitives (basic shapes) in the Drawing toolbar, everything in Draw is a frame. Even text in Draw is an object, and behaves differently from ordinary text in Writer. For this reason, knowing the basics of objects is essential for all work in Draw. Learning more than the basics, however, can be next to impossible because of several ongoing problems.

On the back of the news that Microsoft (MSFT) is suing Motorola (MOT) for patent infringments related to Android, Steve Ballmer tells the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android...and that other Android manufactures may be forced to do the same.

So you broke down and finally set up a Linux machine on your network. And this time it's not a server! You're running one of the more recent distributions (let's say either Ubuntu 10.04 or Fedora 13) with the GNOME desktop. Here's the thing: you need to allow other users, those using Microsoft Windows-based machines, to have access to specific directories on that Linux box. How do you do it?

LXer Feature: 04-Oct-2010

In this week's LXWR OpenOffice.org gets liberated, a nice review of Linux Mint, The GNU Project celebrates its 27th birthday, Jono Bacon talks about how Ubuntu gets built, a case for Linux in schools, Rad Hat's CEO makes it on Mad Money, Microsoft sues Motorola because of Android and a LXer Feature by our own Hans Kwint on the choices Windows and Linux users both have. Enjoy!

To put the Maverick Meerkat through its paces, I ran it on my reliable old laptop companion a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 This 2008 notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also tried it out on one of my usual desktop operating systems testbed PCs: a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that's now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it's here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.

Love it or hate it, we all know Flash, but Microsoft’s equivalent, Silverlight, is a bit less well known. With Silverlight you can stream video and create animations, in fact you can even use it to create Windows sidebar widgets. However, in what may come as a bit of a shock, Microsoft Silverlight doesn’t play nice with Linux. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but true. To remedy this, the folks at the Mono project have created Moonlight – an open source implementation of Silverlight. If you find yourself wanting to access a Silverlight-only broadcast or game, but not wanting to install a second operating system for the privilege, we’ve got you covered.

Debian's "testing" distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the "Constantly Usable Testing" (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.

In my previous Dropbox article, I highlighted that Dropbox had released apps for the Android, iOS and Blackberry platforms. These enabled Dropbox users to access their data while on the move. However, the apps, especially the Android one, was very much in its infancy and there were a lot of basic functions that it lacked. Dropbox has recently updated its Android app and I thought it was a good time to review the app.

Google has expanded Android Market paid application support for developers to 29 countries, and boosted to 32 the number of countries where consumers can buy apps for their phones. The search giant has also replaced its Nexus One web store with Google Phone Gallery, a site where users may compare three Android handsets at a time.

Microsoft has filed suit against Motorola, alleging that the mobile phone maker's Android-based smartphones violate nine of the Redmond company's patents. Motorola promised to "vigorously defend" against the allegations, citing the strength of its own intellectual property portfolio.

[We all saw this coming from a thousand miles away.. - Scott]

One of the core statements Oliver Diedrich makes in his article The hype is over is that commercial open source software has outlived itself. According to the author, an important reason for this is that most of this software belongs to the "open core" category – products where only the software core is available under an open source licence, while other components which are equally important for professional environments are provided via classic proprietary licences