Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There are no profound revelations here...at least not in this post. It just serves to reinforce something we already know.Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively. When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows. This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs. They don't care...they are just jacked that they are finally entering into the tech age at home. Most times, any concern expressed is with the parent. Of course it would be.

One thing you may not know about SSH is that it has an escape character: ~. To try it out, hit return (the escape character is only picked up at he start of a line, so you must make sure you are) at the console in an active SSH session, then enter ~. Nothing will show on screen; so far so good. Next, hit Ctrl-Z and the session will be suspended -- handy if you want to check something on your local box without logging all the way out of SSH. This trick will also work from within screen, and even from within mutt. To return to your SSH session, type fg and hit return.

A couple of days ago, I talked about Yahoo's warning messages saying my system (Linux) had not been tested with their mail program and that resulted in a very impassioned plea to help a group of Yahoo Groups users to protest the changes that Yahoo has apparently made to the way Yahoo Groups work. Changes to the way mailing lists work are nothing new. I am a member of several Yahoo Groups. But I am also a member of a number of Google Groups and a mess of mailing lists running on Mailman. While reading the complaint, I had two thoughts.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready, ARM9-based i.MX28x SoC and a Coldfire-based MCF5441x MCU, both targeting fanless industrial applications as well as automotive systems. The i.MX28x and MCF5441x each consume less than half a Watt, support extended temperatures, offer clock synchronized Ethernet, and with some models, include a Layer 2 switch for low-cost daisy-chaining of devices.

The Eclipse development team has released version 3.6.1 of the open source development environment. This is a first service release of the IDE, which was released in the summer as part of Helios and consists of around 40 Eclipse projects. The new version is primarily a bug fix version and does not contain any new functionality. The release notes provide detailed information on what's new in Eclipse 3.6.1.

Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paulo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paulo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

If you're looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we've arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order. That said, we're sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

"The worst thing that could come of this is I could fall down the steps of the FTC building, hit my head and kill myself," quipped Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates in 1992, as the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation of his company. But nobody joked on the third day of April, 2000, as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson delivered his decision on what had morphed into the biggest software antitrust case in history: The United States of America vs. Microsoft.

A hearty Happy 27th Birthday to the GNU Project! Here is a link to the original announcement of the GNU Project posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Without the GNU project FOSS as we know it today would not exist. Thank You to everyone who works and has worked on the GNU project over the last 27 years. You have helped make the world a better place. We at LXer take our hats off to you.

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those processes formed the core of a performance evaluation suite for the public telephone network - a rather sizable system for its day with high visibility.

Ten years ago, most of us thought we would be able to live a full and happy life without worrying about whether we were getting maximum throughput across our networks, or whether the point-to-point latency on our machines would preclude us from popular gaming. But things have changed. Televisions, games consoles and Linux machines all vie for IP addresses and bandwidth, usually on the same network, with poor wiring, poor layout and do-it-yourself support. Which is where we come in.

Fifty-two per cent of developers believe that Google's Android is "best positioned to power a large number and variety of connected devices in the future," whereas only 25 per cent favor Apple's iOS, according to a new study. Appcelerator – the outfit whose Titanium dev kit was recently freed from the threat of Jobsian destruction – has now teamed with tech research mainstay IDC on its regular mobile developer studies, and their first joint effort indicates that although developers are currently more interested in Apple's platform, they see lots o' Google in the future.

I don't think it's an accident that suddenly companies like Oracle and Amazon are looking at the success of Red Hat's support model and the advantages a locked OS/hardware scenario can present and are now trying to model their own business strategies in a similar fashion. Of course, such advantages are good for the companies, but not so much the end user. As I already pointed out, trying to un-do the commoditization of Linux does the customer a huge disservice, because you're essentially introducing vendor lock in again. Ultimately, I think the customers should get wise to this and resist such "tuned" versions of Linux.

System Administrators (SAs) need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments*. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.

This file is an edited version of the EU OSS Strategy draft with the input of Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology, an organisation that has strong ties with Microsoft.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) and other open source licenses dictate the things you're allowed to do with code. Simply because the GPL allows parasitic behavior, doesn't mean that Oracle can't be called out when it's not being a good community citizen. Some see the GPL's reciprocal requirements as restrictive - but even the requirements to give back changes and share code only go so far. Open source licenses leave a lot of room for companies to behave poorly while still complying with the license. Oracle could ship GPL'ed code on DVDs in wallets made out of the finest baby seal pelts housed in ivory boxes, and it wouldn't be against the GPL. But that doesn't mean the house that Larry built should get a pass if it chooses to do so.

LXer Feature: 26-Sept-2010

In the Roundup this week we have Mandriva saying "We're not dead" and news of their assets being sold to a Russian firm, Linux From Scratch 6.7 gets released, Dave Newman leaves .net, living through the wild west of FOSS history, the future of KDE, Carla Schroder gets a shiny new laptop and what is the best way to move 60 million files from one Windows server to another? Linux of course. Enjoy!

Besides talking about the X.Org Server development process and the X.Org Server 1.10 plans, Keith Packard also talked about not running the X.Org Server as root (also sometimes referred to as a "root-less X Server") during XDS Toulouse. Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it's something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action.

Ubuntu is one of the most polished Linux distributions available, fusing the work of a global community of contributors who provide a diverse range of skills to make Ubuntu what it is. While we all enjoy the fruits of a new Ubuntu release every six months, many people have asked the team over the years how this wide range of contributors manage to come together to build a new Ubuntu release.

Back with Ubuntu 7.10 an option was added to Ubuntu's alternate CD installer to easily setup an encrypted LVM during the Ubuntu installation process. This would better protect your personal data in the case your laptop or mobile device was ever stolen or misplaced as the Ubuntu Linux installation cannot boot if the encrypted LVM cannot be mounted with the encryption pass-phrase. Of course, encrypting the entire root partition can cause a performance penalty as some of our earlier results have shown while introduced in Ubuntu 9.04 was support for home encryption where only your SWAP and home folder is encrypted and this is done using eCryptfs.