So you bought the EasyBloom to take precise soil moisture readings. You have a spreadsheet plotting plant growth over time. But you’re still schelpping out to water the lawn like all your Luddite neighbors. Where’s your sense of pride? You’re a geek! You should be using technology to make your life better. Here, we’ll help get you started with this Instructable on using Linux to water your lawn! → Read More
Remember that 2,300 unit PS3 order that the Air Force put together to build a supercomputing cluster? Well, file this one under “unintended consequences” because when Sony killed the “other OS” option on the PS3 they definitely made things difficult. → Read More
Everyone and their brother can make an Android device, which means that Android is outselling the iPhone. But as some of the comments on John’s post point out, device proliferation leads to consumer angst in trying to find the right device to purchase. The same phenomenon has been happening in the Linux market for ages, with consumers trying to figure out whether they need or want Fedora or Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. Fragmentation is a problem, when you look at things in this context; but is the Linux market really that fragmented? Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation doesn’t think so. → Read More
LinuxCon, the big Linux conference put on by the Linux Foundation, is heading to Sao Paulo, Brazil this year. This makes the third location for regional LinuxCon events after Boston, Mass in the U.S.A. an Tokyo, Japan in Asia. Why Brazil? “Brazil leads many other countries in its adoption of Linux and is a growing base of development. The time is right to take the industry’s premier Linux conference to Brazil,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. Full press release inside. → Read More
The Linux Foundation has announced the first round of keynote speakers for LinuxCon, their annual Linux conference. The line up this year includes some interesting folks, including Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO for Virgin America. In addition to a “Linux Kernel Roundtable” with notable kernel maintainers there will also be a number of mini-summits with focused discussion on specific aspects of Linux development: file systems, KVM, Xen, power management, and more. → Read More
I get the feeling that there’s a whole team of people at Valve whose job is to just do “like, what if” stuff, or “you know, while we’re at it” stuff. Like, “what if” we just made an awesome comic book to send out gratis to users? Or “what if” we made a Mac version just because, and “while we’re at it” just keep on working and bring that sucker over to Linux as well? → Read More
Looks like Sony now finds itself on the business end of a class-action lawsuit. You’ll recall that a recent PS3 firmware update removed the “Other OS” option from the console, preventing owners from installing Linux (which was one of the selling points when the PS3 first came out in 2006). The removal upset one California gentleman, who filed suit with the note “Sony’s decision to force users to disable the Other OS function was based on its own interest and was made at the expense of its customers.” → Read More
Today marks the start of the fourth annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which is “an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today.” All the names you’d normally expect at a Linux event are going to be there — IBM, Google, Hewlett Packard — along with companies jumping on the MeeGo bandwagon — Nokia, Intel, and more. The agenda lists some interesting topics, but the Summit itself raised a number of questions for me. I exchanged emails with Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, about the Summit, and the state of Linux in general. → Read More
Y’all know that Sony killed Linux support on the PS3 with the latest firmware update (and had previously killed it with the introduction of the PS3 Slim), yes? Yes. A European PS3 owner has received a £84.00 (around $130) rebate from Amazon for removing support for the free and open source operating system. Win~! → Read More
It’s no secret that I’m a big Free Software fan. It’s no secret that IBM is a giant company with more money than I can possibly imagine. So I was pretty happy in 2005 when IBM, in an obvious PR stunt to get buddy-buddy with the open source community, made its Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS, ostensibly saying that it would permit open source projects to use any of the items covered by those patents without risk of penalty or lawsuit. Yay! Finally, a BigCo getting it and doing the right thing! But five years is a long time, people come and go, and promises can be forgotten. IBM has lately threatened to sue someone for infringement of a lot of IBM patents, including at least two that were included in the Non-Assertion statement. → Read More
It was only last week, on the 1st, when Sony announced it’d be removing the Install Other OS option from the PS3 — an option already missing on the PS3 Slim. Predictably, there was outrage, and now, a hack.
Renowned hackster Geohot has shown that by a simple restore trick, you can get 3.21 to let you install another OS — but if you’ve already updated and lost the ability, there’s nothing you can do at the moment. → Read More
With all the hype about the iPad, and indeed, the hype about smaller and smaller mobile computing devices, I thought I would remind you all that there was at one point a Linux-powered wristwatch! This marvelous curiosity was discussed back in 2001, when it ran kernel version 2.2.1, had 8 megabytes of flash memory, and had IrDA (remember that?!). It even had a touchscreen display, and had a PIM suite that “consists of an organizer, WML browser, to-do list and a calculator” all in 51K of code! → Read More
I almost bought a Sony PS3 specifically so that I could use Linux on it. Now, I’m glad I didn’t, because Sony has announced that in an upcoming firmware release they’re going to remove support for alternate operating systems. The official explanation for the removal of this feature is “due to security concerns”, but no specific security concerns have actually been mentioned yet. → Read More
Masen Marshall, pictured above, is not your ordinary Linux user. No, he’s the Ultimate Linux Guru, a title bestowed upon him by his significant contributions to the Linux.com user community. He’s seen here holding a laptop signed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. All of the stickers and bling you’ve added to your laptop are now decidedly second rate. → Read More
The Linux.com store is open for business! Nice looking shirts, hats, and onesies are available for Linux users of all ages. Also available are mugs for the all-important coffee, and stickers. All proceeds benefit the Linux Foundation’s various programs. → Read More
Of all the wonderful uses for Linux, gaming hasn’t traditionally been one of its stronger suits. But as we all know, old console emulators provide eons of entertainment and said emulators run across a variety of operating systems. And so there’s Puppy Arcade, a derivation of the small-footprint, runs-on-just-about-any-hardware Puppy Linux. → Read More
I knew you had to pay a little extra to get Windows, but $100,000 to get Linux on your Mini 10n netbook? Good lord! What are the manuals written on? The skin of unicorns?
Click to embiggen. → Read More
Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share.
Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share. → Read More
Last summer we wrote about Ksplice, a hot new technology that allows Linux kernel updates to be applied in real time, without requiring a reboot. Whether you want to use this for your personal laptop, or a lab room full of PCs, or a data center hosting environment, Ksplice Uptrack, the company’s hosted service, is now available to the general public. They’re offering a thirty day free trial, plus a completely free (as in beer) version for Ubuntu users. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
