2010 was a busy year for the Linux Foundation, and their recently posted 2011 schedule suggests that this year will be just as interesting. In addition to LinuxCon and the Collaboration Summit in the US, there’s also LinuxCon Brazil, LinuxCon Japan, and for the first time ever LinuxCon Europe. The latter is running concurrently with the Linux Kernel Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. → Read More
OK, now that the big iPhone story is out of the way we can move onto some other stuff. (I’m sure there will be enough iPhone stories today and tomorrow to fill a swimming pool.) Specifically, let’s move onto some fun stuff, some fun Linux stuff. InfoWorld has put together a Linux IQ test to see just how learned you are vis-à-vis the free-and-open-source operating system that makes the world go… → Read More
Darn shame that none of us thought to attend the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. Why cover fun stuff, right? Thankfully PSGroove made it out there, and came away with video of a video game console security discussion. The Wii has been “broken” (hackable, in other words) pretty much since Day One; the Xbox 360 has been hackable for a few years now (JTAGing is the way to go these days)… → Read More
Tired of dealing with the legal hassles with Microsoft, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered that all government agencies will be running on open-source software by 2015. Russia has a rocky relationship at times with Microsoft, and started this whole process by first proclaiming that schools will run only open-source software, and now proclaiming that the government would follow suit. → Read More
The Linux Foundation recently conducted a survey to identify just how popular Linux is in the enterprise computing world. Traditional studies of OS popularity conducted by traditional analyst firms usually only count number of units sold. But with a free operating system you can’t reliably count units sold or installed. Instead, you need to ask a different set of questions, like “Are… → Read More
Heading off to college? Here’s my suggestion: buy a used laptop from Craigslist and install Ubuntu onto it. Seriously. You don’t need a new computer for college. If you’re pursuing a liberal arts degree, you really don’t need a brand new computer just to write all the papers you’ll write. If you’re pursuing an engineering degree, the chances are high that your department’s computer labs are better… → Read More
Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without a reboot, is now free for users of the Fedora distribution. Using Ksplice is like “replacing your car’s engine while speeding down the highway”, and it can potentially save your Linux systems from a lot of downtime. Since Fedora users often live on the bleeding edge of Linux development, Ksplice makes it even easier to do so, and… → Read More
The eighth annual Ohio LinuxFest is September 10-12 in lovely Columbus, Ohio. As always, this is a free event chock full of interesting hands-on Linux and free software solutions. Register at the Supporter level for $65 and you’ll get lunch, one of the gorgeous t-shirts pictured here, and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting an event like this. → Read More
Open source software has many benefits, but one of the greatest is the ability to not reinvent the wheel. By sharing solutions, the open source community is able to develop great software quickly and effectively. Although open source software usually stands alone, on ideological grounds, you can easily find examples of open source software in a great number of successful proprietary applications… → Read More
GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories – that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files – while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code… → Read More
The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this… → Read More
Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on… → Read More
Joilcloud, is a Linux-based operating system for small devices (e.g. netbooks and touchscreens). The new version 1.0 now supports a long list of touchscreen devices right out of the box. Check out the video of it in action showing off the new HTML 5 interface. Looks pretty cool. → Read More
Pixel Qi. If you haven’t heard of them, you will. Everyone will want one of their screens. They offer both a full color LCD screen and an E-Ink screen in one. From what I have seen so far, the technology appears to be very promising. Other companies seem to think so as well, and are lining up to use Pixel Qi screens in their devices → Read More
I’m not sure Google has ever come out and said that they hope the future of computing doesn’t involve Windows. But we all know they’re thinking it. However, while they may think that way, it’s been hard to take that too seriously since most of the computers they do their work on likely run Windows. In the near future though, that may not be the case.
Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe. What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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