Jack Wallen thinks the decision of the US Navy to switch their drones to GNU/Linux from that other OS because of a virus will play out like this: “
* DOD begins Linux roll out * US Government begins wide-spread roll out * Civilian security companies world-wide begin roll out * Universities fall in line * Consumers begin clamoring for better security on their OS
“
I think the situation is a bit more complex than that. Clearly weapons/intelligence collection devices require top security but it is far from clear that consumers will ever think that way. They fall for the salesmen’s lies…
Google thinks we're ready to say goodbye to fat client systems and move to cloud-based operating systems, such as its own Chrome OS. Instead of PCs, it wants us to use Chromeboxes and Chromebooks. We're resisting, but I think we'll come around to Google's point of view in a few short years.
Not that the old mainframe/terminal model ever really went away. Some companies still issue thin clients that are basically input devices, with most of the actual computing happening on a distant server. Others use its descendant, client/server systems. More companies might have stuck with those models, but users made their preferences known. They liked the "personal" in "personal computer." They wanted their computers to run just the way they wanted.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds may call Nvidia “the single worst company” the Linux community has ever dealt with. But the chipmaker makes no apologies for its approach to the open source operating system.
Late last week, during an event in his native Finland, Torvalds went so far as to hurl an expletive at the chipmaker and flip it the proverbial bird, and when we contacted the company about this on Monday, it could not be reached to comment. But the company has now responded with a brief statement that seeks to explain why it doesn’t work to include its Linux hardware drivers in the core open source code for the OS.
Basically, the company prefers to offer its own proprietary drivers for running its graphics hardware with Linux, rather than rolling driver code into the Linux kernel. “While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging Nvidia common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure,” reads a canned statement from Nvidia. “While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.”
Torvalds created Linux in 1991 as an open source alternative to Microsoft Windows, which was on its way to dominating the computer market. In the twenty years since, it has became so widely used — particular on servers — that even Microsoft has started to play nicely with Linux.
One of the few areas where Linux lags behind Windows and Mac in the desktop space is the lack of a professional grade film editing software. This situation was expected to be changed with Lightworks, the high-end non-linear film editing software which is expected to be released for Linux.
Few days back we reported that a new online petition has been launched requesting only native Linux games in Humble Bundle.
In Humble Indie Bundle 5, LIMBO was not supported on Linux as a native game and instead used a Wine/CodeWeaver wrapper. Some Linux users were concerned that if this trend continues, more such games can be introduced in future the bundles which would not be good for Linux community.
Things appear to be moving along nicely in the Linux cabal at Valve Software as they work to enable Steam and the Source Engine on the Linux desktop. Here's another one of the new tenured Linux developers that will be starting soon.
Back in May I shared one of the new Valve Linux developers that I previously recruited for the company: Forest Hale, a.k.a. the lead developer of the open-source game engine (DarkPlaces) used by the open-source Nexuiz and Xonotic. See the aforelinked article for more details and on their Linux hiring efforts.
Back when I started work at a Linux company, I had trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that an operating system could have more than one desktop. Finally, I asked what the difference between GNOME and KDE was.
"Oh, that's easy," another employee told me. "KDE is for people who are used to Windows, while GNOME is for those who like innovations."
Today, recommendations are much harder. For one thing, both GNOME and KDE have morphed out of all recognition, making that summary long obsolete. For another, at least half a dozen other desktops are clamoring for users' attention.
LibreOffice may be the most popular open-source Office Suite around, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other good open source office suite that you can use. If you are looking for a simpler, yet equally powerful office suite for your Linux system, Calligra might be a good alternative to LibreOffice (or is it?) Let’s check it out.
GNOME’s Mahjongg is an one player matching game that is based on the ancient Chinese 4-player game Mahjong. The Mahjong Solitare games family has been available on computers since 1981, and is to be found in every platform and device nowadays. So, what is so great about this game?
The aim of the game is to remove all 144 given tiles as quickly as possible, while avoiding a stall. The tiles have a specific formation that is called “The Turtle”. To remove 2 tiles by matching them, they must be “free”, meaning that they have no other tile on their right or left of the same level. See the two images below to understand this better.
I've looked at Zorin OS before, and I liked what I saw then. That was based on Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", and now the new Zorin OS version 6 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin", so I'm checking it out.
As noted earlier, Charles Schulz with various members of Mandriva SA and the Mandriva development team met in Paris today discuss the future of the struggling Linux distribution. Schulz blogged after the meeting to brief interested parties in the progress, stating it had been a "fantastic day."
The challenge of managing massive amounts of data is one that enterprises are facing on a greater scale than ever before. That challenge will continue to evolve, with industry research indicating that by 2015, global Internet traffic will reach the zettabyte threshold, up four times from 2010.(1) And while this traffic explosion is driving an increase in the number of data-driven applications, capturing, retaining and using all of this data can be costly for organizations to scale and manage. Traditional structured and relational data management technologies now present economic and technical hurdles for organizations to extract the true value from their increasing data.
Various dignitaries gathered at Red Hat on Monday morning to celebrate an expansion of the Littleton Road office park.
With the groundbreaking for Red Hat's expansion project this morning, today's Patch Answers comes from a reader asking why the hat in Red Hat is red and not blue or lavender or some other color.
Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle ought to be called Fedora 17 Medium-Rare Steak, as it's just that, a slab of meat swept off the grill too early, still dripping red developers' red blood. Honestly, if your product is not ready, don't release it. Don't do it. You will be doing everyone a favor.
Fedora 17, code-named Beefy Miracle, is the latest release of Fedora, a Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat, Inc. Though the main edition uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment, the Fedora Project offer Spins that use other major desktop environments.
One of the reasons why I've personally long enjoyed using Red Hat Linux and now Fedora is because of ease of installation (mostly Anaconda). It's an experience that is set to get even better in the upcoming Fedora 18 'Spherical Cow' release later this year.
Canonical and giant PC maker Dell Computer have already found new horizons for Ubuntu in China. In a post on Canonical's blog late last year, it was announced that Canonical and Dell would bring PCs loaded with Ubuntu to the Chinese market. The two companies have steadily partnered on that effort, and now they are pusing Ubuntu-based PCs into India. Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, has discussed the companies' plans to bring Ubuntu systems to 850 retail outlets in India.
Wipro on Wednesday said, it has launched a desktop PC for small and medium businesses which has low-cost 6-Core AMD FX 6100 processor and Ubuntu Linux operating system.
Canonical has agreed to offer Ubuntu server operating support to Zentyal customers. The result: Zentyal and its authorized server partners can more easily engage small and midsize (SMB) customers, the company claims. Admittedly, Zentyal isn’t a household name in the United States, but the Canonical-Zentyal agreement sheds more light on Canonical’s international growth strategy for Ubuntu channel partners.
The development of the live session is major Linux achievement, yet it also embodies the shortcomings of the open-source community when it comes to marketing its software, says Dmitry Kaglik.
Klaus Knopper is a great man. Who could argue with that? He brought into the Linux world the very thing that everyone uses and appreciates: the live session.
Live session is a way to run a Linux or BSD distribution from a CD or, more recently, from a DVD or USB drive. It makes you independent of the data on the hard disk — technically, the computer need have no hard drive at all.
The Linux Mint project is one which has gained a good deal of attention in recent years. The distribution, lead by Clement Lefebvre, has continued to increase in popularity and currently tops the DistroWatch page hit charts. The project has continued to do well financially too, bringing in over $13,000 from donations and sponsorships last month. The main edition of Linux Mint is based upon the Ubuntu distribution and the latest version of Mint, version 13, will be a long term support release and receive support for five years. The Main edition is further broken into several sub-editions, each of which is offered as either a 32-bit or 64-bit build. The flavours currently offered are Cinnamon and MATE -- Cinnamon being a desktop environment which is put together using GNOME 3 technology, but featuring a classic style desktop. The MATE desktop can be considered a continuation of the GNOME 2 environment. Further expanding our options users can download a fully loaded build of either preferred desktop, complete with multimedia codecs and Flash. Alternatively users can download a completely free edition of either desktop that avoids the use of proprietary or patented software.
If you know one thing about the Raspberry Pi PC, it's most likely the fact that it's almost comically inexpensive. $35, to be exact. And what do you get for such a modest sum? In terms of in-the-box hardware, not much. Essentially a motherboard with a CPU soldered onto it, the Pi requires that you provide your own operating system, your own local storage media, even your own power supply.
The point of such a product is primarily education. According to their Web site, the designers of the Raspberry Pi wanted to create an affordable computer that encourages students to break away from the technical hand-holding that comes with off-the-shelf PCs. Chances are you might learn something from building a system yourself. Given that it's a Linux-based computer, you might even write your own software for it.
The Galaxy S III will be the first Samsung device to bear the brand of the company's new SAFE program -- Samsung Approved for Enterprise. Out of the box, the SAFE-branded Galaxy S III supports a suite of enterprise-ready features and capabilities as well as 338 IT policies. SAFE may help combat Android fragmentation, at least as far as various IT security protocols are concerned.
None other than the widely respected Carla Schroder soon responded with a rebuttal of her own, followed soon afterward by a different take from Muktware's Swapnil Bhartiya.
Congratulations to the five finalists in The Linux Foundation's 2012 "Inspired by Linux" T-shirt Design Contest! This year we received just shy of 90 contest entries and competition for the finalists was tough. A special thanks to the entrants who submitted their artwork for consideration. Your creativity and enthusiasm for Linux are an inspiration to us all.
The latest stable GIMP 2.8 is great in many ways such as the sane integration of docks, speed and some nice addons. It installs like a charm on Windows 7 and the aging XP. Getting it to work on the latest *buntu and Fedora is also easy, although both these flavors suck as far as stability and usability is concerned. But if you expect it to play nicely on your reliable CentOS 6.2 or Debian 6.0.5, forget it. Cos you may fuck your entire system just to get it installed.
That’s an average decline of 0.57% per month.
Ecuador has offered Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, residency in the country.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas said his country's government wanted to invite Mr Assange to Ecuador to give him the opportunity to speak publicly.
He said Ecuador was concerned about some of the alleged American activities revealed by Wikileaks.
Earlier this year Sweden refused an application from Mr Assange, who is Australian, for residency there.
According to the EPA, the waste from coal burning plants contains concentrations of arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, and other metals that has been known to seep into ground water supplies. Thursday marks the two year anniversary of when the EPA first proposed minimum safeguards for coal ash disposal.
After an hour and a half visit to Janesville, the “Nuns on the Bus” bus cruised on to Milwaukee for a visit to St. Benedict the Moor’s meal program and to a picket line by mostly immigrant workers at Palermo’s frozen pizza plant. During the next two weeks, the sisters will visit seven more states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland before a scheduled finish in Washington D.C. on July 2.
Back on Janesville’s Main Street Tuesday afternoon, the crowd had evaporated, leaving a single peace sign between a Manpower office and a shuttered “Rock County Mortgage.” There were no manufacturing jobs at Manpower (GM’s last auto plant closed in 2009), just a poster seeking four telemarketers at $8.50 an hour. With so many Janesville families without work and grateful for what little government assistance there is in hard times, it is no surprise that the nuns received a warm welcome.
When the history of modern Brazil comes to be written, a special place will be reserved for the soybean, the powerful farmers that grow it -- and the deforestation it is driving. And at the center of that tale will be Monsanto, with its patented "Roundup Ready" crop, so called because it has been genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup.
This Thursday, June 21st, the "International Trade" (INTA) committee of the EU Parliament will adopt its draft report on ACTA. Under pressure from the EU Commission and industry lobbyists1, members of the committee could decide, potentially in a secret vote, to call for the adoption of ACTA or to postpone the final vote for years, which would help the pro-ACTA to save face. Citizens participation is absolutely crucial to ensure that the Parliament will stick to the general interest and face its political responsibility by voting a clear rejection of ACTA.
ACTA threatens fundamental freedoms online, Net neutrality, innovation, access to free/libre technologies and to essential medicines. The European Parliament has all the evidence needed to reject it, and if it were to postpone the final vote on the agreement it would be seen as escaping its political responsibility.
Today, the final and ultimately responsible committee in the European Parliament gave its recommendation on ACTA. Its opinion was clear: Reject ACTA. This brings five recommendations to the European Parliament to reject and kill ACTA once and for all.
The European Parliament's main committee in charge of ACTA just adopted its voting recommendation to the rest of the Members. Despite intense pressure, the Parliament is now officially advised to reject ACTA during the upcoming plenary vote, scheduled for July 4th1. We now have very high chances of finally defeating ACTA and opening the way for a positive reform of copyright! Let's celebrate, while aiming for the final vote, and build a post-ACTA world!