David Adams Archive

Fedora Reboots Updates After Hack

The Red Hat-supported Fedora Project has started issuing updates to its Linux distribution again, after a hiatus of several weeks caused by a hacker break-in. Late yesterday, Fedora emailed its users to let them know that it would soon issue updates for its most recent Fedora 8 and 9 operating systems.

X.Org 7.4 To Be Released Today

It has been one year and four days since X.Org 7.3 was released and a number of months since X.Org 7.4 was supposed to be released, but today X.Org 7.4 is scheduled to finally make it out the door! This release is shipping quite late and with a slimmed down set of features, but in this article we have more details on what this release holds in store for the Linux desktop community and why it may be a short-lived release.

Bringing Desktop Applications to the Browser

jQuery is emerging as the JavaScript library of choice for developers looking to ease their creation of dynamic Rich Internet Applications. As browser-based applications continue to replace desktop applications, the use of these libraries will only continue to grow. See jQuery in action, its easy syntax, how to use jQuery correctly in your own JavaScript code in your browser app, and how to avoid any pitfalls when using it with other libraries.

The Amazing Artwork of Fedora 10

Now that the second deadline for Fedora 10 themes has been reached, the remaining theme proposals have matured and gotten much, much better. At this point, it is clear that no matter what theme is chosen, Fedora 10 will look great. Still, all themes are not equal. These are some of the best, though.

Browser Or Cloud Operating System?

Walter Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, who has been testing Google's Chrome browser for a week next to the latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, concludes "With the emergence of Chrome, consumers have a new and innovative browser choice, and with IE8, the new browser war is sure to be a worthy contest." Many cloud computing enthusiasts are overjoyed with Chrome and call it the first cloud browser or even the basis for a cloud operating system.

Contiki 2.2.1 Released

Version 2.2.1 of the Contiki operating system has just been released. The Contiki operating system is designed for wireless deeply embedded systems that have memory on the order of a few kilobytes and a power consumption on the order of a few milliwatt. Within these severe resource constraints, Contiki provides a low-power multi-hop TCP/IP stack, a command-line interface, a flash-based file system, and loadable modules. Release 2.2.1 improves network performance, reduces power consumption, and fixes a number of bugs from previous releases.

Smartphone Sales To Hit $200 Billion In 2012

Consumers increasingly want more sophisticated handsets, and smartphone sales are expected to grow 52% this year compared to last year, according to Gartner. Overall, 190 million units will be sold this year, accounting for about 15% of the total handset market. In 2012, Gartner predicts, smartphone sales will reach over 700 million units, accounting for 65% of all handset sales. This will represent nearly $200 billion, Gartner said.

Android App Store Winners

The day after Google announced its answer to Apple's iPhone App store, it has announced the winners of a contest wherein developers win $275,000 or $100,000 for developing a top app for Google's upcoming Android mobile phone OS. To get an idea of where the trend in mobile computing is heading, all of the top ten use location-based data via GPS. Check out the winners.

Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum, Creator of MINIX

"I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of the extremely secure Unix-like operating sytem MINIX 3. Andrew is also the author of Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the must-have book on programming and designing operating systems, and the man whose work inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. He has published over 120 works on computers (that's including manuals, second and third editions, and translations), and his works are known all over the world, being translated into a variety of different languages for educational use universally. He is currently a professor of computer science at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands."

IBM, Linux and the Microsoft-Free PC

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."