A few years ago there was an advertising campaign on television, the punchline of which was, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” Like so many commercials, I remember the joke but not the product — I believe it was margarine, but I do not know or care which brand.
For our last desktop oriented article, I promised we would build one item using the generic Open Source scripted building process. For this project, I chose something only slightly complicated, and likely to be favored by most users: PySolFC, the Python Solitaire Fan Club Edition. It's not just a collection of card games, but more card games than you've ever seen, along with a wide array of Mahjongg based games. It also comes with background music.
In my last column, we learned the basics of RPM, the software management tool of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and numerous other distributions). With a little less hand-holding this time, I am going to outline for you building a bigger SRPM project which has lots of dependencies. As scary as that may sound, it is really fairly simple in practice.
I remember as a boy shopping with my parents for our first computer that didn’t hook up to a TV. In the stores, there was the “open world” of PC’s and then that odd little section for people who insisted on closed, strange — gasp — Macs. Such a view was more a sign of a general misunderstanding of Macs than anything else, but the reputation has persisted for many. A new product launch from Adobe, however, shows just how wrong that reputation is.
You probably know everything on your computer is just zeroes and ones, grouped together in eights and sixteens, and so forth. You might know a bunch of folks type out lines of instructions ("code") for computers which have to be converted into those ones and zeroes, in a process called compiling. You may have heard compiling stuff on Windows requires you to buy expensive software suites to do that sort of stuff. Maybe you know Open Source means the entire process from start to finish is wide open and free, and if you take a notion, you can compile your own software because it's all part of the package. This is why I recommended you install the Developer Workstation package profile. You can take all those instructions people write and make it into zeroes and ones yourself.
Linux is capable of superior font display handling. On my hardware, it's better than any version of Windows if those capabilities are taken advantage of. However, its capabilities are not turned on in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or many other distributions) by default. There are several issues involved, but never fear — they can be solved.
In many ways, 2011 is shaping up to be the year of 4G. Although Sprint launched its 4G network several years ago and Verizon went live with its own next generation network late last year, this is the year that phones and other 4G devices have finally become widely available. With each of the major carriers claiming to have a 4G network, Open for Business investigated to find out who offers the best choice for fast Internet access on the go.
Today opens up WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple has confirmed three major foci for the conference this year: iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud. Word on the street points to major Twitter integration in the core of iOS as a key component to iOS 5, something that sounds interesting, but hardly earth shattering. Let’s go a step further: what if Apple’s Twitter integration work was a step towards an Apple purchase of Twitter?
There is a world of difference between Windows and Linux in file handling. Your immediate need is to understand the business of permissions. One of the fundamental security advantages in Linux is every file is owned by someone, and the owner gets to decide what happens to those files. Ownership, of course, is limited to those who have an identity on the computer in question.
Last year, choosing a cellular network for a smartphone was easy enough: pretty much any phone you might buy was a “3G” capable one and, for the most part, the speed those phones achieved on their respective networks was about the same.. Today, all four of the big cellular companies are proclaiming the arrival of 4G phones. In this series, we will be looking at the latest and greatest phones to hit the market and examine whether they live up to the hype, starting with the first nationally available 4G LTE phone: the HTC Thunderbolt.