Free Republic

This is in the "If the subject should ever come up" category... One of the biggest problems which comes up for people trying to get a look at one of the newer Linux distributions is what to do about WIFI. Particularly in the case of laptops and particularly in the case of laptops with Broadcom wifi radios, those radios act as if they'd gone dead. LINUX does not come with drivers for such (the drivers are Windows only and proprietary) ; information exists on websites for setting up wrappers to allow the Windows drivers to think they're running under Windows...

Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system's SVCHOST.EXE processes. Windows XP users affected by this problem typically found that the operating system was using up system resources for 15 minutes to an hour after startup, making it difficult to use the machine during that period. The Microsoft Update team had vowed last month to spend the holiday break tackling the issue, which has plagued some users for years. The fix involved stopping the system from perpetually checking Internet Explorer updates. Microsoft indicated that the fix was rolled out on Tuesday....

Image by opensource.com I can see the brightness of curiosity in my six year old niece Shuchi's eyes when she explores a mobile phone or manipulates the idiot box with its remote control or becomes creatively destructive with any other electronic device. She, like a lot of kids her age, love experimenting.This curiosity reaches its peak when she sits in front of my laptop or her father's laptop. A lot of times, however, I observe that she is lost in complicated applications that are suitable only to adults. An operating system that an adult uses and the system running it...

Regardless of how stalled Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSFT +0.69% business seems to Wall Street analysts, the fact of the matter is that this company powers 90.73 percent of the Desktops and Notebooks around the world. Its nearest competitor at second place is Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) AAPL +0.14% Mac operating system which has only 7.54 percent market share. Microsoft released its latest upgrade to the much discussed Windows 8 operating system, Windows 8.1, in October of 2013. Last month, during December, devices running the Windows 8 and 8.1 crossed over 10 percent market share for the first time. A month earlier, in...

I came into work today and fired up Google Chrome, like on any other day. My Google home page usually displays the eight most frequently visited websites in icon/link form. The icon and link for Free Republic has always occupied the number one or two spot, depending on my frequency of visits. But today Chrome looked different. It wasn't just the new seasonal header image but that some of my frequently visited icon images have been replaced by some infrequently visited icon/links. I clicked on 'Do Not Show on This Page' option for these newbies and it replaced them with...

One of most widely respected repositories of embedded and mobile Linux news and information has returned to the web as an archive hosted here at LinuxGizmos.com. QuinStreet acquired LinuxDevices.com in Feb. 2012 through its purchase of a group of websites from publisher Ziff Davis Enterprise. After the acquisition, LinuxDevices remained frozen in time for about a year before vanishing in May, shortly after I launched LinuxGizmos.com. Following a constructive discussion about possibilities for bringing the LinuxDevices content back online, QuinStreet generously offered to license LinuxGizmos to host the LinuxDevices Archive on our site, as a “holiday present to the Linux...

The Free Software Foundation today has come out for "the first time we've ever been able to encourage people to buy and use a laptop as-is." The Free Software Foundation now backs one laptop model as respecting the customer's freedoms, but are the hardware specs any good? The Free Software Foundation publicly announced today the "Respects Your Freedom" certification for the Gluglug X60 laptops, which come down to refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad X60s... These refurbished laptops come from an Internet retailer in the UK that replaces the proprietary ThinkPad BIOS with Coreboot. The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished...

Is it time for you to dump Windows XP, or maybe to abandon Windows altogether? Windows 8 has improved significantly with the 8.1 upgrade. Nevertheless, for many users, Windows 8’s ...major changes like Live Tiles and the removal of the Start menu—remains an object of scorn. And security has always been a bigger headache for Windows... If you’re still running Windows XP, making the switch to Windows 8.1—or to Windows 7, if you can find it—will probably involve replacing more than just the operating system. Your...hardware may not be able to handle a newer Windows OS; and even if it...

Release a day, or so, ago..

Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...

A new worm is targeting personal computers running the Linux operating system, and may also pose a threat to embedded devices such as home routers and set-top boxes, a security vendor reported this week.   Symantec said its researchers warned the malware, named Linux.Darlloz, spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi that had been patched as early as May 2012.   "The worm is capable of attacking a range of small, Internet-enabled devices in addition to traditional computers. Variants exist for chip architectures usually found in devices such as home routers, set-top boxes and security cameras," researcher Kaoru Hayashi said...

Had it up to here with Windows? Can't take another "blue screen of death"? Another 10-minute wait for your laptop to boot? Another spyware or virus hassle? Heck, maybe you just think Microsoft got it so far wrong with Windows 8.1, it's time for a change.In fact, maybe it's time for Linux.The open-source operating system offers users a Windows-like alternative with a few key advantages: It's free.Most software for Linux: also free.It runs briskly with less horsepower under the hood, making it a good choice for older PCs.No viruses. No spyware. No adware.You can choose from a variety of user-interface...

The Tech Report crew seems to think that SteamOS and Mantle could ruin PC gaming. I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion but I'm sure you guys will have plenty to say on the topic. Now, all of a sudden, next year's gaming landscape looks to be shaping up very differently. Instead of three major platforms based on a common hardware architecture, game developers will face two monolithic platforms and a fragmented one—the PC—that will have two starkly different operating systems and three different APIs—Direct3D, OpenGL, and Mantle.

Give me Steam It looks like Valve’s announcement about its SteamOS has poked Nvidia and AMD to spruce up their Linux support. A day after Valve announced penguin flavoured SteamOS, AMD and Nvidia announced improvements to their driver support for the Linux. One of the things which prevented Linux from taking off in the gaming world, other than a lack of decent games, was a lack of drivers. AMD is active in the Linux community, but its open-source Linux drivers are not as good as its Windows drivers. It has been making efforts. It recently released 165 kernel patches...

International Business Machines Inc. plans to announce Tuesday that it will spent $1 billion over four or five years on Linux, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Digits blog.

New Orleans: If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: The reason why desktop Linux hasn't made it is because of its lack of games. Thanks to Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve and its Steam game platform, that's not true anymore. Linux gaming is ready to rumble and Valve expects it to win. As a keynote speaker at the Linux Foundation's 2013 North American Linuxcon, Newell explained that the old proprietary ways are no longer working for gaming companies. In no small part, that's because the economics of games are changing. Newell said, "Games are becoming nodes...

PengPod, a low-quantity Linux tablet vendor, released the PengPod 1040 tablet today that they claim will "transform the PC and Tablet world by merging both elegantly together to fit any lifestyle." But will it really pan out? The company claims their latest tablet will transform the PC and tablet worlds since it can effectively dual-boot between Android and Linaro/Ubuntu on ARM. This way, you can enjoy Android apps and then reboot and gain access to your normal Ubuntu (desktop-focused) apps -- not too different from Canonical's failed Ubuntu Edge campaign with a smart-phone dual-booting Ubuntu and Android. PengPod also...

There are literally hundreds of Linux desktop distributions. Here's how to find one that's right for you. On a regular basis I use five different Linux different distributions. Over the decades, I've used pretty every much every major Linux distribution out there... and I haven't even touched more than 10% of all available Linux distributions. If I, who've made something of a career of tracking Linux, can't keep up with all the distros how can you? Honestly, you can't. No one can. So how can you find the right Linux for you? This handy, dandy guide will help. But before...

Victory can be defined in countless ways, of course, but here in the Linux blogosphere, Microsoft's recent release of its core Office app for Android is a pretty good example. "Linus won a long time ago," said blogger Mike Stone. "Android is flying high, Linux is dominating on servers and supercomputers. Linux pretty much mops up every market it's in."What a difference a day makes, as the old saying goes -- or, perhaps more aptly here in the Linux community, what a difference an app makes.Which app, you may ask? Why that would be Microsoft Office for Android, of course...

After a steep – 33% – decline in unit shipments in the second calendar quarter of the year, Acer Group now wants to shrink its Microsoft Windows-based offerings and expand product lines that utilize operating systems from Google, such as Android or Chrome. The company seems to be serious about the plan as it wants to grow its “non-Windows” business as quick as possible. "We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible. Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. I also see a new market there for Chromebooks," said Jim Wang, the president...