Articles about Open Source

As far as web browsers go, Opera never seems to get enough love. But it has a dedicated following of avid users who seem suddenly to appear whenever you say something bad about the software. Now that following has grown, and Opera plans to reward them with a new engine.

Today CEO Lars Boilesen proclaims a milestone: "On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen". While that is certainly a big step for the company, and worthy of a pat on the back, Opera browser still remains far behind its competitors.

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The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 4.0 FINAL. The open-source, cross-platform productitivty suite, which is based on OpenOffice, has evolved to the point where the developers are happy to assign a major new version number.

Version 4.0 includes a number of relatively minor new features, but the big changes will come under the hood, marking the first radical development in the program’s API since the app it was built on -- OpenOffice -- was first released. Other changes include support for Firefox Personas, integration with CMS and online storage providers, plus support for importing both Microsoft Publisher and the latest VISIO documents.

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Microsoft Open Technologies unveiled the VM Depot public preview early last month, and the software giant has just announced that its community-driven open-source virtual machine image catalog is now integrated into the company's cloud platform, Windows Azure.

The new feature is available through the Windows Azure management portal and is designed to ease the handling of virtual machine images from VM Depot. The cloud platform's users can take advantage of open-source stacks, "based on supported Linux distributions, made available by members of the community and directly provision the files as personal images straight from the Windows Azure portal".

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Little more than four months ago, Team Win Recovery Project introduced the last major iteration of the popular Android custom recovery TWRP. Now there is a new version available that packs features as well as bug fixes.

After switching from libtar instead of busybox's implementation, TWRP 2.4 can now create TAR files larger than 2GB. The popular custom recovery also introduces support for memory cards formatted as exFAT as well as support for decrypting internal and external storage on Samsung devices sporting a TouchWiz encryption.

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Firefox OS is anything but a secret with Mozilla releasing important details down the road since its unveiling and even an eye-opening operating system simulator, the latter introduced little more than two months ago. Frankly, the only important missing piece of the puzzle is the hardware on which Firefox OS is designed to run.

Mozilla decided to shed some light on the matter and through Geeksphone, that works in conjunction with Telefonica, revealed two developer preview phones, dubbed Keon and Peak. Spoiler alert: If you're hoping to see two LG Optimus G Pro devices in disguise you're in for a big surprise.

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Keeping up with recent CyanogenMod tradition, the team behind the popular green droid custom distribution unveiled the first monthly release based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The build is designed to offer users a stable experience, more suitable for daily use compared to the usual nightly builds.

CyanogenMod 10.1 M1 is currently available only for a limited number of devices, including the Google Nexus lineup (Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 including the 3G variant, Nexus 4 and Nexus 10), the US variants of the Samsung Galaxy S III, the Samsung Galaxy S (codename "galaxysmtd" and "galaxysbmtd"), the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (versions P3100 and P3110), the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (versions P5100 and P5110) as well as the Hardkernel ODROID U2 open development platform.

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Firefox OS is coming this year and we have already seen some early previews. In order to hit the ground running these days any operating system, be it desktop or mobile, needs a healthy app ecosystem. To that end, Mozilla today announced "App Days", a series of events around the world that are designed to get developers excited and moving for this upcoming release.

In the announcement, Mozilla's Mark Coggins explains that at "each App Day event, you’ll have the opportunity to learn, hack and celebrate Firefox OS, Mozilla’s open source operating system for the mobile web. Technologists and developers from Mozilla will present tools and technology built to extend and support the Web platform, including mobile Web APIs to access device hardware features such as the accelerometer".

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"How hard can it be?" is a question that I have hopelessly asked myself too many times down the road. The answer is almost never "Give me five minutes and I'm done" because for me there's no such thing as an easy task to undertake. Case in point is my latest hobby, if it can be named as such, building Android 4.2 Jelly Bean from the Android Open Source Project. Do you still remember the question?

The idea is to get a working Android 4.2 Jelly Bean-based build with only minor alterations, that I apparently cannot find anywhere else combined in an already available custom distribution. My requirements are fairly simple at first glance, as I only want a center clock, blacked-out Settings menu, to remove a few tiles and add new ones and, maybe, add some Linaro optimizations to the build. Straightforward, right?

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If there's one word that best describes my personal tech use for 2012, change is definitely it. For the most part of the year I "cheated" one platform with another, with no particular personal favorite to get me through (almost) 365 days. Each piece of software and hardware is used for a particular scenario, something that I find rather soothing for my personal early adopter endeavors as well as my sanity. I just can't stand tinkering with the same bit of tech for longer periods of time, although there still is a dear old friend in my life...

My colleagues Alan Buckingham and Wayne Williams already wrote about their personal tech choices in 2012, and now it's my turn. Without further ado here is what I used most throughout the year, starting with my trusty dear old friend.

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A little more than four months ago, part of the interestingly named "Project Sputnik", Dell announced the XPS 13 Developer Edition which ran popular open source operating system Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. After a long wait, the new laptop is available for purchase today for a not-so-cheap $1,549.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with a 13.3-inch 720p HD display. Processing power is provided by a third generation Intel Core i7 3517U processor that tops out at 3 GHz, an HD 4000 video card, and 8GB of DDRIII RAM. It also comes with a 256GB solid state drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. To keep the laptop running off the grid, there is a 47WHr battery which Dell says can deliver up to 6 hours and 13 minutes of unplugged operation.

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Mozilla is moving forward with the Firefox OS plans, even though odds are not in its favor. The open-source organization released a prototype simulator for the in-house operating system, which gives a glimpse of what potential customers should expect. All the action happens in a small Firefox window.

Mozilla did not release a standalone application, but instead the Firefox OS is available as an extension for the popular open-source browser. Firing up the new operating system is done with a simple flick of the Simulator toggle, and for easier control there are some keyboard shortcuts assigned to physical button operations. Users can experiment with Firefox OS straight from the lockscreen, so let's take a peek.

The lockscreen looks similar to earlier versions of Android. There is the typical slider to open camera or unlock the phone on top of the date and time. The interface is pretty basic in the camera department, but this is just a glimpse in the stable Firefox OS.

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Android Open Source Project Technical Lead Jean-Baptiste Queru announced that Google is pushing the Android 4.2 source code to AOSP, after the company released the second Jelly Bean-branded operating system today. To complement Android 4.2 the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation also uploaded the factory images for a number of Nexus devices.

The Android 4.2 source code will be available under the "android-4.2_r1" name, with the matching development branch named "jb-mr1-dev". Interestingly enough Queru says that the Nexus 10 is the best choice for AOSP work on the latest version of Android, which he considers the most open flagship device. But the Nexus 7 with 3G connectivity is not supported at the moment because of the GSM stack that is not yet licensed for the Android Open Source Project.

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If you’re the creative type then the idea of designing your own games can seem appealing. For a moment or two, anyway, until you began to think about exactly how many technical challenges you’d need to overcome in order to make this dream a reality.

You don’t have to handle everything on your own, though. Spring is a capable, versatile and open-source 3D RTS engine that can take care of many of the low-level gaming tasks, leaving you to get on with the more important design decisions.

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Almost four months ago the European Commission opened an investigation after Microsoft failed to distribute the browser ballot to Windows users. The problem, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation, only affected 10 percent of PCs, but Mozilla says there's more to it than meets the eye. Microsoft claims a glitch, lasting 18 months, caused the ballot to disappear.

Harvey Anderson, who works at Mozilla on business and legal affairs, revealed some numbers that portray the impact on Mozilla Firefox downloads. Prior to Microsoft fixing the problem daily downloads of the popular open-source browser decreased by 63 percent to 20,000 per day. After Microsoft decided to fix the issue the number of Mozilla Firefox downloads increased by 150 percent to 50,000 per day. The European Commission isn't overly excited by what happened, and sent Redmond a "statement of objections". That usually implies that a fine is underway...

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It’s something that programmers of the popular credit card-sized ARM GNU/Linux box have been asking after for a while now, and finally that wish has come true. Broadcom has agreed to make its mobile GPU drivers open source, releasing them under a 3-Clause BSD license.

What that means for developers, is it will now be much easier to implement Wayland EGL client and server support, and allow anyone attempting to port a different OS to Raspberry Pi to take full advantage of the graphics core.

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