Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Which do you like best: the satisfying, rich taste of principle in free software? Or do you prefer the less morally filling and pragmatic goodness of open source? Do you wish people would stop endlessly rehashing the whole question of "free" versus "open source?" Or do you enjoy the chance to talk about goals and philosophy? As you might suspect, since I'm bringing it up...

ZybaCafe, a complete, multiplatform tool for managing internet-cafes and cybercafe's, has been released as an alpha version. Developer A.J. Venter has said that he would like to give user a chance to try and test it out for themselves before he declares the release stable.

Heaven knows that I've written a lot of stuff about ways to find software that lets computer users crop, enhance, adjust and otherwise tweak digital photographs, but I continue to get asked about this. It's understandable considering that not only are digital cameras replacing traditional film ones, but cell phones are replacing digital cameras. I wonder what will replace cell phones? Hmmmm. Sorry for the digression.

Freelance software consultant Renaud Gaudin longed to parlay his passion for free and open source software into something that would help developing countries access and use technology. In March, he joined Geekcorps. Now he brings information and communication technology (ICT) into communities, helps them get hardware and software up and running, and then teaches local users the technical skills they need to sustain their new equipment for the long-term.

They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but over the last year, the venerable (in Internet time) Wikipedia online encyclopedia has faced an international furor over its reliability and accuracy. The collaborative processes used to create the service have been tweaked, but concerns still rumble through the Web. Now one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has begun development of a competitive service, the Citizendium or “Citizen’s Compendium”.

UniNet and Ilizwi Telecommunications (ITel) recently concluded a deal that will see the rollout of a broadband network in the Eastern Cape. ITel is a licenced "Under Serviced Area Licencee" (USAL) for the OR Tambo district, which includes the towns of Umtata, Mqanduli, Libode, Tsolo, Qumbu, Ngqeleni, Tabankulu, Port St Johns, Lusikisiki, Flagstaff and Bizana.

As in business, free and open source software (FOSS) is spreading rapidly in educational systems. Yet, despite the growing acceptance, experienced advocates are unanimous in observing that significant barriers remain. FOSS advocates in schools in Canada and the United States not only need to face the innate conservatism of those around them, but also need to plan their campaigns carefully, choosing tactics that will work and avoiding counterproductive ones. Success is more likely to come slowly, and from starting small, than from any overnight success.

Microsoft has made an interesting move into the free software market with its announcement this morning of Office Accounting Express 2007, a stripped-down version of its small business software kit. Office Accounting Express 2007 is available as a free download at http://www.ideawins.com. A report at SmartPros describes the offering as “software as a service,” but the giveaway is a traditional client-side program, not a Web-based service. However, it does include multiple tie-ins to Web-based services that can be added for a fee.

When I hear "Open Source PBX", my knee jerk reaction is to think the A-word. Pingtel’s SIPxchange software is an open source PBX solution, but it has no code from A-word. After all, when you say Linux, there's twenty different flavours of Linux, but they all have some core commonality.

There's an ancient Unix practice of keeping a system-wide phone directory in /usr/share/ with one-line entries containing name, location, and number, and a shell script named something like phone or tel that calls grep to output lines that match whatever arguments you give. You can improve on that method to create a personal contact manager with surprising speed and power.

Welcome to another of Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletters, keeping you up to date with us, and all things free software... enjoy!

Bigger and Badder! The Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo is coming! It will be February 10-11, 2007, at The Westin Los Angeles Airport. Due to year over year growth, we've moved the Expo to a new location which will allow us to expand. We'll have more speaker tracks, and more tutorials designed to show users of all skill levels what Open Source can do. And SCALE 5x will offer more booth space for those interested in showing how they have made Open Source work for them.

IBM first announced the availability of Linux on the iSeries in May 2001--more than five years ago. With great fanfare, Big Blue has consistently touted this Linux capability as a means for shops to realize cost savings and simplicity by capitalizing on the huge (outside the System i community) movement towards open source software and through server consolidation. All the appropriate heads nodded at the time, and certainly no one is arguing that the System i's ability to run Linux or other operating system partitions is in any way a bad thing.

When the market wipes a quarter of your company's share price because a powerful competitor declares its intention to enter your market space, one would think tough measures are called for. Unfortunately Red Hat, which now has to contend with Oracle competing for support of its Linux distribution, appears to have confused tough measures with talking tough.

One of the biggest turn offs people have when trying to build their own PVR is that things can get complicated quickly, especially if you use a Linux based software solution. Heck, even for the seasoned PVR builders amongst us, we know that configuring everything just right can be a huge hassle and time sink.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on Decibel and the KDE-based NEPOMUK components accelerates. The Unity web rendering engine experiment is removed from KDE SVN, due to a change in the circumstances that prompted its creation. KTabEdit, a guitar tablature editor is imported into the KDE SVN playground. A branch of kde-pim for improvements in future 3.5 releases shows promise with the introduction of several new features. QMA, an experimental email client, continues to mature and is renamed Mailody. Usability and file format support refinements in Amarok. Speed optimisations in KViewShell and KFTPGrabber. More improvements in the state of games in KDE 4.

Looking for a way to add stock quotes to your web site? With a little Perl scripting and the Finance::Quote module you can script this up in no time.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been a great success – in that it's a new buying signal for lots of customers who were seemingly getting a bit fed up with paying money to IT vendors for more of the same.

It's Autumn in St. Louis, my favorite time of year in Missouri. Coats are getting progressively thicker as the temperature drops, trees are changing their leaves in a final show of brilliant color before their skeletons show, and darkness is starting to scare away the sun a bit earlier every day.

Eagle-eyed Ubuntu 6.10 users may have noticed that their favorite new version of this popular Linux distribution has an old friend: Firefox.