Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2006

Microsoft appear to be up their old tricks again. This time it's the "let's work with odt to show how much we care" farce. If you work in an office you probably need to pay attention to this.

Linux and open source software lag behind the proprietary market in the number and quality of available video games, especially in the realm of first-person shooters (FPS), a genre dominated by the likes of Doom, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, and Halo. Here, Linux is an afterthought, if not ignored completely. Tremulous, a mixture of FPS and RTS (real-time strategy) written by Tim Angus, is an exception to that rule.

If you are planning to port your Unix apps to Linux, be sure to consider the technical, business and project management perspectives, says Alfredo Mendoza, one of the co-authors of Unix to Linux Porting. A thorough assessment of your porting plan from those three perspectives could cut down on unforeseen events in the actual porting and testing.

In this interview with SearchOpenSource.com, Mendoza gives IT managers tips on where to begin when planning to porting apps and what issues IT managers can expect to encounter when porting older Unix apps.

One of Morocco's first government departments to start the move to free software has chosen to switch its servers to Mandriva Linux and is looking at switching desktops to Linux in the near future in a move that could save them as much as 80% of their acquisition and support costs.

In my work I'm expected to be on a Unix system 80% of the time, yet I also need to use office applications, a Windows-only VPN client, and some Windows-based asset management tools. That leaves me with little choice but to use a tool to connect a Windows client to a remote Unix desktop. I could use a terminal emulator or connect via a VNC server, but I've found that Cygwin, a Windows port of many GNU/Linux tools, is the best way for me to bridge the gap.

Freedom Partners is a network of car dealerships in Vermont. Freedom IT director Chip Kaupp doesn't know one Linux distribution from another, but he doesn't need to. Freedom Partners' Web sites and its company intranet run on the Nitix server appliance.

Nitix is a custom variation of Linux that includes Web, email, printing, security, and backup utilities, which is administered through a browser-based GUI. It comes in an easy-to-install package, or preinstalled on its own server hardware.

I asked before about success stories of schools using Open Source Software. Here's a few examples with dollars attached.

[I am studying to become a Teacher, its nice to see at least a few success stories. - Scott]

It is a case of a David and Goliath face-off, with Melbourne and Hobart competing for the right to stage for one of Australia's leading open source software technical conferences in 2008. Linux Australia President Jon Oxer, today announced the two teams bidding for the opportunity to host Free and Open Source Software conference linux.conf.au in 2008.

An(sic) faulty update has caused Symantec to incorrectly detect the Zlob trojan in the open source Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS)... Last week's error marks that fourth time that Symantec mislabels NSIS as spyware, according to an overview on the project's web page. NSIS gets mislabelled as spyware on a regular basis. Microsoft tops the list. It's anti-spyware software has goofed up on five occasions.

[Five times..can't imagine why - Scott]

PUTRAJAYA: There appears to be a gap in the university curriculum for information and communications technology. ICT degree holders make up a large segment of unemployed graduates, but after they complete professional ICT courses under the Human Resources Ministry’s Graduates Retraining Scheme, they are snapped up by employers.

Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 11th-15th AMIA Fall conference in Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn't 'magic pixie dust' and there are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine's free software future a reality.

Tor is a system designed to anonymise Internet connections for users concerned about their privacy. It's free, it's simple, it's effective -- and it facilitates troublemaking.

Novell's creation of Bandit, an open source project, has been met with plaudits from a multitude of vendors whose interests one might assume to be quite divergent.

Linux has a reputation as a multimedia lightweight. That's undeserved; there are plenty of powerful, useful, and usable applications to meet most of your media needs. For example, it's possible to become an independent podcaster with a little bit of equipment and experience. John Littler shares his advice on podcasting with open source.

LXer Feature: 22-June-06

Tired of normal distro reviews, I decided to write a review in the form of a diary. Written by an intermediate Gentoo user, this review offers some insight in administering a Gentoo desktop. So bear with me while I try to make my stuff work!

The US investment bank is teaming with Cisco Systems, Envoy Technologies, iMatix Corporation, Iona Technologies, Red Hat, 29West and corporate treasury body Twist to create the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) Working Group.

Setting up RAID-1 mirroring on a running remote Linux system over ssh session RAID -1 allows to create an exact copy of the original drive. Thus, it results into the increased fault tolerance and easy data recovery option for single server. It is true that the best and easy way to setup a RAID 1 is during installation. But if you forget to setup RAID – 1 during installation or if you have added new hard disk after installation, then this how to covers setting up a RAID-1 mirroring on a running remote Linux system over ssh session.

Wow, big news to start off my new blog. The Gardens Point GP Ruby .NET development team has announced an initial beta version of their system.

At this point, they claim that it can compile Ruby source into verifiable .Net v2.0 assembly, or it can run Ruby code directly in a compile, load and execute cycle. They do warn that their implementation is not yet complete, although it does pass everything in samples/test.rb (I wonder if they're using theRubicon/Rubytests stuff for further testing?).

IBM and St. Jude Medical used embedded Linux to build a device that lets cardiac care clinicians retrieve and analyze data from implanted cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and pacemakers, and make programmatic changes to them. The St. Jude Merlin Patient Care System runs a customized MontaVista Linux

LXer Feature: 27-May-06

Recently, Mr. Steven Titch wrote an article about Open Document which contained Microsoft-style disinformation. At that moment, some of our readers suggested Heartland or Mr. Titch might have been funded by Microsoft. While I couldn't find any direct ties, there are lot of indirect ties between the Heartland Institute and Microsoft, and at a certain point in my research, even the name of Mr. Abramoff showed up. A summary of the things I found.