Showing all newswire headlines

The second part of a Ruby on Rails 2.0 tutorial. Ruby on Rails 2.0 changes the way Rails uses scaffolding. This has made many existing Rails tutorials obsolete. This part covers customization of the Model and the View and gets the scaffolded application built in part one looking like something you could present to a client

Bombay, India. While the official name of the city is now "Mumbai", the name "Bombay" is still used by a lot of the inhabitants, and its use draws images of one of the world's largest cities, a gateway to the sub-continent. Therefore an invitation to speak at Techfest 2008 (http://www.techfest.org/), a large student-organized technical showcase, was impossible to turn down. Techfest is a yearly three-day event that encompasses "everything technical". While computer hardware and software had their place, the fest also included demonstrations and competitions centered around alternative energies, clean water production, recycling and included civil and mechanical engineering challenges.

There exists no official flash package available for the 64bit architecture with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If you click the add plugin button when visiting a page with flash, you are taken to the official Flash site and will soon notice that there are no available 64bit downloads here either. There are some workarounds on ubuntu forums, however, they don't always seem to work and get complicated if you have compiled your own 32bit Firefox. We have been using both the official 64bit Firefox package from the Kubuntu repositories as well as a modified 32bit version I built quite a while ago to get around some stability issues with the 64bit version. So after about a year without flash support, we finally took the plunge and have built a quick and easy solution. Read on to see how you can add Flash and Java support to your 64bit system in under 1 minute. [Update] At the end of the article, you will see how we can install a 32bit version of Firefox.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL. Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion – helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash. But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups.

Here is a report that analyzes the results of independent tests performed by PC Magazine Romania comparing the AXIGEN Mail Server against two open source alternatives, Sendmail (with Dovecot) and Postfix (with Cyrus).

Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!).

Just as Camino offers Mozilla Web browsing capability tightly integrated with OS X system services, its new sibling, Correo, aims to bridge the same gap for email. The open source email reader is based on Mozilla technology, but unlike Thunderbird it ties in to core Mac OS libraries in order to better the end user experience. Correo 0.3 is the newest release, a 20MB .DMG file available for download from the project page. The application is a universal binary compatible with OS X versions 10.4 and up. Right now, two localizations are available: English and French.

Many companies consider instant messaging to be a distraction, but IM can be an effective communication tool if used properly. OpenFire is an open source enterprise IM server that has lots of features to streamline communication within an enterprise. The server is written in Java and uses Jabber, which is one of the most popular open protocols for real-time communication. In addition to being cross-platform, OpenFire is easy to set up and administer. While the basic version of the OpenFire server is available free of cost, an enterprise version, which costs $15 per user per year, adds features suitable for a large multi-office corporation.

Many moons have risen since I last gushed about Splunk, so what better way to reinvigorate our personal buzz than to install the latest version and write a how-to. After talking about a few neat features, we will briefly discuss how to set up central syslogging and how to install Splunk, before a tangent into "working around the free version's crippled interface."

2008 is off to a fine start for the world of Linux sound and music software, so this week's story is straight reporting from Studio Dave, with breaking news from various points on the Linux audio compass.

Although Free software is mostly about coding, there is also room for every kind of creativity. Read why I believe a amateur artist might benefit in contributing to a FOSS game project like The Battle for Wesnoth.

This short tutorial describes how to record audio tracks and then mix them all down using Qtractor -- an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application for Linux. It allows us to record soundtracks, add MIDI files, arrange, mix music and adjust the volumes, effects, and clean up the sound.

dhtmlxGrid is a JavaScript grid control that you can use to create an AJAX interface to a relational database server. The grid view provided by dhtmlxGrid offers actions that one would expect from a desktop grid control, such as sorting by columns by clicking on them, resizing columns, rich cell rendering, keyboard navigation, themes, and drag and drop. The standard edition of dhtmlxGrid is available under the GNU GPL and free to use, while other editions include additional features and cost from $150 to $450 depending on your needs. Methods in the JavaScript API for dhtmlxGrid indicate if they are only available in the paid versions. For this article I use the free GPL version.

A rootkit is a program designed to take fundamental control of a computer system, without authorization by the system’s owners and legitimate managers. Most rootkits use the power of the kernel to hide themselves, they are only visible from within the kernel. How do I detect rootkits under CentOS or Debian Linux server?

If you have more than one computer or run more than one operating system (for example, Linux and Windows on a dual-boot machine), you probably need to keep the bookmarks in your browsers on the different platforms in sync. Firefox has several add-ons that can help you. For instance, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, Box.net Bookmarks Synchronizer, and Chipmark all provide good synchronisation features, and they allow cross-browser import and export and bookmark visualisation. However, all of them store data on a third-party server (sometime subject to a fee), at which you need to register.

In most cases, operating system updates are a good thing because they fix problems and sometimes provide new functionality for you to use and enjoy. There’s no problem with this, but when these updates cause more problems than they solve, then you know something’s wrong.

Many Linux users find themselves working in Windows-based environments. More often that not, this is not something that can be avoided, and to be honest, I cannot actually say for certain that it should be.

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Mobile workers no longer have to carry bulky laptops in order to do their work; with the emergence of free software and live operating systems, a bootable USB Flash drive with Linux is often all that's needed to complete one's task while on the road. In this week's issue we'll take a quick look at Mandriva Flash 2008, a useful "pocket" OS with thousands of applications and several gigabytes of free space for storing your data. In the news section, Gentoo Linux works hard to improve the interaction between the developers and its users, Debian embarks on a major switch to GCC 4.3 as the default compiler, Fedora announces more changes to the project leadership prior to the upcoming release of Fedora 9, and ISP-Planet talks to m0n0wall's Manual Kasper about the importance of small, configurable firewalls. Finally, don't miss the usual bunch of new Linux distributions submitted to DistroWatch, including the promising openmamba GNU/Linux. Happy reading!

Trolltech, the originator of Qt, which forms the basis of the Linux KDE desktop environment, is being acquired by Nokia, the world’s number-one mobile phone vendor. Nokia expects its acquisition of Trolltech to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and to enhance its Internet services business.

Bombay, India. While the official name of the city is now "Mumbai", the name "Bombay" is still used by a lot of the inhabitants, and its use draws images of one of the world's largest cities, a gateway to the sub-continent. Therefore an invitation to speak at Techfest 2008 (http://www.techfest.org/), a large student-organized technical showcase, was impossible to turn down.