Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A program to help keep software and device makers on the right side of open-source licensing law has been unveiled by the Linux Foundation. The Open Compliance Program includes tools, training, consulting, and self-assessment to help you comply with the myriad of open-source licenses. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told The Reg that the program provides a ready-made mechanism for companies to understand and deal with licenses.

If you have anything more than a small home network, you need to be monitoring the status of your systems to ensure they are providing the services they were designed to provide. Rihards Olups has created a comprehensive reference and usability guide for the latest version of Zabbix that anyone being tasked with implementing should have by their side.

Last time in the KDE contributor interview series, we talked with the KDE developer Stephen Kelly from KDE PIM. We've been digging around in the KDE interview vaults and found this interesting discussion we had with Albert Astals Cid on 12 May 2010. Albert is well known in KDE from his work with KDE España, as maintainer of Okular and the KDE Edu applications. The original interview in Italian is also available.

After months of silence, OpenSolaris supporters have had enough and launched the Illumos project. Described as a "spork" of OpenSolaris, rather than a true fork, Illumos is a misguided attempt to keep the Solaris legacy OS alive for another generation. Too bad it's doomed from the start.

The Sun PDF Import Extension is one of the most popular OpenOffice.org extensions ever created. For the last two years, it has been near the top of the list of most popular downloads on the OpenOffice.org Extensions site -- and no wonder, considering that it is a free replacement for Adobe Acrobat, which is currently priced at $449US. However, the extension does have some quirks and limitations that you have to learn to work around.

The original architects of the Internet got the big things right. By making the network open, they enabled the greatest exchange of ideas in history. By making the Internet scalable, they enabled explosive innovation in the infrastructure. It is imperative that we find ways to protect the future openness of the Internet and encourage the rapid deployment of broadband. Verizon and Google are pleased to discuss the principled compromise our companies have developed over the last year concerning the thorny issue of “network neutrality.”

In a country where the legal system is based on precedents, a judge's recent decision just may make the use of Linux a whole lot easier. From nearly the beginnings of entertainment DVDs, Linux users in certain countries either had to break the law to watch their legally obtained media on their computer, boot a Windows system, or not use them. Many chose to break the law and install decryption software. Perhaps those days are over.

LXer Feature: 09-Aug-2010

A roundup of the big stories hitting our newswire from the previous week.

The Phoronix Test Suite is one of the few mainstream projects that uses PHP-GTK, a PHP5 extension that provides bindings for the GTK+ tool-kit on the desktop, for its user-interface. Unfortunately, PHP5-GTK packages can be found in very few distribution repositories even while the Phoronix Test Suite can be found in most any modern distribution.

Ubuntu's ambitions don't stop with moving some window buttons and making everything purple – the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium saw the announcement of Unity, a completely new desktop interface aimed at instant-on computing.

This interview is part of a series following the Supreme Court's Bilski decision, which left the laws on what you can get a patent on largely as they are, after a four-justice minority failed to ban "business method" patents. Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen heads the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and wrote the group's amicus brief in Kappos v. Bilski.

A liberal blogger has uncovered that a "group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com has just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, up-vote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives." The blogger, Ole Ole Olson, infiltrated a group that called itself Digg Patriots. His proof is quite damning.

[I used to use Digg but noticed how they made it impossible to either submit or find anything Linux related over a year ago, I haven't been to the site since. - Scott]

On August 3 Nexenta hosted a conference call to announce a new open source project called "Illumos." Illumos is an open source alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution free from the binds of Oracle. Still several days short of the deadline set by the OpenSolaris governing board to Oracle, perhaps this announcement makes it all moot.

vell has committed to keep surfing Google's Wave despite the search giant stopping development of its new-age collaboration tool. The Linux vendor has said it'll keep building Novell Pulse, its implementation of Wave built using Google's APIs and protocols, as it can turn Wave into a successful technology.

It doesn’t matter if you are using Windows, Linux or Mac, as long as you don’t maintain it, it will grow out of hand and become very messy. Previously, we have discussed 8 useful ways and Bleachbit to help you maintain a clean lean Ubuntu machine. This time, we are going to show you 4 more ways to keep your Ubuntu clean.

For those too impatient to wait for next month for a new native Linux game release when Amnesia: The Dark Descent is set to premiere, there is another game with a native Linux client that was released today: And Yet It Moves.

My favorite PC game of all time was Interstate '76. It was really unique in its gameplay and has the best soundtrack for a game ever, featuring 70's funk, where I would pop in the cd on my computer just to play the music. I've never done that with any other game, before that or since (the site has archived the soundtrack and you can download the mp3 files from there). Later, I'd find out that there were some really heavy hitters who were a part of the soundtrack. In January 2007, I started searching out more recent games that were similar in gameplay- where you are an auto vigilante, completing missions in your weapon-infused, tricked-out vehicle (but that ran on Linux). Lo and behold, I came across such a game in Interstate Outlaws.

We’ve all heard of Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora and Mandriva. But how about RIP, Damn Vulnerable and Zeroshell Linux? Here are five specialised Linux versions worth bookmarking.

Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system platform. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, nearly 60% of all Android devices in circulation are now running version 2.1 of the OS – up almost 10% compared to mid-June (50%). Android 1.5 and 1.6 devices now make up 15.3% and 20.3% of devices respectively, while only 0.2% of devices are running obsolete versions, including version 1.1, 2.0 and 2.0.1.

Despite the wealth of free applications out there, many small business owners continue to spend an inordinate amount of their all-too-scarce resources on software. Microsoft Office 2010? That'll be $499.99 -- or $279.99 if you can do without the Professional version. QuickBooks 2010? $159.95 or more. Adobe PhotoShop CS5? A whopping $699. The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need, and most of them are excellent. Whether or not you've already made the switch to Linux -- there are, after all, myriad security and other reasons for doing so -- these free apps can be just what any small business needs to succeed.