Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you are into eye-candy and are always looking for ways to impress your non-geek friends with 3D graphical effects, here is another one to add to your collection. FoxTab is a Firefox extension that transforms Firefox into a 3D browser with Compiz-like graphical effects. The good thing about FoxTab is that it is cross platform compatible (works in Windows, Linux and Mac) and it doesn’t require a high end computer to run. I got it to work in my netbook and it runs without any lag.

Google and the Eclipse Foundation have announced the launch of Eclipse Labs, a Google hosted portal that will feature open source projects based on the Eclipse platform. Using the portal, developers can start and maintain their Eclipse-based open source projects.

Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe. What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox.

Michael Dell briefly showcased his long-awaited Streak tablet at the Citrix Synergy conference. The 5-inch device features a 800X480 touch display, along with a customized version of Google's Android OS. The Streak - which is expected to support both Wi-Fi and cellular networks - also boasts two cameras: a front webcam for video-conferencing and a 5-megapixel camera for snapping pictures.

Senior Product Manager and Senior Software Engineer take flight. Yesterday, Senior Android Product Manager Erick Tseng left Google for Facebook as the head of mobile products. Tseng worked at Google for four years, with previous stints at Yahoo and Microsoft.

More than a hundred schools across Finland are using open source for all of their desktop PCs, according to Opinsys, an open source services provider. The company assists ninety schools in 28 municipalities with the maintenance of PCs and laptops running Ubuntu Linux. Tens of other schools are managing similar PCs themselves, according to Mikko Soikkeli, the company's sales director.

For those of you who were unhappy that Script Frenzy was not about writing scripts but about writing...well...scripts, here is something to entertain you...The 2010 Scripting Guy Games! Huh? Windows? Um... OK, yes the Scripting Guy Games are for Windows. But what if we did it for Linux. What sort of meaty script challenge could we come up with? Certainly something more challenging than determining the time or reading the registry. Here are some thoughts, with apologies to the Scripting Guy(s) for stealing their format.

The Wine project isn't the only free software project with official releases being few and far between, but the Haiku Project is in a similar boat. Development on Haiku, the open-source reincarnation of BeOS, started back in 2001 but the first alpha release was only released last year. This month, however, the second alpha release of the Haiku OS has arrived.

Google has published a statistical breakdown of the students accepted to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. Each year Google seeks students and mentors from the FLOSS community to take part in it's annual GSoC event, which takes place over a period of three months.

Kris Occhipinti shows us how to move our window buttons back to the right side in Ubuntu's latest release, Lucid.

Google has released a preliminary software development kit for Native Client, its native-code browser plug-in. The company unveiled its Native Client SDK "developer preview" with a blog post on Wednesday, calling it "an important first step in making Native Client more accessible as a tool for developing real web applications." Google released a research version of Native Client a year ago - including a snapshot of its source tree - and this allowed for application development. But until now there was no formal SDK.

Many organizations have attempted to use open source sudo as their privileged identity management solution. While sudo might be a viable solution for small scale organizations, CSOs managing large IT environments are consistently discovering that sudo creates security, compliance and productivity challenges to large enterprises seeking to protect critical assets.

On April 29, the University of Colorado held a conference on patents and free software. Your editor, having spent the morning getting some significant dental work done, figured that an afternoon devoted to software patents would appropriately continue the day in the same theme - only without the anesthetic. The following is not a comprehensive report of the event; instead, it focuses on a few of the more interesting moments.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support. It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

I've been avoiding video editing for years. I've seen a couple of tutorials that always made it look too complicated. But recently, at a model airplane fun fly, I shot a lot of short video clips with my digital camera. I needed a way to combine the good parts into a video I could put on the web. I tried a few of the video editing apps available for Linux looking for something that was easy for a first-timer to use, and settled on kdenlive. I was amazed how easy it was to use, even for a first-timer. Turns out there was no need to be afraid of video editing!

Tired of slogging through Facebook's interface? Sick of seeing the Fail Whale? Cut through the cruft and simplify your social services with Gwibber -- a microblogging client for Linux that supports Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Mark Sobell again delivers the answers to common Linux administration challenges, and provides thorough and step-by-step instructions to configuring many of the common Linux Internet services in A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fifth Edition.

Novell is close to launching Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 11 on the desktop and server. Which stands to reason. With all the new server iron being injected into the market, (and more to come later this year) and an impending release of Enterprise Linux 6 from Red Hat and the just-released Ubuntu 10.04 from Canonical, commercial Linux distributor Novell has to either put out a new version of SUSE Linux or crank out a service pack to keep pace.

Speaking at the Secure360 Conference here, Marcus Ranum, CSO of Tenable Network Security, said that the country's reliance on commercial off-the-shelf software has made us more susceptible to attack, not to mention less innovative and creative. Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office," he said. "Why don't we have a strategic software reserve? Is this putting us at a greater or lesser risk? I'm not sure. But our own software is probably a greater threat to us than anything other people can do to us."

The front-runners for replacing the expensive MS Office are openOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?