Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

Leeenux Linux is a netbook distribution for the EeePC 701G, and is now available as version 2.0, complete with many new applications. The Linux distribution focuses on ease of use, even on the 8.9 inch display of the EeePC 701G. Leeenux is also perfect for use on other Netbooks, and uses Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Easy Peasy. The distribution contains only free software.

Bugs are a reality of software development, and a pain for both coders and users. Security bugs are a particularly nasty variety, and in an effort to kill as many as possible, Google is now coughing up cash for catching Chrome and Chromium glitches. The new program, modeled on Mozilla's successful Bug Bounty program, will pay rewards to bug-catchers who report "interesting and original vulnerabilities" in the code of either the Open Source Chromium browser, or Google's Chrome implementation. Google's Chris Evans, who announced the program on the official Chromium blog, described it as both a "token of our appreciation" for existing contributors and an incentive for new participation.

Viruses. They happen to almost everyone. If they don’t happen to you, it’ll be your cousin Stan who get joins the malware-of-the-month club, and you’re the only person he knows who can fix a computer. The problem is, things are so screwed up that Windows won’t even start properly. And if it does, the virus has embedded itself so deeply that you can’t access the files and tools you’d need to remove it. Enter Linux. By booting from a Linux Live CD or USB, you can remove the offending programs manually or with a Linux-based anti-virus program. This guide will cover creation of a bootable USB Linux system as well as a comparison of the antivirus software options.

The open source legal profession has established the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) to discuss topics including copyrights, licensing, software patents, open standards, case law and statutes in the open source arena. The IFOSSLR now appears in its second issue.

How many SUSE subscriptions can you get for $240 million? Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft. According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership. And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out. The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft."

Video editing in Linux is never an easy stuff. While there are several top-notch video editing software available for Linux users, most of them are not meant for the faint-hearted. With the release of OpenShot, the averagae users (like you and me) now have an easy to use video editor that they can fire up, drag their photos into the time frame and quickly produce a slideshow movie. OpenShot is a non-linear video editor for Linux. It can easily combine multiple video clips, audio clips, and images into a single project, and then export the video into many common video formats. Things that you can do with OpenShot include creating photo slide shows, edit home videos, create television commercials and on-line films, or anything else you can dream up.

Diamond Systems announced that it has originated a new, mezzanine-style expansion standard for SBCs (single board computers), COMs (computer-on-modules) and other embedded products. Involving a single low-cost connector and expansion modules "three-fifths the size of a credit card," the standard will be open and support any host form factor and processor, the company says.

On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites. SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn't provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time. The changes have been described as either a re-write of the PHP runtime or a compiler for PHP. A change to PHP would be Facebook's latest donation to the language, which has also had contributions from Microsoft and the former Sun Microsystems over the years.

ActiveState, the dynamic languages experts, today launched ActiveState Business Edition, commercial-grade language distributions for Perl, Python and Tcl providing organizations open source compliance, commercial support, and cross-platform access. A slide presentation around ActiveState Business Edition is available on Slideshare.net: http://bit.ly/ayd49J

With all of this iPad buzz stirring up the tech world over the past couple of weeks, Chrome OS has almost been forgotten. That may have something to do with the fact that Google has yet to officially release the netbook-centric operating system to the public, but still, you'd expect a company like Google to keep the details flowing about a forthcoming operating system. Today it seems we're getting exactly what you'd expect, in response to all the recent tablet fanfare.

Apple turned up the heat in the mobile market last week when it unveiled its new iPad mobile computing device. Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, has responded to Apple's product launch with a candid appraisal of Linux's strengths and weaknesses in the mobile market relative to Apple's mobile operating system. Zemlin, one of the Linux community's most vocal advocates, speculated last year that Linux could eventually become the dominant operating system for consumer electronics products. His argument was based largely on the assertion that Linux's lack of licensing costs will make it the most practical and affordable option for hardware vendors.

Now that the Sun acquisition is a done deal, Oracle has begun picking and choosing the products that will live on and which will fade out. While CEO Larry Ellison was adamant that there would be no wholesale slaughter of products or staffing cuts, the reality is that not everything can survive or receive full Oracle investment. Most of these discussions are available online from a collection of videos made during Oracle's (NASDAQ: ORCL) Product Strategy day earlier this week.

During the last two months Marcel and I ported all tree views in digiKam from Qt3 to Qt4 and its model view concept. These changes are now included in the svn trunk. The new code still needs some serious testing and we would appreciate your help on this.

Social media has taken over the Web in a very big way. It has even been argued that social media is the new Web or “new media”. From social networking sites like Facebook to video sharing sites like YouTube, social media services occupy all of the top 20 most popular sites on Alexa.com, excluding search engines. Two of those popular social media sites are Blogger and Wordpress, two sites that host free blogs for their users. Although most blog services and blogging content management systems allow users to post directly on their websites, there are many advantages to using client software on a local computer, such as the ability to work offline. In past years, KDE had no full-featured blogging client.

re bugs, and bug reports, are good. No really, at least that's what Karl Fogel says in trying to squash the idea that bugs are "technical debt that developers must repay. Fogel, who works for Canonical on the Launchpad platform, says that it's a fallacy that growths in bug reports is bad. On the contrary, more bug reports mean good news because it means more users are using the project. If you've participated in a growing project, it's not unusual to see alarm at the growing number of bug reports and the inability to address them all. Soon, developers start talking about focusing on bugs and not features.

Last Friday, after four years of deliberation, representatives of all parties in the Danish parliament (Folketing) reached an agreement to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their official format for saving documents from April 2011. Initially, the decision will not affect any regional or communal authorities; a decision in this respect is to follow at a later stage. An official approval of the agreement by the Danish parliament is planned for next Tuesday, although this will apparently only be a formality.

I don't usually write book reviews, but this one is special. My friend and colleague Daniel James has written an introduction to the world of media production with Linux, or as the subtitle describes it, "A manual for creative media on a modest budget". I'll put the spoiler right up front: This book is wonderful and is an essential read for all artistically-inclined Linux users. Read on to find out why I think so.

Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh's energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the "business of open source" miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd.

There are many ways to do the same tasks in Linux, which is a lovely thing because it means we can tailor our workflows to suit our own personal needs. Here are five of Carla Schroder's favorite speed and efficiency tips.