Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

IDC has offered to charge $500 to tell you what's commonly felt in the Valley: Java faces a potentially better future under Oracle than under Sun Microsystems. You can pay for the report here or read extracted highlights from entrepreneur and Cnet blogger Dave Rosenberg here. In short: Oracle's software business is so dependent on Java and so important to Oracle, compared to Sun Microsystems' old software business to it, that Oracle needs to keep Java open and cannot afford to alienate a community that keeps the platform and language alive and modern.

Just a year ago -- April 21, 2009 to be exact -- I installed a Linux distribution. I installed it from a DVD of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, that came with an issue of Linux Pro magazine I bought from a news stand, and I put it on a hand-me-down eMachine with 384MB RAM (the other 128MB being dedicated graphics). It was the first time I had ever installed an operating system. In fact, it was the first time I had ever installed anything at all, anytime, anywhere. I had always just called for (and paid for) professional help from a neighbor who extended me rates more favorable than his enterprise customers paid. Raised at IBM, he had become a born-again Microsoft True Believer and wanted to keep us all happy Windows users.

Invoicing is one of the necessary evils for freelancers and small business owners. It's a pain in the neck to bother with but, on the other hand, it's always nice to get paid. Here are four open source invoicing applications that make the job a little easier.

Lets face it. Nothing lasts for ever. No matter how much we enjoy that perfect meal, movie, romance or whatever it will always be relegated to the past. The same with operating systems. They have come and gone. While there still may be pockets of them floating around in obscure places, such operating systems like DOS, OS/2, AmigaOS, GEOS and windows are either dead, dying or, like a turtle on its back, scrabbling around feverishly but going nowhere.

Texas Instruments (TI) announced the availability of a version of its WiLink 6.0 WL1271 wireless module for the Mistral-manufactured Cortex-A8-based OMAP35x Evaluation Module (EVM). The tiny 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1+ WL1271 chip is pre-integrated and optimized for TI's OMAP35x system-on-chip, thereby accelerating wireless development time, says TI.

Emacs is not so much a text editor, more a way of life - an "extensible, customisable self-documenting real time display editor" with thousands of ready made extensions that take you way beyond its original remit as a text editor, some of which can be found at the Emacs wiki or on the Emacs Lisp list.

OpenOffice.org (OOo for short) is a great office suite for Linux and pretty much any other operating system, but can always use improvement. This is especially true for templates and clip art. Fortunately, the open source community provides many add-ons or extensions.

In my last article, Quick and Dirty with Open Office Base, I described my initial experiences with building a simple database application for my wife in Open Office Base, having had no prior experience with the program. In that article, I described how easy it is to get started, and how easy it is to build usable software with Base. In this article, I'm going to discuss mitigating one of Base's major weaknesses by connecting it to an external SQL back-end.

The radio stations Deutschlandradio and Radio Orange received the awards from the Free Software Foundation Europe and Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure because they transmitted over the Internet in the Ogg Vorbis media container format. The free Radio Orange 94.0 in Vienna and dradio.de (Deutschlandfunk in Cologne and Deutschlandradio Kultur in Berlin) were honored with the awards (and a cake) the afternoon of March 31 under the slogan "rOGG on!"

Today I finally managed to get GNOME Shell installed so I could get a preview of what is to come on the Linux desktop (at least through the eyes of GNOME). This new GNOME will arrive sometime this year (2010) and will, I promise you, change the way you use your desktop. Finally someone has looked at the current desktop metaphor and said “It’s over!” Think about it, the current paradigm has been in play since, when, Windows 95? Earlier you say? CDE? Let’s stick with Windows 95, because that really solidified the whole “taskbar, start button, icons, notification try” metaphor in the eyes of the public. Well, public, that is about to change - drastically.

Covering SCO is a marathon, not a sprint, so after each big win, I tend to savor the moment, goofing off and enjoying a rest, knowing as I do that they never quit and there will be more awfulness to come.

For those from the Mandriva camp, you'll want to head on over to your favorite mirror to check out the freshly released beta of Mandriva Linux 2010.1. Mandriva 2010.1 Beta 1 is running with GNOME 2.30 that was released just this past week, provides a preview of GNOME Shell for a glimpse of what is coming with GNOME 3.0 later this year, and there is a wealth of other package updates too.

The Plasma Javascript Jam Session is a friendly competition that aims to reward creators of original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition. The competion concluded on March 31st with 11 successful submissions making the deadline. Judging has commenced, and it will not be easy: many excellent submissions were sent in ranging from the entertaining to the highly useful. Ranging in size from a few dozen lines to a few thousand lines of Javascript code, the submissions showcase a variety of ideas and possibilities.

Faced with disappointing sales, HP and Dell are scaling back investments in 10-inch netbooks, with HP possibly quitting the format entirely, according to DigiTimes. Other motivators were said to include expectations for re-invigorated sales of larger, more expensive notebooks fueled by a recovering economy.

The developers of Songbird, the open source and cross platform media player, have announced they are dropping Linux support. In an announcement on the company blog, VP of Engineering Georges Auberger said that "After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird". Auberger cited prioritisation issues for the small engineering team which have meant that the Linux version of Songbird has fallen behind the other versions on Windows and Mac. The company has therefore decided to focus on the Windows and Mac versions and delivering new features and device support on those versions.

Final Demand. Dear Linux, We own you. Pay up or else. Love, SCO - Merc Crimperman, Bizarre Cathedral

Ubuntu just released the beta 1 version of their new LTS (Long Term Support) Distribution, Lucid 10.04. The theme is based on "light" and it looks great. Here's what to expect and what not to expect when you first install this new flavor of Ubuntu: The first thing you notice when you launch the live CD is Ubuntu's new logo. Don't worry, they still have the basic logo but they added some new typography and use the logo like a registration mark. They went with the black desktop theme for their default which is fine, but they moved something around. The window manager buttons went from the right side to the left, which is difficult at first if you are not used to it.

Mel Gorman posted the seventh version of his Memory Compaction patches asking, "are there any further obstacles to merging?" The patches, first posted in May of 2007, provide a mechanism for moving GFP_MOVABLE pages into a smaller number of pageblocks, reducing externally fragmented memory. Mel explains that 'compaction' is another method of defragmenting memory, "for example, lumpy reclaim is a form of defragmentation as was slub 'defragmentation' (really a form of targeted reclaim). Hence, this is called 'compaction' to distinguish it from other forms of defragmentation."

From February 20th to the 21st, Linux enthusiasts from the greater Los Angeles area converged at the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles Airport to celebrate Linux and Free Software at the annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE8X). KDE was there once again showing attendees the work of the KDE community. The team was showing off Plasma Desktop and a prototype of the Plasma Netbook workspace. There were four new volunteers who did a great job representing KDE for the first time - Jonathan Prien, Wayne Speir, Aaron Reichman, and Barrington Daltrey. A special mention goes also to Gary Greene, who shipped out the KDE booth box for use at SCALE. Aaron Johnson gave a talk "A Basic Introduction to KDE", attended by about thirty people, that was well recieved.

There is a classic bit of computer wisdom that states “If you’ve got a problem, and decide to solve it with regular expressions, now you’ve got two problems.” This of course stems from the perception that regular expressions are a complicated mix of magic characters and Voodoo. Regular expressions can allow you to achieve elegant and concise program logic quickly and easily, but only once you’ve learned to understand how they work and why. Just about any Linux or Mac system comes with a powerful regex tool call grep and learning grep is an essential task for any power user or system administrator. Today, we’ll explore some of what you can do with grep and how it can be one of the most powerful tools in your geek arsenal.