Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After I finished my recent articles on Teaching with Tux and Learning with Gcompris, I received a couple of suggestions from readers that I take a look at Childsplay. I spent some time looking at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should too.

If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere. For good measure let’s throw in a few databases from MySQL that occasionally take a virtual table or two from your SQL Server farms – and let’s not forget to mention the Oracle database that runs your CRM software. To top things off you’re running a slew of other open and closed source software that all together keeps your business running.

The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual. The unexpected merging of the Nouveau driver is the result of one such snag - but it is a story with a happy ending for all.

If you're an ASCII-head of any kind, you will feel immediately at home in Markdown. It was so obviously designed by someone who has done a lot of writing online, as it apes common plaintext conventions that we've collectively been using for decades now. It's certainly far more intuitive than the alternatives I've researched.

The developers behind the XBMC project have released a new version of the popular open source media player. It comes with an impressive new user interface theme.

Google’s Android OS has been making consistent progress in the smartphone world. If you’re anything like me, you may have been curious about this mobile OS but not willing to spend much on a phone. Fortunately, the LiveAndroid project on Google Code provides a bootable LiveCD image that can be run on your home computer. With the free virtualization program VirtualBox, we can try it out on Windows, Linux or Mac without even burning a CD.

Firefox 3.6, which had been expected by the end of the year, has been delayed with a release now expected in the "first quarter of 2010". The news comes from the Mozilla Wiki where "Ship Firefox 3.6" has now been carried over as a goal for the first three months of 2010. This change has triggered a slight ripple through the foundation's roadmap and Mozilla meeting notes now place the release of Firefox 4 in "late 2010 or early 2011".

For the last 40 years, Unix operating systems have helped to power mission-critical IT operations around the globe. Now, as Unix enters middle age, its backers are busily developing the new specifications that they hope will carry the OS forward into the next age of computing.

Would you like to see some places where Caldera has copyright notices in Linux on code it contributed under the GPL, and you're frustrated because some of us have Caldera CDs and you don't? Just go to Google code search and search for license:gpl "caldera.com" You'll be buried in GPL'd Caldera code, 5,000 hits.

Google and its applications are fast becoming the backbone of the internet. They seem to be solving everyone’s problems with free stuffs. Just when you get happy with something like Firefox, Google comes along and makes a browser that’s fast, super secure and has all kinds of add-ons and themes to personalize it. If you have not make the switch to Google Chrome because of the extensive extensions library in Firefox, here are a few must have extensions in Google Chrome that might make you reconsider your decision.

A few months back, I wrote an article looking at battery life on a couple of laptops using several different OSes. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were the main focus, but I decided to test battery life on Linux running Ubuntu as well. Naturally, the Linux community wasn't happy to see their OS place last in the battery life results. One of the readers actually took the time to offer his help in getting a Linux OS configured "properly", and we started work.

More games for Linux and open source - a large choice for every taste. Strategy, chess, and more.To be continued..

On Sunday 27th of December at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin, security researchers published open source instructions for cracking the A5/1 mobile telephony encryption algorithm and for building an IMSI catcher that intercepts mobile phone communication. The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard for digital mobile phone networks, which is used by around four billion people in 200 countries, is quite insecure, explained cryptography expert Karsten Nohl in front of a large audience of hackers. While this has been known in academic circles since 1994, the evidence now produced leaves "no more room for playing hide and seek" said Nohl.

Very little is done quietly in a giant multi-national corporation. Exceptionally high-profile firms like Google undergo even more scrutiny, making it somewhat unusual to discover they've been developing numerous projects — in the open, and Open Source-licensed — that are all but unknown. As odd as it may be, that is exactly the case at Google. A post yesterday from a Polish student/software developer lists several dozen such projects, few of which could be described as household names, even in the geekiest of homes.

If you were sat at your Linux computer one dark evening in late 1999, things would have been considerably different. Your machine would probably be running either Red Hat 6.1 or Mandrake 6. Outside your window, the world was going crazy for all things dotcom. Microsoft was prepping both Windows 2000 and its ill-fated Millennium edition, while Apple had just released OS 9 and its Power Mac G4. As a Linux user, you'd have been an uber-geek, someone with an obsessive interest in computing and far too much time on your hands. But things have changed. Linux is now an operating system anyone can install and use, and it's growing stronger every year. Here's how it happened.

This might make me sound like an old fogey, but I really do miss the old games like Space Quest, The Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Zork. The problem isn't that I don't have the games anymore, but rather that they were designed for my 386 computer running DOS. Thankfully, I'm not alone in my fits of nostalgia. The developers over at http://www.scummvm.org have reproduced the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” developed by Lucas Arts and packaged it into a virtual machine (thus, ScummVM). That virtual machine is open source and available for just about any platform you can imagine.

In a desperate last gasp bid to stop Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and its precious MySQL kit and kaboodle, the database's co-creator - Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius - has launched a campaign to "help keep the internet free." As we reported earlier this month, the European Commission welcomed a series of promises made by Oracle about the future of the MySQL database, all of which signalled that the company's planned $7bn takeover of Sun Microsystems may now get the all-clear from regulators in the New Year.

Packet Fence bundles many useful and powerful network protection tools into an attractive, integrated package. Such as network access control, monitoring, intrusion detection, VLAN isolation, DHCP fingerprinting, and captive portal. Eric Geier introduces us to this protective powerhouse.

For those of you that still have time off of work from the holidays, there is a new release of the Alien Arena first-person shooter if that piques your interest. Alien Arena 7.33 has been released, which is coming just two months after Alien Arena 7.32.

RAIDCore VRA solutions support Windows and Linux and offer a storage "system on a chip" that provides the same functionality as hardware-based RAID. The technology uses the power of multi-core server CPUs to provide integrated storage capabilities and process RAID tasks without compromising performance.