Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Lantronix announced a design contest based on its recently introduced XPort Pro, touted as the "world's smallest Linux networking server." Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design, plus a separate $3,000 prize for the Best Student Linux Design, says the company.

Cuteness aside, the hexapod bot has gotten some attention from high places. Two days after Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical-engineering senior, posted a YouTube video of his bot, Intel ordered two of them to promote its Atom processors at trade shows and engineering meetings. The robot uses Intel's 1.60GHz Atom Z530 and US15W chipset. It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.

Linux's adaptability is serving netbooks and smartphones well, as a multitude of adaptations for the small screen are flowing into user's hands. Anjal is a sleek, modern interface for Evolution that is well-suited to the small screen.

If you're a Google Nexus One user, you experienced a bit of magic last week. In one click of an over-the-air update, your Nexus One became an iPhone--offering the ability to pinch and expand the screen to zoom in or out. Just one click, with little to no user intervention. That's what operating systems look like in the 21st century, a future more clearly playing out in mobile than in the more traditional realms of personal computers and servers.

Terracotta and Eucalyptus Systems, both open source startups, have announced a new joint partnership. According to the companies, which specialise in scalability for Java applications and the private cloud platform, the partnership will "provide enterprises with an open source solution that maximizes data scalability and application performance in a private cloud environment". With the new agreement, the companies will reportedly combine their sales and marketing efforts and improve integration between their products. Woody Rollins, CEO and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems said that, "Together we are making private clouds a viable option for managing critical applications and processes at even the highest workloads"

Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, "Caikaku", bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Ksplice Inc. today officially launched its no-reboot patching service for Linux servers. The Cambridge, Mass., start-up has about 35 customers and several thousand servers using its paid Uptrack service, in which security and maintenance patches are automatically applied to Linux servers with minimal delay and no downtime, according to Chief Operating Officer Waseem Daher. "From a customer point of view, it's seamless," he said.

Motions in limine are flying in Utah like snowflakes in a winter storm, filed by both parties in SCO v. Novell. But there are a lot more from Novell than from SCO. Novell has filed 19 more motions in limine, all filed on February 8, for a total of 20, as well as motions for a Daubert hearing to disqualify Dr. Christine A. Botosan, Dr. Gary Pisano, and G. Gervaise Davis III, three of SCO's experts. The Novell motions in limine are mainly to exclude testimony from certain witnesses of SCO's "for lack of personal knowledge," among other reasons. Like Ed Chatlos. Remember when Judge Dale Kimball was on the case, and Novell filed motions to disqualify that same testimony? Well, now they are raising it again.

At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, software that was declared dead was resurrected (Hurd), known combatants sat down at the same table (openSUSE, Fedora and Debian) and almost forgotten entities raised their hands again (openSUSE for PowerPC).

Is Android at odds with Linux after the removal of Android device drivers from the Linux source code tree or is this business as usual for the Linux community and nothing new? The H looks at the issues.

Welcome to part 3 of our overview of the KDE 4.3 System Settings panel, the replacement for the old control panel of KDE 3.5. Today we're going to look at the Computer Administration master section. This will be a key area for those wanting to administer their own section. So sit back, pay attention, and enjoy.

Readline is the library that handles your Linux command-line input (and input for some other applications). The various customizable options for it are set either system-wide in /etc/inputrc or per-user in ~/.inputrc. Most of the time the default settings will work perfectly well, but there are a few you may wish to try out that will make slight changes to the way that tab-completion behaves. Be sure to hit Ctrl-X, Ctrl-R after editing the file to re-read it and use the changes you've made.

With job losses rising and belts being tightened across the country, now is the perfect time to look once again at the benefits of using open source software aside from the reported $60 billion a year savings on offer.

The next major release of Firefox will not be compatible with Macs running Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This comes from a mozilla.dev.planing discussion on Google Groups started by Josh Aas, a Mozilla-employed developer working on the project. The change will go into effect later this year when the browser's Gecko rendering engine makes the jump from 1.9.2 to 1.9.3.

Proprietary vendors are using "anti-features", features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month. But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiastic with remarks like, "Finally, enlightenment" and "It's about time government joined the 21st century." As a security guy, I've been on both sides of the OSS fence at different times but I've come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn't think OSS has a place in today's business or government simply hasn't been paying attention.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government.

The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.