Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Tasktop Technologies has announced updated versions of its Tasktop Pro task management for application lifecycle management (ALM) toolsuite, and of Eclipse Mylyn. New features include time-tracking, document sharing, and ALM system interoperability that fills a gap between software development delivery and Agile project tracking and management. Tasktop Pro is built on Mylyn, a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easier for developers.

In Part 1 we learned some basic network sniffing and stumbling with SWScanner on Linux. Today Eric Geiers shows us some more excellent network discovery and probing utilities: KwifiManager, tcpdump, and Wireshark.

While Microsoft was assembling a promotional booth to celebrate their Windows 7 launch directly opposite the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo, Microsoft's biggest competitor couldn't resist spontaneously recognizing the textbook exercise in irony.

Dell is currently flogging a cheap-as-chips netbook that apparently comes loaded with that well-known Microsoft operating system, Ubuntu 8.04. Anyone dropping in on the computer maker's UK product website will be able to buy an Intel-based Inspiron Mini 10 laptop for £199 a pop. And, according to the blurb on the site, one ickle mobile computer in its current range is being shipped with Microsoft's, er, Linux-flavoured OS. Shurely shome mishtake, we think.

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced. That explains, in part, why recent discussions of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun – and hence MySQL – have once more put free software licences under the microscope.

Motorola posted and then removed specs for its Verizon-destined, Android-based "Droid" phone, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Motorola "Calgary" and "Zeppelin" Android phones have been tipped, T-Mobile launched Huawei's Android-based "Pulse" phone in the UK, an HTC Desire photo has appeared, and HTC released source code for the Hero, say various reports.

Apple has closed down its project to develop ZFS for Mac OS X. An announcement on the project's site simply says "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly". Sun's ZFS filesystem was believed by some to be a contender for Apple's next filesystem and the appearance of some support for the filesystem in Mac OS X 10.5 Server seemed to confirm that. The arrival of Snow Leopard, which lacked any ZFS support, contradicted that belief.

Back in June, I reviewed Amarok 2.1 and was far from impressed. The layout editor was difficult to work with and felt tacked on, and the fact that a great deal of my music was placed under “Various Artists” for no apparent reason frustrated me. Amarok 2.2 has been released recently, and it’s a definite improvement, and may even be the best music player released this year.

This year's linux.conf.au — which will, despite the name, be held in Wellington, New Zealand — is fast approaching. For those waiting to get in on the action up front, the time to act is now, because the early bird will soon have flown the coop. The annual linux.conf.au conference is the grandest Linux gathering of the Australasian year, and one of the crown jewels of Linux conventions worldwide. The schedule for this year's event includes a wide representation of the Open Source community, as always, including keynotes by Jonathan Corbet, Andrew Tridgell, Matthew Garrett, and Linux Journal's own Glyn Moody. The miniconf schedule — comprising the conference's first two days — boasts sessions on the business of Open Source, cloud computing, Arduino, system administration, a distro summit, and Wave development, among others.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

Mozilla Labs developers have revealed project Raindrop, an approach to handling a large number of messages from email and RSS to YouTube and Twitter. Raindrop uses a mini web server to dig through messages from those sources and attempts to categorise them, pulling out important or personal messages and bringing them to the top of the user's view. Examples of this filtering include automatically detecting email from mailing lists, messages from friends or relatives or status messages from online retailers such as Amazon, and presenting them in context based on the preferences of the user.

All the computing world hype this week has been about Windows 7: Cheap Windows 7; Microsoft's future rides on Windows 7; etc., etc. What what if you're not that excited about Windows 7? After all, it's still as insecure as ever, and upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major pain. So if you want, or are going to be forced by your aging PC, to move to another operating system, why not give Linux a try?

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. So what do you get for the money?

Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.

The history, status, and future of audio for Linux systems was the topic of two talks—coming at the theme from two different directions—at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Ardour and JACK developer Paul Davis looked at audio from mostly the professional audio perspective, while PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering, unsurprisingly, discussed desktop audio. Davis's talk ranged over the full history of Linux audio and gave a look at where he'd like to see things go, while Poettering focused on the changes since last year's conference and "action items" for the coming year.

Due for a November release, Fedora 12 is already shaping up as an exciting, jam-packed release that targets netbook users, virtualization, improved networking, and much more.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. To celebrate the past five years of brown, we decided to have a look at five ways that Ubuntu has helped make the open source Linux operating system more human.

He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister. He was recruited by Adobe as Director of open source and standards with a specific mission: "I was hired to, a) start an open source process and, b) get PDF approved as an ISO standard." So: mission accomplished?

Japanese software firm Access and Israeli mobile design firm Emblaze Mobile today demonstrated a smartphone prototype and device stack based on the LiMo-compatible Access Linux Platform (ALP) 3.0. The Else phone incorporates a Texas Instruments OMAP3430, 16GB internal flash, 3G, WiFi, GPS, and jointly developed "Else Intuition" software.

Mozilla has confirmed that the release of Firefox 3.0.15 and 3.5.4 have both been delayed until Tuesday the 27th of October. The minor security and performance updates were originally scheduled to be released on the 21st of October, but are being delayed for further beta testing. Details of the planned changes in each update, however, have yet to be confirmed.