Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales. But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them.

COBOL is celebrating its 50th birthday. Or at least the name is. In May 1959, during a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the US Department of Defense organized a committee charged with developing a "short range" approach to a common business computing language. And on September 18th of that year, the new Short Range Committee coined the name COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language.

Latest statistics from Black Duck Software show version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2) sliding in popularity. Just under half of all the open source projects contained in the September 2009 statistics used the GPLv2.

If there's one complaint we in the Linux world hear more than anything, it's "My [whatever] doesn't work with Linux." The unfortunate truth is that, while their infrastructure is likely Linux powered, the majority of device manufacturers aren't thinking about the desktop version when designing their wares. When a manufacturer does think outside the box (the one on the shelf, with the $200 price tag), it's a great day for us all — when they make really cool devices, it's all the better.

A Linux-powered instant-on OS can get you connected faster by shaving precious minutes or seconds off your Windows system's startup process. Joe Moran reviews HyperSpace, Presto, and Splashtop.

Version 4.3 of the lean Puppy Linux distribution is now available to download. At a size of just about 110 Mbytes, the system with its JWM and IceWM window managers offers up to date applications and includes many new features. Puppy Linux 4.3 now uses with kernel version 2.6.30.5 which includes ext4 filesystem support.

Cisco has its own networking operating system, IOS, which has long been the mainstay of its routers and switches. But now Linux is powering a new generation of Cisco networking devices for small businesses.

Nero AG announced a new version of its Linux CD burning software. Nero Linux 4 now offers a wizard-style UI and support for Musepack and AIFF audio formats, and a "Nero Linux 4 Essentials" application is available separately for OEM partners, says the Karlsbad, Germany-based company.

Google has given Microsoft a virtual bear hug, lauding the Redmond software giant for finally joining the push for a new-age HTML. In early August, Internet Explorer product manager Adrian Bateman suddenly appeared on a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) mailing list dedicated to the still-gestating HTML 5 standard, and this simple gesture has sparked a rare moment of Redmond love inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

After a year's development, a new, stable version 3.0 of Google's open source Chrome browser is now available. Developers promise "significant speed improvements," although current beneficiaries are Windows Vista and XP users only.

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

Developer Matthew Dillon has announced the release of version 2.4 of DragonFly BSD, originally created as a fork from FreeBSD 4.x. The major release includes several bug fixes, performance improvements and a new 64-bit port.

Quarterly reports are the stuff of business. In most people's minds, they are as far from the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) as anyone can imagine. All the same, as non-profit organizations, many FOSS projects issue them. And while your first reaction may be to avoid quarterly reports, they can give some insights into projects, especially if you read between the lines.

A group of SUSE Linux users put plans in motion last week to create a free, community-managed server distribution that maintains compatibility with Novell's enterprise offerings, but guarantees the long-term-support not provided by openSUSE. The result, said organizers, would be similar to the relationship between CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and would ultimately be beneficial to Novell. There are numerous practical difficulties to be overcome in the creation of this distribution, though, and the form that this distribution might take is not yet clear.

The OSGi Alliance has released version 4.2 of the OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) specification. OSGi is a Java component technology which serves as a basis for development environments like Eclipse. The OSGi components, called bundles, export code and services to others. They can be installed and exchanged individually at runtime. As a result, OSGi allows software modules to be dynamically discovered at runtime. The platform requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and provides a JVM-based OSGi framework.

If you're a Vonage user and you'd like to keep tabs on your bill as the month progresses, the script described here can help. The script uses curl to login to your Vonage account and download the web page with your current balance. The balance is then extracted using grep and sed.

In part one of this series we looked at the basic building blocks needed to put together your very own high-end Linux workstation. This time Paul Ferrill finishes the actual hardware assembly, encounters Windows-required-for-BIOS-update follies, and starts to gaze towards putting some software on this beast.

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

Building your own corporate phone system using the Asterisk open source telephony suite could result in massive cost savings for your company, and setting up a test box to hone your Asterisk skills costs nothing but time. Paul Rubens gets you started on this sophisticated open source iPBX.

Open Source events tend to be rather spread out across the year. linux.conf.au starts things off in January, followed by Linux Journal staff favorite Penguicon in May, two of the major yearly conferences in July, the Linux Symposium and O'Reilly's OSCON, the new but integral Linux Plumber's Conference in September, and wrapping it all up, the Linux Congress in October. Added to that, just days from now, is the inaugural LinuxCon and the Geek High Holy Day, Software Freedom Day.