Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current. With RedHawk Linux 5.4, announced Tuesday, Concurrent is slipping into Linux 2.6.31 and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4. That's because RedHawk is a tweak on Red Hat, adding real-time extensions and other goodies cooked up by Concurrent to make it different from Red Hat's own Enterprise MRG real-time Linux.

Germany's first open source professorship was established at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Most people require a little help in managing and organizing their life. Whether we like to admit it or not, most people tend to be disorganized and the reason why we have any semblance of organization is because we have and use tools to help us: pads of paper, PDAs, phones, groupware solutions, and so forth. If you don’t necessarily need a smartphone to keep things under control and a large groupware solution like Zimbra or Outlook is too much organization, there’s a solution called Osmo, which may be the program for you.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future. After years of attempting to explain just how ubiquitous open source was going to be, he can now take the reigns of a company at a time when most customers and vendors take as a given that a substantial portion of any solution will consist of open source code. This was not always the case, especially when Larry was still CEO of VA Linux Systems, at the time the premier vendor for servers running Linux.

ZiiLabs announced a mid-range smartphone development platform supporting its Android and Linux-based "Plaszma" stacks. The Zii Trinity is based on ZiiLabs' dual ARM9-core "ZMS-05" SoC, and provides 1080p video output, OpenGL graphics, HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.1-inch, 800 x 480 OLED touchscreen, says the Creative Technology subsidiary.

Nokia has released Version 4.6 of its Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. Qt 4.6 includes support for the Symbian platform for the first time, and adds Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and the upcoming Maemo 6 to the list of Qt-supported platforms.

Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month's edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.3. KDE SC 4.3.4 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE 4.3.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.3.4 is more completely translated. KDE 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.

The European Interoperability Framework, EIF, regulates how public agencies, citizens and businesses communicate with other on a software level. Now an alliance of proprietary ventures has had an influence on the EIF draft.

OpenLogic have announced that they are expanding their commercial support services for open source packages to include CentOS Linux. The company offers indemnification for a certified range of around 500 open source packages and a choice of either Developer Support with a four hour response time during business hours or Production Support with a one hour, round-the-clock response time.

Of all the big computer companies, only Dell really supports desktop Linux. Specifically, Dell offers a nice selection of PCs running Ubuntu Linux. But what Dell hasn't done is come out and announce that they are working on Google's beta Chrome OS. Other vendors, such as Acer, HP and Lenovo, are on board with Chrome. Regardless, Dell is actually the first big-time vendor to have released a version of Chrome OS designed to work with one of their netbooks.

A developer who claims he is tired of the “Linux is secure” argument has set out to develop a “package of malware for Unix/Linux” in order to help ethical hackers demonstrate the vulnerability of the open source operating system. "I was fed up with the general consensus that Linux is oh-so-secure and has no malware,” a developer going by the name of buchner.johannes wrote on Ask Slashdot, in posting filed by kdawson.

[Tired of the “Linux is secure” argument? Now I've heard it all.. - Scott]

The Mozilla Project has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox contest. The contest required entries to make use of new features in the Firefox 3.5 series, and included categories for best new add-on, best updated add-on, best shopping add-on, and best game & entertainment add-on. The winning entries for Best New Add-on were FireFound by Chris Finke, Multifox by Jeferson Hultmann, and Voyage by Hsiao-Ting Yu. FireFound sends your machine's location to a secure server, with the idea that if your machine is stolen, it can send its location using Firefox's Geolocation API to help track the machine. This assumes the thief uses Firefox after stealing the machine, of course. It works with Firefox and mobile Firefox.

Linux newbie and excellent writer Emery Fletcher weighs in on the subject of documentation for Linux users, and why it is a good thing.

Most of us still rely on CD/DVD writing software applications for file backup, data transfer and distribution, and for ripping audio and video content among other things. If you are using Linux, there are plenty of optical disc-authoring programs to choose from. Here are some of those that I like..

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy. My regular job, my hobby and working with the folks at Linux Journal. Along the way, I have been thinking about the Open Source world more than I have in the past. And as I have been talking about it with people, I have been getting the standard responses you might expect.

The SCaLE University training program continues for SCALE 8X. It is presented by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) in partnership with SCALE. The classes give a more intense and personal learning experience than a 45-minute seminar. We are offering four half-day classes for system administrators of all skill and experience levels. The SCaLE University Pass includes a full day of training (two classes of your choice) and full access to all three days of SCaLE. To register, select the "SCALE 8X Full Access Pass" and then the "SCALE University Pass" which will include a $60 discount on your total charge. The SCALE University classes will be held on Friday, February 19th. 2010.

Writers at MakeTechEasier taken more screen shots than many other computer users will take in their lifetimes. We all use our favorite programs and usually do not give them a second thought. The user who might occasionally want to give an instructional lesson or just show off some desktop eye candy will probably need a little more guidance. After all, there are many screen shot programs to choose from, and not all of them are equal. KSnapshot for KDE stands out as one of the best screen shot tools available and is unquestionably the best one for KDE. It is a standard KDE program and should come packaged with any Linux distributions that offer KDE. It is very easy to learn, but as we always do at MTE, we are about to make it easier.

Concurrent has revised its Red Hat-based real-time Linux distribution, adding support for Intel Nehalem and AMD Opteron processors with up to 48 cores, among other enhancements. RedHawk Linux 5.4 also improves NUMA performance and provides enhanced Nvidia drivers that support Nvidia's "Cuda" parallel computing technology, says the company.

Dell Technology Strategist Doug Anson has announced that, after "doing some tinkering", he has gotten Dell's Mini 10v netbook working with Google's Chromium OS, the open source branch of the Chrome OS. In a post on the Direct2Dell Blog, Anson says that "Without a network connection, Chromium OS is not very interesting. With a network connection, Chromium OS shines."

Sometimes it's the little things that trip us up, like a filename that begins with the wrong character. Juliet Kemp knows what to do when Linux becomes confused and won't operate on a file the way we want it to.