Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you're buying a new netbook for this holiday season, odds are that it will be loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. While many users will be happy with Microsoft's new OS, others might balk at the limitations that this version includes -- for example, you won't be able to change your desktop background, and it doesn't include Windows Media Center. And it may even add a bit to the cost of the device. So what are your alternatives?

A few weeks back, we looked at the newly announced CodePlex Foundation. At the time, there were a few questions about the foundation and its plans. We asked Sam Ramji, interim president of the foundation—and, previously, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy—to fill in some of the gaps. Below are his answers to our questions, ranging from the foundation's governance and plans, to his thoughts on Microsoft's open source strategy going forward, as well as information about his new company and its relationship to open source software.

Techsol announced it is now shipping its Linux-ready Medallion Touch Panel Computers (TPCs) with Python-GTK support. The new support enables developers to develop embedded GUIs using Python-GTK on a desktop PC and easily load it onto Techsol's TPC touch-panel systems, thereby accelerating proof-of-concept design, says the company.

The Amarok Team have announced that Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). The Software Freedom Conservancy is composed of various Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects and provides member projects with administrative and financial services.

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform.

One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is. Founded in March of this year, Canadian-based Pink Army Cooperative is using open source synthetic biology to create better drugs to fight breast cancer. The organization is comprised of members who pay $21 CDN to join the cooperative and, in turn, receive a small economic stake in the co-op.

MySQL Cluster has come a long way in the 4 years since I experimented with it. Compared to when I first got the cluster working on my home computer, I didn't have to change much get the latest version up and running. So, what is MySQL Cluster? It is a database solution which tries to solve high availability issues by using multiple synchronous masters (for the lack of a better phrase) in a shared-nothing environment. In order to solve a lot of the latency issues associated with multiple masters, it keeps all the indexed data in memory to enable fast processing of the data.

The very popular Skype VoIP service has provided a Linux client for some years now, but it's not nearly as full-featured as its Windows counterpart, and right now it's a binary-only application. However, things may be partially changing at this company that's in the process of being spun off from eBay.

On October 29th the NLUUG held their second conference this year (the first, held in the spring, focused on file systems). With over 200 visitors and talks by 19 speakers, all prominent in their respective fields, this conference was of particularly high quality. This is surely emphasized by the location and surroundings and the excellent organization. Read on for a short impression on the conference, which was attended by several KDE community members.

Mobile specialist Palm strengthens its team by hiring Matthew Tippett, the Linux graphic driver developer since 2003 at ATI, to be in charge of Linux kernel development.

Developer Nanni Bassetti has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Computer Aided INvestigative Environment (CAINE) Linux live distribution. CAINE and NetBookCAINE (NBCAINE) provide a complete digital forensic environment that's organised to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a simple graphical user interface (GUI).

Keeping any computer system running can be some work. It would be nice if we never had to do any type of maintenance or troubleshooting, but no operating system has reached that point. Many desktop Linux users have server administration experience and are quite comfortable dropping to the command line and tinkering with their system. Not only do they know how to do this, it is the method that makes them comfortable. For those users who use a desktop operating system and expect a graphical experience, opening a terminal window is not a normal thing to do. That does not mean they are incapable of learning it. They are just more comfortable with a visual interface. There are many control panel tools and settings dialogs in KDE that make it easier for graphical-minded users to get things done. Here are five stand-alone applications that will help you stay informed about your computer’s status and health.

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2009

A couple weeks ago I wrote about NoSQL and provided a short overview of the landscape of non-relational databases. One that has become increasingly popular is Apache CouchDB, so I’d like to spend a couple weeks digging into it a bit and talking about why it’s so interesting. Before I do, it’s worth noting that Ubuntu 9.10 was just released and uses CouchDB under the hood. The Ubuntu One backup/synchronization service makes it easy to back up and sync Firefox bookmarks, Tomboy notes, files, contacts, and more. As more users adopt 9.10 and Ubuntu One, CouchDB usage grows accordingly. If you read my previous NoSQL article and wondered which projects are ready for prime time, consider this a big vote of confidence for CouchDB.

In like a lion, out like a Snow Leopard? Apple changed its spots on Sun's ZFS fairly quickly. This week the company shutterd the ZFS Project on Mac OS Forge, and there's no hide or hair of ZFS to be found in Snow Leopard. It's a pretty quick turnabout from a few years ago, when Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was touting Apple's inclusion of ZFS in Leopard.

The Gimp is a powerful graphical application that can handle just about any kind of bit-mapped editing job. You can re-touch photos, shrink or enlarge pictures, combine elements using layers, and many other operations with little to moderate effort. The program also has a bunch of interesting “filters” that transform your picture into something new. Perhaps you need to make a cool text logo for your company or are a teacher needing to create some coloring projects, for your kids. The Gimp has you covered in those departments. And, once you try using a few of the filters, I'm sure you'll see opportunities to "filter" pictures, all over the place.

There are far too many interesting Linux and free software conferences these days, so it would be difficult—really, impossible—to attend them all. Slides and videos of the talks can help fill in the gaps, but, for conferences with a more academic bent, the papers that are the basis of the presentations can give an even more detailed look. The papers from the recently concluded Real Time Linux Workshop are a good example; this article will briefly look at a few of them.

Android 2.0, nicknamed "Eclair," will make its big entrance on the Droid next month, and other handsets are sure to follow. Version 2.0 brings a set of new features to the table, including native support for Microsoft Exchange. However, the wide-open Android ecosystem may be prone to fragmentation as the underlying platform grows in strength and ability.

According to a report in the French language publication 01net, the French General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP) is switching to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client for 130,000 users. The switch is happening as part of a merger of two French tax authorities which had different email systems, The Directorate General Tax (DGI) which used Lotus Notes and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP) which used Microsoft Outlook.